BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Marxist Education Project - ECPv6.15.18//NONSGML v1.0//EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-WR-CALNAME:Marxist Education Project
X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://marxedproject.org
X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Marxist Education Project
REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H
X-Robots-Tag:noindex
X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:America/Halifax
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0300
TZNAME:ADT
DTSTART:20180311T060000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0300
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:AST
DTSTART:20181104T050000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0300
TZNAME:ADT
DTSTART:20190310T060000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0300
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:AST
DTSTART:20191103T050000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0300
TZNAME:ADT
DTSTART:20200308T060000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0300
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:AST
DTSTART:20201101T050000
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190225T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190225T210000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190109T164958Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140844Z
UID:10006482-1551121200-1551128400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Black Reconstruction
DESCRIPTION:Black Reconstruction: An American Revolutionary Period\nwith the Revolutions Study Group \n13-week session \nSome have called the U.S. Civil War the “second American revolution” or the completion of the first American revolution. Others claim that the war of independence and Civil War were not revolutions\, but had tremendous revolutionary potential. By whichever historical claim\, the great social revolution of that momentous period following the Civil War was surely the “reconstruction” of social relations in the former slave states. In his groundbreaking study (1935)\, W.E.B. DuBois reveals that this social revolution was both initiated by slaves in the midst of the war and carried through by the emancipated Black population during and after the period when federal troops occupied the former Confederate states. DuBois is concerned to refute the multiple slanders imputed to “Reconstruction” during the counter-revolutionary “Jim Crow” period that followed and to record the real advancements of democracy and social reform made under Reconstruction and partly lost when it was defeated. We will read DuBois’ Black Reconstruction (Oxford University Press\, 2007) in whole\, and for more recent research\, the middle part of Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South (Harvard University Press\, 2003). Both books are readily available new and used\, as e-books\, and in libraries. Email to info@marxedproject.org for a reading syllabus. \n \nTHE REVOLUTIONS STUDY GROUP (originally at the Brecht Forum) has been meeting for 10 years. Individual participants have come and gone\, however the group has held together\, studying in depth a wide range of history including the French Revolution\, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917\, the Mau-Mau Revolt in Kenya\, the Haitian Revolution\, the European Revolutions of 1848\, the May movement in France of 1968 and the Hot Autumn of Italy the following year\, the Spanish Civil War\, the Mexican Revolution\, the Socialist (2nd) International\, the German revolutionary period of 1918-1924\, and the Chinese revolutionary process of the 20th Century. \nThe listed fees are sliding scale. No one is denied admission for inability to pay. \n  \nTONIGHT\, FEBRUARY 11 ONLY: The class will meet at The Brooklyn Commons\, 388 Atlantic Avenue. A or G trains to Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop is a short walk from this venue.\n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/black-reconstruction/2019-02-25/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ReconstructionSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190225T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190225T210000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190112T034008Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190112T034008Z
UID:10006509-1551121200-1551128400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Can the Working Class Change the World?
DESCRIPTION:5 Sessions \nCan the Working Class Change the World?\nBy Michael D. Yates\nA new book from Monthly Review Press \nSession 1\nThursday\, February 7\, 5:30 to 7:15\nA discussion with author Michael D. Yates\nSessions 2-5\nMondays\, February 11 through March 4\nAnalysis and discussion of the book\nThe first 10 registered participants in this group will receive a free copy of the book. Contributions to Monthly Review Press are appreciated.\nFrom Monthly Review: \nOne of the horrors of the capitalist system is that slave labor\, which was central to the formation and growth of capitalism itself\, is still fully able to coexist alongside wage labor. But\, as Karl Marx pointed out\, it is the fact of being paid for one’s work that validates capitalism as a viable socio-economic structure. Beneath this veil of “free commerce”—where workers are paid only for a portion of their workday\, and buyers and sellers in the marketplace face each other as “equals”—lies a foundation of immense inequality. Yet workers have always rebelled. They’ve organized unions\, struck\, picketed\, boycotted\, formed political organizations and parties—sometimes they have actually won and improved their lives. But\, Marx argued\, because capitalism is the apotheosis of class society\, it must be the last class society: it must\, therefore\, be destroyed. And only the working class\, said Marx\, is capable of doing that. \nIn his timely and innovative book\, Michael D. Yates asks if the working class can\, indeed\, change the world. Deftly factoring in such contemporary elements as sharp changes in the rise of identity politics and the nature of work\, itself\, Yates wonders if there can\, in fact\, be a thing called the working class. If so\, how might it overcome inherent divisions of gender\, race\, ethnicity\, religion\, location—to become a cohesive and radical force for change? Forcefully and without illusions\, Yates supports his arguments with relevant\, clearly explained data\, historical examples\, and his own personal experiences. This book is a sophisticated and prescient understanding of the working class\, and what all of us might do to change the world. \n“Michael Yates’s passion and respect for the class he came out of delivers a book that is especially accessible without retreating from the complexities and internal contradictions of working class life and organization—a book committed not only to defending workers\, but also to building on their potentials to transform society.”      —Sam Gindin\, former chief economist\, Canadian Auto Workers Union; Packer Visitor in Social Justice\, Political Science\, York University\, Toronto \nOn Thursday\, February 7\, Michael Yates will teleconference with us for a preview and discussion of his important new book. On the four Mondays that follow\, we will read\, analyze and Michael’s book. \nMichael D. Yates is Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press. For more than three decades\, he was a labor educator\, teaching working people across the United States. Among his books are The Great Inequality\, Why Unions Matter\, A Freedom Budget for All Americans (with Paul Le Blanc)\, and The ABCs of the Economic Crisis (with Fred Magdoff). \nThe Capital Studies Group has been meeting on Saturdays for nearly two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are now dedicating themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. \n  \nThe stated fees are sliding scale. No one is turned away for inability to pay.\, or
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/can-the-working-class-change-the-world/2019-02-25/
LOCATION:United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/CanWorkingClassSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190228T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190228T193000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20181218T045246Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20181218T160333Z
UID:10006440-1551376800-1551382200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capitalism: Causes\, Conditions\, Consequences ... and Beyond
DESCRIPTION:Capitalism: Causes\, Conditions\, Consequences … and Beyond\nThe Ecosocialism Group convened with Fred Murphy and Steve Knight \n8 Sessions \nThe Marxist Education Project’s Ecosocialism Study Group — now completing its third year — devotes the winter 2019 term to Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi’s Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Join us for a close reading of this new work\, which shows how different historical regimes of capitalism have relied on institutional separations between economy and polity\, production and social reproduction\, and human and non-human nature. Interaction between these domains is periodically readjusted in response to crises and upheavals. Such “boundary struggles” can help us better grasp capitalism’s contradictions and elaborate strategies for moving beyond it. Supplementary readings will be drawn from related work by David Harvey\, Silvia Federici\, and others. \n  \nFRED MURPHY and STEVE KNIGHT have co-led the Ecosocialism Study Group since 2016. Both are active in DSA’s climate justice work. Fred studied and taught historical sociology at The New School for Social Research. Steve reviews books for Marx & Philosophy and is active in faith-centered environmental groups.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capitalism-causes-conditions-consequences-and-beyond/2019-02-28/
LOCATION:United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalismConversationSite-1.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190228T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190228T213000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20181216T071121Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190320T043627Z
UID:10006413-1551382200-1551389400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Globalization and Writing
DESCRIPTION:Exploration: Exploitation/Domination • Discovery/Liberation\n4 Works • 11 Weeks \nThe MEP Literature Group \nIn this eleven-week session we will read one memoir and three novels that study the scope of empire. Written between 1899 and 2000\, the authors\, two sailors (Polish and American)\, a Jamaican social theorist\, and a British Jamaican immigrant are denied privilege because of their citizenship (or lack of it)\, class\, or color. Unwilling\, or unable to conform and accept lesser positions in their societies\, they remain within their marginality and write their unease in novels which give readers an alternative report of the results of colonization both abroad where the EuroAmerican capitalists have colonized and what consequences that colonization has made for life in the home countries. \nHeart of Darkness\nJoseph Conrad\nThe story\, written at the height of the British Empire\, reflects the physical and psychological shock Conrad himself experienced in 1890 when he worked briefly in the Belgian Congo. The experience left him disillusioned\, questioning what it meant to be civilized in the age of colonialism \nThis novella is astonishingly powerful and equally enigmatic. Its condemnation of Western imperialism—of the greed\, violence\, and exploitation that so often accompanies ventures to bring “light” and civilization to the “dark” and needy areas of the world—and its poignant look at the destructive influence of colonization on the colonized and colonizer alike\, have been widely praised. However\, some postcolonial African writers\, most notably Chinua Achebe\, deemed the book racist for its portrayal of native African cultures. \nFamiliar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands\nStuart Hall\nFamiliar Stranger takes us only as far as the mid-1960s\, after a decade during which\, for Hall\, “normal” life was suspended in favour of non-stop political agitation. The book touches on his role in the New Left; his critical involvement with CND; his early exposition of the “formal” and “unwitting” variants of British racism; and the importance of Catherine\, with whom he relocated to Birmingham at the start of his lifelong embrace of cultural studies. These recollections of a busy life in Britain nonetheless remain haunted by the ghostly presence of his earlier years in Jamaica. With its resonant subtitle\, A Life Between Two Islands\, it encourages the reader to draw such parallels as that between Jamaica’s 1938 rebellion and the Brixton riots of 1981. It was Hall’s belief that the British had never fully come to terms with colonialism and decolonization. \nDog Soldiers\nRobert Stone\nDog Soldiers deals with the fall of the counterculture in America\, the rise of mass cynicism and the end of the optimism of the 1960s. California has moved on from the Summer of Love to post-Manson paranoia. Converse\, a once-promising writer now unable to do more than observe\, waits for artistic inspiration as a correspondent in Vietnam. Symbolic of his moral corruption is his decision to traffic in heroin\, which the 1960s counterculture never embraced as they did marijuana and LSD. \nWhite Teeth\nZadie Smith\nThis may be the first novel ever written that truly feels at home in our borderless\, globalized\, intermarried\, post-colonial age\, populated by “children with first and last names on a direct collision course.” Published when Smith was just 24\, White Teeth follows the friendship of two Londoners\, a pub-going working-class bloke named Archie and a Muslim from Bangladesh named Samad. Archie marries a Jamaican; Samad has twin sons\, one of whom becomes a religious militant\, the other a rabid Anglophile. The overlapping fates of Smith’s characters seem to trace the new structures of 21st-century life and test their sturdiness as framework for peace and happiness. Both deeply Dickensian and playfully post-modern\, White Teeth doesn’t quail before the rampantly ramifying novelistic complexities of a multicultural world. It revels in them. \nThe MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project following a presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on her Indigenous Peoples History of the United States and her recommendation that we take up literature with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of The Dead. The group has recently completed readings of Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years following by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Our second summer of noir\, considered works by Hammett\, Chandler\, Manchette\, and others. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the global depression of the 1930s\, and novels on border politics\, migrations and labor organizing.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/globalization-and-writing/2019-02-28/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/GlobalizedLitJan24_Site2.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190302T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190302T140000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190111T053528Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140647Z
UID:10006499-1551524400-1551535200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 1
DESCRIPTION:CLASS & DISCUSSION with CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP\nKarl Marx’s Capital remains the fundamental text for understanding how capitalism works. By unraveling the commoditized forms of our interactions with nature and each other\, it provides tools to understand capitalism’s astounding innovativeness and productivity\, intertwined with growing inequality and misery\, alienation\, stunting of human potential\, and ecological destruction all over the globe. In this way\, Capital offers the reader a methodology for doing our own analysis of current developments. We will conclude Volume One this term and begin our first 12-week session on Volume Two on Saturday\, April 27. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nNo one turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-1-2/2019-03-02/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalAccumulationSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190304T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190304T210000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190109T164958Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140844Z
UID:10006483-1551726000-1551733200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Black Reconstruction
DESCRIPTION:Black Reconstruction: An American Revolutionary Period\nwith the Revolutions Study Group \n13-week session \nSome have called the U.S. Civil War the “second American revolution” or the completion of the first American revolution. Others claim that the war of independence and Civil War were not revolutions\, but had tremendous revolutionary potential. By whichever historical claim\, the great social revolution of that momentous period following the Civil War was surely the “reconstruction” of social relations in the former slave states. In his groundbreaking study (1935)\, W.E.B. DuBois reveals that this social revolution was both initiated by slaves in the midst of the war and carried through by the emancipated Black population during and after the period when federal troops occupied the former Confederate states. DuBois is concerned to refute the multiple slanders imputed to “Reconstruction” during the counter-revolutionary “Jim Crow” period that followed and to record the real advancements of democracy and social reform made under Reconstruction and partly lost when it was defeated. We will read DuBois’ Black Reconstruction (Oxford University Press\, 2007) in whole\, and for more recent research\, the middle part of Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South (Harvard University Press\, 2003). Both books are readily available new and used\, as e-books\, and in libraries. Email to info@marxedproject.org for a reading syllabus. \n \nTHE REVOLUTIONS STUDY GROUP (originally at the Brecht Forum) has been meeting for 10 years. Individual participants have come and gone\, however the group has held together\, studying in depth a wide range of history including the French Revolution\, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917\, the Mau-Mau Revolt in Kenya\, the Haitian Revolution\, the European Revolutions of 1848\, the May movement in France of 1968 and the Hot Autumn of Italy the following year\, the Spanish Civil War\, the Mexican Revolution\, the Socialist (2nd) International\, the German revolutionary period of 1918-1924\, and the Chinese revolutionary process of the 20th Century. \nThe listed fees are sliding scale. No one is denied admission for inability to pay. \n  \nTONIGHT\, FEBRUARY 11 ONLY: The class will meet at The Brooklyn Commons\, 388 Atlantic Avenue. A or G trains to Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop is a short walk from this venue.\n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/black-reconstruction/2019-03-04/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ReconstructionSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190304T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190304T210000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190112T034008Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190112T034008Z
UID:10006510-1551726000-1551733200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Can the Working Class Change the World?
DESCRIPTION:5 Sessions \nCan the Working Class Change the World?\nBy Michael D. Yates\nA new book from Monthly Review Press \nSession 1\nThursday\, February 7\, 5:30 to 7:15\nA discussion with author Michael D. Yates\nSessions 2-5\nMondays\, February 11 through March 4\nAnalysis and discussion of the book\nThe first 10 registered participants in this group will receive a free copy of the book. Contributions to Monthly Review Press are appreciated.\nFrom Monthly Review: \nOne of the horrors of the capitalist system is that slave labor\, which was central to the formation and growth of capitalism itself\, is still fully able to coexist alongside wage labor. But\, as Karl Marx pointed out\, it is the fact of being paid for one’s work that validates capitalism as a viable socio-economic structure. Beneath this veil of “free commerce”—where workers are paid only for a portion of their workday\, and buyers and sellers in the marketplace face each other as “equals”—lies a foundation of immense inequality. Yet workers have always rebelled. They’ve organized unions\, struck\, picketed\, boycotted\, formed political organizations and parties—sometimes they have actually won and improved their lives. But\, Marx argued\, because capitalism is the apotheosis of class society\, it must be the last class society: it must\, therefore\, be destroyed. And only the working class\, said Marx\, is capable of doing that. \nIn his timely and innovative book\, Michael D. Yates asks if the working class can\, indeed\, change the world. Deftly factoring in such contemporary elements as sharp changes in the rise of identity politics and the nature of work\, itself\, Yates wonders if there can\, in fact\, be a thing called the working class. If so\, how might it overcome inherent divisions of gender\, race\, ethnicity\, religion\, location—to become a cohesive and radical force for change? Forcefully and without illusions\, Yates supports his arguments with relevant\, clearly explained data\, historical examples\, and his own personal experiences. This book is a sophisticated and prescient understanding of the working class\, and what all of us might do to change the world. \n“Michael Yates’s passion and respect for the class he came out of delivers a book that is especially accessible without retreating from the complexities and internal contradictions of working class life and organization—a book committed not only to defending workers\, but also to building on their potentials to transform society.”      —Sam Gindin\, former chief economist\, Canadian Auto Workers Union; Packer Visitor in Social Justice\, Political Science\, York University\, Toronto \nOn Thursday\, February 7\, Michael Yates will teleconference with us for a preview and discussion of his important new book. On the four Mondays that follow\, we will read\, analyze and Michael’s book. \nMichael D. Yates is Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press. For more than three decades\, he was a labor educator\, teaching working people across the United States. Among his books are The Great Inequality\, Why Unions Matter\, A Freedom Budget for All Americans (with Paul Le Blanc)\, and The ABCs of the Economic Crisis (with Fred Magdoff). \nThe Capital Studies Group has been meeting on Saturdays for nearly two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are now dedicating themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. \n  \nThe stated fees are sliding scale. No one is turned away for inability to pay.\, or
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/can-the-working-class-change-the-world/2019-03-04/
LOCATION:United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/CanWorkingClassSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190307T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190307T193000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20181218T045246Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20181218T160333Z
UID:10006441-1551981600-1551987000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capitalism: Causes\, Conditions\, Consequences ... and Beyond
DESCRIPTION:Capitalism: Causes\, Conditions\, Consequences … and Beyond\nThe Ecosocialism Group convened with Fred Murphy and Steve Knight \n8 Sessions \nThe Marxist Education Project’s Ecosocialism Study Group — now completing its third year — devotes the winter 2019 term to Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi’s Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Join us for a close reading of this new work\, which shows how different historical regimes of capitalism have relied on institutional separations between economy and polity\, production and social reproduction\, and human and non-human nature. Interaction between these domains is periodically readjusted in response to crises and upheavals. Such “boundary struggles” can help us better grasp capitalism’s contradictions and elaborate strategies for moving beyond it. Supplementary readings will be drawn from related work by David Harvey\, Silvia Federici\, and others. \n  \nFRED MURPHY and STEVE KNIGHT have co-led the Ecosocialism Study Group since 2016. Both are active in DSA’s climate justice work. Fred studied and taught historical sociology at The New School for Social Research. Steve reviews books for Marx & Philosophy and is active in faith-centered environmental groups.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capitalism-causes-conditions-consequences-and-beyond/2019-03-07/
LOCATION:United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalismConversationSite-1.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190307T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190307T213000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20181216T071121Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190320T043627Z
UID:10006414-1551987000-1551994200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Globalization and Writing
DESCRIPTION:Exploration: Exploitation/Domination • Discovery/Liberation\n4 Works • 11 Weeks \nThe MEP Literature Group \nIn this eleven-week session we will read one memoir and three novels that study the scope of empire. Written between 1899 and 2000\, the authors\, two sailors (Polish and American)\, a Jamaican social theorist\, and a British Jamaican immigrant are denied privilege because of their citizenship (or lack of it)\, class\, or color. Unwilling\, or unable to conform and accept lesser positions in their societies\, they remain within their marginality and write their unease in novels which give readers an alternative report of the results of colonization both abroad where the EuroAmerican capitalists have colonized and what consequences that colonization has made for life in the home countries. \nHeart of Darkness\nJoseph Conrad\nThe story\, written at the height of the British Empire\, reflects the physical and psychological shock Conrad himself experienced in 1890 when he worked briefly in the Belgian Congo. The experience left him disillusioned\, questioning what it meant to be civilized in the age of colonialism \nThis novella is astonishingly powerful and equally enigmatic. Its condemnation of Western imperialism—of the greed\, violence\, and exploitation that so often accompanies ventures to bring “light” and civilization to the “dark” and needy areas of the world—and its poignant look at the destructive influence of colonization on the colonized and colonizer alike\, have been widely praised. However\, some postcolonial African writers\, most notably Chinua Achebe\, deemed the book racist for its portrayal of native African cultures. \nFamiliar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands\nStuart Hall\nFamiliar Stranger takes us only as far as the mid-1960s\, after a decade during which\, for Hall\, “normal” life was suspended in favour of non-stop political agitation. The book touches on his role in the New Left; his critical involvement with CND; his early exposition of the “formal” and “unwitting” variants of British racism; and the importance of Catherine\, with whom he relocated to Birmingham at the start of his lifelong embrace of cultural studies. These recollections of a busy life in Britain nonetheless remain haunted by the ghostly presence of his earlier years in Jamaica. With its resonant subtitle\, A Life Between Two Islands\, it encourages the reader to draw such parallels as that between Jamaica’s 1938 rebellion and the Brixton riots of 1981. It was Hall’s belief that the British had never fully come to terms with colonialism and decolonization. \nDog Soldiers\nRobert Stone\nDog Soldiers deals with the fall of the counterculture in America\, the rise of mass cynicism and the end of the optimism of the 1960s. California has moved on from the Summer of Love to post-Manson paranoia. Converse\, a once-promising writer now unable to do more than observe\, waits for artistic inspiration as a correspondent in Vietnam. Symbolic of his moral corruption is his decision to traffic in heroin\, which the 1960s counterculture never embraced as they did marijuana and LSD. \nWhite Teeth\nZadie Smith\nThis may be the first novel ever written that truly feels at home in our borderless\, globalized\, intermarried\, post-colonial age\, populated by “children with first and last names on a direct collision course.” Published when Smith was just 24\, White Teeth follows the friendship of two Londoners\, a pub-going working-class bloke named Archie and a Muslim from Bangladesh named Samad. Archie marries a Jamaican; Samad has twin sons\, one of whom becomes a religious militant\, the other a rabid Anglophile. The overlapping fates of Smith’s characters seem to trace the new structures of 21st-century life and test their sturdiness as framework for peace and happiness. Both deeply Dickensian and playfully post-modern\, White Teeth doesn’t quail before the rampantly ramifying novelistic complexities of a multicultural world. It revels in them. \nThe MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project following a presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on her Indigenous Peoples History of the United States and her recommendation that we take up literature with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of The Dead. The group has recently completed readings of Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years following by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Our second summer of noir\, considered works by Hammett\, Chandler\, Manchette\, and others. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the global depression of the 1930s\, and novels on border politics\, migrations and labor organizing.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/globalization-and-writing/2019-03-07/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/GlobalizedLitJan24_Site2.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190309T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190309T140000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190111T053528Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140647Z
UID:10006500-1552129200-1552140000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 1
DESCRIPTION:CLASS & DISCUSSION with CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP\nKarl Marx’s Capital remains the fundamental text for understanding how capitalism works. By unraveling the commoditized forms of our interactions with nature and each other\, it provides tools to understand capitalism’s astounding innovativeness and productivity\, intertwined with growing inequality and misery\, alienation\, stunting of human potential\, and ecological destruction all over the globe. In this way\, Capital offers the reader a methodology for doing our own analysis of current developments. We will conclude Volume One this term and begin our first 12-week session on Volume Two on Saturday\, April 27. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nNo one turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-1-2/2019-03-09/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalAccumulationSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190309T153000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190309T173000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190204T021848Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190205T031932Z
UID:10006520-1552145400-1552152600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Premonitions
DESCRIPTION:Selected Essays on the Culture of Revolt\nAn afternoon talk and discussion with author AK Thompson\n \nBringing together a decade of AK Thompson’s essays on the culture of revolt\, Premonitions offers an engaged assessment of contemporary radical politics. Inspired by Walter Benjamin and addressing themes ranging from violence and representation to Romanticism and death\, Thompson combines scholarship and grassroots grit to disabuse readers—and rebels—of cherished certainties. Whether uncovering the unrealized promise buried in mainstream cultural offerings or tracing our course toward the inevitable moment of reckoning ahead\, the essays in Premonitions are both practical investigations and prescient provocations. \nAccording to Thompson\, Premonitions are similar to Walter Benjamin’s “illuminations’ and “reflections” in that\, as forms of extrapolative reasoning\, they reveal how a thing or event can be made to alert us to the broader social process from which it derives. The major difference is that\, whereas Benjamin’s concepts placed emphasis on the resolution of accumulated tensions\, “premonitions” direct our attention toward the future that will obtain should present dynamics be left undisturbed. \nBecause of his misgivings with “progress\,” which Benjamin took to be both a central conceit of capitalist culture and an idea that had blunted class hatred among social democrats\, Benjamin urged movements to turn their back on the future and focus more on “the image of enslaved ancestors … than that of happy grandchildren.” Even so\, his work discloses a strong premonitory orientation. The concluding line to Paris\, Capital of the Nineteenth Century (1935)\, for instance\, recounts how “in the convulsions of the commodity economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.” \n“A pleasure. “This incendiary little book is also a finely balanced one. It asks the defining questions of our hard moment and shows why the answers are uneasy  ones. One part an elegiac history of recent freedom movements and their quandaries\, one part a caution against any too-easy commitment to nonviolence\, Premonitions teems with insights.”\n— David Roediger\, author of Class\, Race\, and Marxism \n AK Thompson is an activist\, author\, and social theorist. Currently a professor of social movements and social change at Ithaca College\, his publications include Sociology for Changing the World: Social Movements/Social Research (2006)\, Black Bloc\, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent (2010)\, Spontaneous Combustion: The Eros Effect and Global Revolution (2017) and co-edited Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle (2016). Between 2005 and 2012\, he served on the Editorial Committee of Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action. \ntickets are sliding scale\nno one is turned away for inability to pay \n  \n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/premonitions/
LOCATION:New Perspectives Theatre\, 456-458 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/DirectActionNetworkSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190311T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190311T210000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190109T164958Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140844Z
UID:10006484-1552330800-1552338000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Black Reconstruction
DESCRIPTION:Black Reconstruction: An American Revolutionary Period\nwith the Revolutions Study Group \n13-week session \nSome have called the U.S. Civil War the “second American revolution” or the completion of the first American revolution. Others claim that the war of independence and Civil War were not revolutions\, but had tremendous revolutionary potential. By whichever historical claim\, the great social revolution of that momentous period following the Civil War was surely the “reconstruction” of social relations in the former slave states. In his groundbreaking study (1935)\, W.E.B. DuBois reveals that this social revolution was both initiated by slaves in the midst of the war and carried through by the emancipated Black population during and after the period when federal troops occupied the former Confederate states. DuBois is concerned to refute the multiple slanders imputed to “Reconstruction” during the counter-revolutionary “Jim Crow” period that followed and to record the real advancements of democracy and social reform made under Reconstruction and partly lost when it was defeated. We will read DuBois’ Black Reconstruction (Oxford University Press\, 2007) in whole\, and for more recent research\, the middle part of Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South (Harvard University Press\, 2003). Both books are readily available new and used\, as e-books\, and in libraries. Email to info@marxedproject.org for a reading syllabus. \n \nTHE REVOLUTIONS STUDY GROUP (originally at the Brecht Forum) has been meeting for 10 years. Individual participants have come and gone\, however the group has held together\, studying in depth a wide range of history including the French Revolution\, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917\, the Mau-Mau Revolt in Kenya\, the Haitian Revolution\, the European Revolutions of 1848\, the May movement in France of 1968 and the Hot Autumn of Italy the following year\, the Spanish Civil War\, the Mexican Revolution\, the Socialist (2nd) International\, the German revolutionary period of 1918-1924\, and the Chinese revolutionary process of the 20th Century. \nThe listed fees are sliding scale. No one is denied admission for inability to pay. \n  \nTONIGHT\, FEBRUARY 11 ONLY: The class will meet at The Brooklyn Commons\, 388 Atlantic Avenue. A or G trains to Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop is a short walk from this venue.\n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/black-reconstruction/2019-03-11/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ReconstructionSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190311T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190311T213000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190112T053859Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190320T044341Z
UID:10006511-1552332600-1552339800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Early American Resistance to Hamilton’s Capitalist Policies
DESCRIPTION:From the Beginning:\nEarly American Resistance to the Capitalist Policies of Alexander Hamilton\nA 5 week study and discussion with Jim Costanzo\, founder & director of the Aaron Burr Society\nMondays\, March 11—April 8\n7:30 – 9:30 Pm @ The Brooklyn Commons \nWas the U.S. Constitution a betrayal of the American Revolution? Did the founders intentionally frame the Constitution to establish a financial aristocracy based on patriarchy and white supremacy? \nFollowing independence\, there were five armed rebellions against the newly formed Republic in response to debt\, financial speculation and foreclosures. This course will examine how the working classes\, small farmers and veterans of the revolution organized to address grievances against the rise of American capitalism. Though different\, the 21st Century’s Great Recession is a continuation of the ongoing struggles against capital formation\, debt and democratic processes. The concentration of economic power was built into the Constitution and enhanced by Hamilton who imposed different forms of British capitalism upon the former colonies that had just rebelled against those policies. Appropriating the Collective Wealth of the Nation to establish an aristocracy is reflected in the phrase “too much democracy” which is often associated with the French Revolution but was popular since the end of the American Revolution. This aristocratic phrase is applicable today with radical return of gerrymandering and voter suppression.This five-week study and discussion will explore the political economy behind post-colonial American class struggles. \nThe main book for this class will be Founding Finance: How Debt\, Speculation\, Foreclosures\, Protests and Crackdowns Made Us a Nation by William Hogeland. Other references will be from various sources that will include my original research from the Pittsburgh Gazette from 1789 to 1803. Another book will be referenced but not required is Fallen Founder: the Life of Aaron Burr by Nancy Isenberg. \nThe Aaron Burr Society: Since 2008 the Aaron Burr Society has been dedicated to exposing the myths of the Free Market and Free Trade. Wall Street and their Corporate Cronies use myths in order to subvert the Sovereignty of The People in an attempt to usurp the Collective Wealth of the Nation. In addition to financial derivatives and other fraudulent monetary policies\, they divert your tax money for their profits while privatizing public programs\, like education\, designed to promote universal prosperity. Wall Street and their cronies make billions in bonuses and trillions in subsidies while we the people\, our nation and the world goes bankrupt. The real reason for the escalation of personal and national debt are the crimes committed by Wall Street and conservative politicians of both parties.The Society maintains relationships with individuals and organizations from Occupy Wall Street. However\, the crisis of capitalism has morphed and expanded by embracing 21st century forms of authoritarianism and corporate fascism. \nSuggested donations are sliding scale. No one turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/early-american-resistance-to-hamiltons-capitalist-policies/2019-03-11/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Whiskey-RebellionSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190313T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190313T213000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190203T224045Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190203T224045Z
UID:10006518-1552505400-1552512600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capitalism Discussion with Nancy Fraser
DESCRIPTION:Join us for a conversation with Nancy Fraser\, co-author with Rahel Jaeggi of Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Fraser and Jaeggi show how capitalism relies on critical “background conditions” – institutional separations between economy and polity\, production and social reproduction\, and human and non-human nature. Capitalist crises periodically readjust the dividing lines among these domains. Such “boundary struggles” offer a key to understanding capitalism’s contradictions and the multiple forms of conflict to which it gives rise. This multidimensional critique of capitalism puts our present conjuncture into broader perspective\, enabling diagnoses of the recent resurgence of right-wing populism and suggesting what is required of a viable Left alternative.s \nNancy Fraser is Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. Her many books include Fortunes of Feminism\, Redistribution or Recognition?\, and Justice Interruptus. \nTickets are sliding scale. No one is denied admission for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capitalism-discussion-with-nancy-fraser/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/NancyFraser2site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190314T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190314T193000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20181218T045246Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20181218T160333Z
UID:10006442-1552586400-1552591800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capitalism: Causes\, Conditions\, Consequences ... and Beyond
DESCRIPTION:Capitalism: Causes\, Conditions\, Consequences … and Beyond\nThe Ecosocialism Group convened with Fred Murphy and Steve Knight \n8 Sessions \nThe Marxist Education Project’s Ecosocialism Study Group — now completing its third year — devotes the winter 2019 term to Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi’s Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Join us for a close reading of this new work\, which shows how different historical regimes of capitalism have relied on institutional separations between economy and polity\, production and social reproduction\, and human and non-human nature. Interaction between these domains is periodically readjusted in response to crises and upheavals. Such “boundary struggles” can help us better grasp capitalism’s contradictions and elaborate strategies for moving beyond it. Supplementary readings will be drawn from related work by David Harvey\, Silvia Federici\, and others. \n  \nFRED MURPHY and STEVE KNIGHT have co-led the Ecosocialism Study Group since 2016. Both are active in DSA’s climate justice work. Fred studied and taught historical sociology at The New School for Social Research. Steve reviews books for Marx & Philosophy and is active in faith-centered environmental groups.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capitalism-causes-conditions-consequences-and-beyond/2019-03-14/
LOCATION:United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalismConversationSite-1.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190314T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190314T213000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20181216T071121Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190320T043627Z
UID:10006415-1552591800-1552599000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Globalization and Writing
DESCRIPTION:Exploration: Exploitation/Domination • Discovery/Liberation\n4 Works • 11 Weeks \nThe MEP Literature Group \nIn this eleven-week session we will read one memoir and three novels that study the scope of empire. Written between 1899 and 2000\, the authors\, two sailors (Polish and American)\, a Jamaican social theorist\, and a British Jamaican immigrant are denied privilege because of their citizenship (or lack of it)\, class\, or color. Unwilling\, or unable to conform and accept lesser positions in their societies\, they remain within their marginality and write their unease in novels which give readers an alternative report of the results of colonization both abroad where the EuroAmerican capitalists have colonized and what consequences that colonization has made for life in the home countries. \nHeart of Darkness\nJoseph Conrad\nThe story\, written at the height of the British Empire\, reflects the physical and psychological shock Conrad himself experienced in 1890 when he worked briefly in the Belgian Congo. The experience left him disillusioned\, questioning what it meant to be civilized in the age of colonialism \nThis novella is astonishingly powerful and equally enigmatic. Its condemnation of Western imperialism—of the greed\, violence\, and exploitation that so often accompanies ventures to bring “light” and civilization to the “dark” and needy areas of the world—and its poignant look at the destructive influence of colonization on the colonized and colonizer alike\, have been widely praised. However\, some postcolonial African writers\, most notably Chinua Achebe\, deemed the book racist for its portrayal of native African cultures. \nFamiliar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands\nStuart Hall\nFamiliar Stranger takes us only as far as the mid-1960s\, after a decade during which\, for Hall\, “normal” life was suspended in favour of non-stop political agitation. The book touches on his role in the New Left; his critical involvement with CND; his early exposition of the “formal” and “unwitting” variants of British racism; and the importance of Catherine\, with whom he relocated to Birmingham at the start of his lifelong embrace of cultural studies. These recollections of a busy life in Britain nonetheless remain haunted by the ghostly presence of his earlier years in Jamaica. With its resonant subtitle\, A Life Between Two Islands\, it encourages the reader to draw such parallels as that between Jamaica’s 1938 rebellion and the Brixton riots of 1981. It was Hall’s belief that the British had never fully come to terms with colonialism and decolonization. \nDog Soldiers\nRobert Stone\nDog Soldiers deals with the fall of the counterculture in America\, the rise of mass cynicism and the end of the optimism of the 1960s. California has moved on from the Summer of Love to post-Manson paranoia. Converse\, a once-promising writer now unable to do more than observe\, waits for artistic inspiration as a correspondent in Vietnam. Symbolic of his moral corruption is his decision to traffic in heroin\, which the 1960s counterculture never embraced as they did marijuana and LSD. \nWhite Teeth\nZadie Smith\nThis may be the first novel ever written that truly feels at home in our borderless\, globalized\, intermarried\, post-colonial age\, populated by “children with first and last names on a direct collision course.” Published when Smith was just 24\, White Teeth follows the friendship of two Londoners\, a pub-going working-class bloke named Archie and a Muslim from Bangladesh named Samad. Archie marries a Jamaican; Samad has twin sons\, one of whom becomes a religious militant\, the other a rabid Anglophile. The overlapping fates of Smith’s characters seem to trace the new structures of 21st-century life and test their sturdiness as framework for peace and happiness. Both deeply Dickensian and playfully post-modern\, White Teeth doesn’t quail before the rampantly ramifying novelistic complexities of a multicultural world. It revels in them. \nThe MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project following a presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on her Indigenous Peoples History of the United States and her recommendation that we take up literature with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of The Dead. The group has recently completed readings of Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years following by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Our second summer of noir\, considered works by Hammett\, Chandler\, Manchette\, and others. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the global depression of the 1930s\, and novels on border politics\, migrations and labor organizing.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/globalization-and-writing/2019-03-14/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/GlobalizedLitJan24_Site2.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190316T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190316T140000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190111T053528Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140647Z
UID:10006501-1552734000-1552744800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 1
DESCRIPTION:CLASS & DISCUSSION with CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP\nKarl Marx’s Capital remains the fundamental text for understanding how capitalism works. By unraveling the commoditized forms of our interactions with nature and each other\, it provides tools to understand capitalism’s astounding innovativeness and productivity\, intertwined with growing inequality and misery\, alienation\, stunting of human potential\, and ecological destruction all over the globe. In this way\, Capital offers the reader a methodology for doing our own analysis of current developments. We will conclude Volume One this term and begin our first 12-week session on Volume Two on Saturday\, April 27. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nNo one turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-1-2/2019-03-16/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalAccumulationSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190316T150000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190316T173000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190204T044027Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190204T044027Z
UID:10006531-1552748400-1552757400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Celebrate the Limerick Soviet of 1919
DESCRIPTION:When Green and Red Commingled: The Limerick Soviet of 1919\nA 100 Year Celebration at The Brooklyn Commons\nThe seismic tremors that the October Revolution sent through Germany\, Hungary and Italy are well known to students of the post-World War One Europe. Less familiar is the fact that the revolution’s ripple effects were felt as far to the west as Ireland. This April will mark the centennial of an episode in Irish revolutionary history known at the time—and since—as the Limerick Soviet. When ten thousand people turned out for the funeral of Robbie Byrne\, an Irish Republican Army adjutant\, and delegate to the Trades Council of Limerick City\, who died at British hands\, the city was placed under martial law\, and citizens were forced to carry written passes to leave and enter the town. The Trades Council answered these repressive measures with a general strike\, run by a committee of union delegates. For twelve days Limerick City was in the hands of its workers\, who put out a newspaper\, organized the food supply\, ran public transportation\, and even issued their own currency. When a journalist compared the strike committee to the workers councils (soviets) that had taken power in Russia nearly two years before\, it was a title that the working class of Limerick City proudly and enthusiastically embraced\, prompting workers in scores of lesser labor actions throughout the country to call their strike committees soviets. \nThe Limerick Soviet marked a hopeful intersection of the workers’ movement with the Irish war of independence\, which had begun a few months earlier. It held out the promise that the working class would take the lead in the struggle for Ireland’s freedom. Both the promise\, and the disappointment as the soviet came to an end\, hold valuable lessons for the struggles of today. \nJoin us for a showing of The Limerick Soviet\, an hour-long documentary on the above events\, produced by today’s Limerick trade unionists. The film will be followed by discussion and song. Refreshments will be available. Celebrate the St. Patrick’s Day weekend with a toast to Ireland’s rich revolutionary tradition. (No plastic shamrocks or green beer permitted.) \nSpecial thanks to Frameworks Films of Cork\, Ireland and to the Limerick Council of Trade Unions\, producers of The Limerick Soviet.  \n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/celebrate-the-limerick-soviet-of-1919/
LOCATION:United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/breadnotprofits-bruree.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190318T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190318T210000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190109T164958Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140844Z
UID:10006485-1552935600-1552942800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Black Reconstruction
DESCRIPTION:Black Reconstruction: An American Revolutionary Period\nwith the Revolutions Study Group \n13-week session \nSome have called the U.S. Civil War the “second American revolution” or the completion of the first American revolution. Others claim that the war of independence and Civil War were not revolutions\, but had tremendous revolutionary potential. By whichever historical claim\, the great social revolution of that momentous period following the Civil War was surely the “reconstruction” of social relations in the former slave states. In his groundbreaking study (1935)\, W.E.B. DuBois reveals that this social revolution was both initiated by slaves in the midst of the war and carried through by the emancipated Black population during and after the period when federal troops occupied the former Confederate states. DuBois is concerned to refute the multiple slanders imputed to “Reconstruction” during the counter-revolutionary “Jim Crow” period that followed and to record the real advancements of democracy and social reform made under Reconstruction and partly lost when it was defeated. We will read DuBois’ Black Reconstruction (Oxford University Press\, 2007) in whole\, and for more recent research\, the middle part of Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South (Harvard University Press\, 2003). Both books are readily available new and used\, as e-books\, and in libraries. Email to info@marxedproject.org for a reading syllabus. \n \nTHE REVOLUTIONS STUDY GROUP (originally at the Brecht Forum) has been meeting for 10 years. Individual participants have come and gone\, however the group has held together\, studying in depth a wide range of history including the French Revolution\, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917\, the Mau-Mau Revolt in Kenya\, the Haitian Revolution\, the European Revolutions of 1848\, the May movement in France of 1968 and the Hot Autumn of Italy the following year\, the Spanish Civil War\, the Mexican Revolution\, the Socialist (2nd) International\, the German revolutionary period of 1918-1924\, and the Chinese revolutionary process of the 20th Century. \nThe listed fees are sliding scale. No one is denied admission for inability to pay. \n  \nTONIGHT\, FEBRUARY 11 ONLY: The class will meet at The Brooklyn Commons\, 388 Atlantic Avenue. A or G trains to Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop is a short walk from this venue.\n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/black-reconstruction/2019-03-18/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ReconstructionSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190318T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190318T213000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190112T053859Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190320T044341Z
UID:10006512-1552937400-1552944600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Early American Resistance to Hamilton’s Capitalist Policies
DESCRIPTION:From the Beginning:\nEarly American Resistance to the Capitalist Policies of Alexander Hamilton\nA 5 week study and discussion with Jim Costanzo\, founder & director of the Aaron Burr Society\nMondays\, March 11—April 8\n7:30 – 9:30 Pm @ The Brooklyn Commons \nWas the U.S. Constitution a betrayal of the American Revolution? Did the founders intentionally frame the Constitution to establish a financial aristocracy based on patriarchy and white supremacy? \nFollowing independence\, there were five armed rebellions against the newly formed Republic in response to debt\, financial speculation and foreclosures. This course will examine how the working classes\, small farmers and veterans of the revolution organized to address grievances against the rise of American capitalism. Though different\, the 21st Century’s Great Recession is a continuation of the ongoing struggles against capital formation\, debt and democratic processes. The concentration of economic power was built into the Constitution and enhanced by Hamilton who imposed different forms of British capitalism upon the former colonies that had just rebelled against those policies. Appropriating the Collective Wealth of the Nation to establish an aristocracy is reflected in the phrase “too much democracy” which is often associated with the French Revolution but was popular since the end of the American Revolution. This aristocratic phrase is applicable today with radical return of gerrymandering and voter suppression.This five-week study and discussion will explore the political economy behind post-colonial American class struggles. \nThe main book for this class will be Founding Finance: How Debt\, Speculation\, Foreclosures\, Protests and Crackdowns Made Us a Nation by William Hogeland. Other references will be from various sources that will include my original research from the Pittsburgh Gazette from 1789 to 1803. Another book will be referenced but not required is Fallen Founder: the Life of Aaron Burr by Nancy Isenberg. \nThe Aaron Burr Society: Since 2008 the Aaron Burr Society has been dedicated to exposing the myths of the Free Market and Free Trade. Wall Street and their Corporate Cronies use myths in order to subvert the Sovereignty of The People in an attempt to usurp the Collective Wealth of the Nation. In addition to financial derivatives and other fraudulent monetary policies\, they divert your tax money for their profits while privatizing public programs\, like education\, designed to promote universal prosperity. Wall Street and their cronies make billions in bonuses and trillions in subsidies while we the people\, our nation and the world goes bankrupt. The real reason for the escalation of personal and national debt are the crimes committed by Wall Street and conservative politicians of both parties.The Society maintains relationships with individuals and organizations from Occupy Wall Street. However\, the crisis of capitalism has morphed and expanded by embracing 21st century forms of authoritarianism and corporate fascism. \nSuggested donations are sliding scale. No one turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/early-american-resistance-to-hamiltons-capitalist-policies/2019-03-18/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Whiskey-RebellionSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190321T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190321T213000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20181216T071121Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190320T043627Z
UID:10006416-1553196600-1553203800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Globalization and Writing
DESCRIPTION:Exploration: Exploitation/Domination • Discovery/Liberation\n4 Works • 11 Weeks \nThe MEP Literature Group \nIn this eleven-week session we will read one memoir and three novels that study the scope of empire. Written between 1899 and 2000\, the authors\, two sailors (Polish and American)\, a Jamaican social theorist\, and a British Jamaican immigrant are denied privilege because of their citizenship (or lack of it)\, class\, or color. Unwilling\, or unable to conform and accept lesser positions in their societies\, they remain within their marginality and write their unease in novels which give readers an alternative report of the results of colonization both abroad where the EuroAmerican capitalists have colonized and what consequences that colonization has made for life in the home countries. \nHeart of Darkness\nJoseph Conrad\nThe story\, written at the height of the British Empire\, reflects the physical and psychological shock Conrad himself experienced in 1890 when he worked briefly in the Belgian Congo. The experience left him disillusioned\, questioning what it meant to be civilized in the age of colonialism \nThis novella is astonishingly powerful and equally enigmatic. Its condemnation of Western imperialism—of the greed\, violence\, and exploitation that so often accompanies ventures to bring “light” and civilization to the “dark” and needy areas of the world—and its poignant look at the destructive influence of colonization on the colonized and colonizer alike\, have been widely praised. However\, some postcolonial African writers\, most notably Chinua Achebe\, deemed the book racist for its portrayal of native African cultures. \nFamiliar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands\nStuart Hall\nFamiliar Stranger takes us only as far as the mid-1960s\, after a decade during which\, for Hall\, “normal” life was suspended in favour of non-stop political agitation. The book touches on his role in the New Left; his critical involvement with CND; his early exposition of the “formal” and “unwitting” variants of British racism; and the importance of Catherine\, with whom he relocated to Birmingham at the start of his lifelong embrace of cultural studies. These recollections of a busy life in Britain nonetheless remain haunted by the ghostly presence of his earlier years in Jamaica. With its resonant subtitle\, A Life Between Two Islands\, it encourages the reader to draw such parallels as that between Jamaica’s 1938 rebellion and the Brixton riots of 1981. It was Hall’s belief that the British had never fully come to terms with colonialism and decolonization. \nDog Soldiers\nRobert Stone\nDog Soldiers deals with the fall of the counterculture in America\, the rise of mass cynicism and the end of the optimism of the 1960s. California has moved on from the Summer of Love to post-Manson paranoia. Converse\, a once-promising writer now unable to do more than observe\, waits for artistic inspiration as a correspondent in Vietnam. Symbolic of his moral corruption is his decision to traffic in heroin\, which the 1960s counterculture never embraced as they did marijuana and LSD. \nWhite Teeth\nZadie Smith\nThis may be the first novel ever written that truly feels at home in our borderless\, globalized\, intermarried\, post-colonial age\, populated by “children with first and last names on a direct collision course.” Published when Smith was just 24\, White Teeth follows the friendship of two Londoners\, a pub-going working-class bloke named Archie and a Muslim from Bangladesh named Samad. Archie marries a Jamaican; Samad has twin sons\, one of whom becomes a religious militant\, the other a rabid Anglophile. The overlapping fates of Smith’s characters seem to trace the new structures of 21st-century life and test their sturdiness as framework for peace and happiness. Both deeply Dickensian and playfully post-modern\, White Teeth doesn’t quail before the rampantly ramifying novelistic complexities of a multicultural world. It revels in them. \nThe MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project following a presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on her Indigenous Peoples History of the United States and her recommendation that we take up literature with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of The Dead. The group has recently completed readings of Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years following by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Our second summer of noir\, considered works by Hammett\, Chandler\, Manchette\, and others. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the global depression of the 1930s\, and novels on border politics\, migrations and labor organizing.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/globalization-and-writing/2019-03-21/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/GlobalizedLitJan24_Site2.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190323T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190323T140000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190111T053528Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140647Z
UID:10006502-1553338800-1553349600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 1
DESCRIPTION:CLASS & DISCUSSION with CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP\nKarl Marx’s Capital remains the fundamental text for understanding how capitalism works. By unraveling the commoditized forms of our interactions with nature and each other\, it provides tools to understand capitalism’s astounding innovativeness and productivity\, intertwined with growing inequality and misery\, alienation\, stunting of human potential\, and ecological destruction all over the globe. In this way\, Capital offers the reader a methodology for doing our own analysis of current developments. We will conclude Volume One this term and begin our first 12-week session on Volume Two on Saturday\, April 27. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nNo one turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-1-2/2019-03-23/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalAccumulationSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190323T153000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190323T173000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190228T095427Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190308T213206Z
UID:10006533-1553355000-1553362200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Noam Chomsky’s Yugoslavia: Peace\, War\, and Dissolution
DESCRIPTION:An afternoon with Davor Džalto on Noam Chomsky’s Yugoslavia: Peace\, War\, and Dissolution\nThe Balkans\, in particular the turbulent ex-Yugoslav territory\, have been among the most important world regions in Noam Chomsky’s political reflections and activism for decades. His articles\, public talks\, and correspondence have provided a critical voice on political and social issues crucial not only to the region but the entire international community\, including “humanitarian intervention\,” the relevance of international law in today’s politics\, media manipulations\, and economic crisis as a means of political control. \nThis volume provides a comprehensive survey of virtually all of Chomsky’s texts and public talks that focus on the region of the former Yugoslavia\, from the 1970s to the present. With numerous articles and interviews\, this collection presents a wealth of materials appearing in book form for the first time along with reflections on events twenty-five years after the official end of communist Yugoslavia and the beginning of the war in Bosnia. The book opens with a personal and wide-ranging preface by Andrej Grubačić that affirms the ongoing importance of Yugoslav history and identity\, providing a context for understanding Yugoslavia as an experiment in self-management\, antifascism\, and mutlethnic coexistence. \nDavor Džalto will address some of the most crucial political and social issues affecting both the Balkans and the international community. He is associate professor and program director at the American University of Rome and president of the Institute for the Study of Culture and Christianity. His research interests include the fields of history and politics of the Balkans\, political theology\, and religious philosophy. He is editor of Yugoslavia: Peace\, War\, and Dissolution by Noam Chomsky (PM Press\, 2018). \nNOAM CHOMSKY is a laureate professor at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics and Chomsky is one of the foremost critics of U.S. foreign policy. He has published numerous groundbreaking books\, articles\, and essays on global politics\, history\, and linguistics. His recent books include Who Rules the World? and Hopes and Prospects. \nDAVOR DZALTO is associate professor and program director at the American University of Rome and president of the Institute for the Study of Culture and Christianity. His research interests include the fields of history and politics of the Balkans\, political theology\, and religious philosophy.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/noam-chomskys-yugoslavia-peace-war-and-dissolution/
LOCATION:New Perspectives Theatre\, 456-458 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/ChomskyCover.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190325T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190325T210000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190109T164958Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140844Z
UID:10006486-1553540400-1553547600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Black Reconstruction
DESCRIPTION:Black Reconstruction: An American Revolutionary Period\nwith the Revolutions Study Group \n13-week session \nSome have called the U.S. Civil War the “second American revolution” or the completion of the first American revolution. Others claim that the war of independence and Civil War were not revolutions\, but had tremendous revolutionary potential. By whichever historical claim\, the great social revolution of that momentous period following the Civil War was surely the “reconstruction” of social relations in the former slave states. In his groundbreaking study (1935)\, W.E.B. DuBois reveals that this social revolution was both initiated by slaves in the midst of the war and carried through by the emancipated Black population during and after the period when federal troops occupied the former Confederate states. DuBois is concerned to refute the multiple slanders imputed to “Reconstruction” during the counter-revolutionary “Jim Crow” period that followed and to record the real advancements of democracy and social reform made under Reconstruction and partly lost when it was defeated. We will read DuBois’ Black Reconstruction (Oxford University Press\, 2007) in whole\, and for more recent research\, the middle part of Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South (Harvard University Press\, 2003). Both books are readily available new and used\, as e-books\, and in libraries. Email to info@marxedproject.org for a reading syllabus. \n \nTHE REVOLUTIONS STUDY GROUP (originally at the Brecht Forum) has been meeting for 10 years. Individual participants have come and gone\, however the group has held together\, studying in depth a wide range of history including the French Revolution\, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917\, the Mau-Mau Revolt in Kenya\, the Haitian Revolution\, the European Revolutions of 1848\, the May movement in France of 1968 and the Hot Autumn of Italy the following year\, the Spanish Civil War\, the Mexican Revolution\, the Socialist (2nd) International\, the German revolutionary period of 1918-1924\, and the Chinese revolutionary process of the 20th Century. \nThe listed fees are sliding scale. No one is denied admission for inability to pay. \n  \nTONIGHT\, FEBRUARY 11 ONLY: The class will meet at The Brooklyn Commons\, 388 Atlantic Avenue. A or G trains to Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop is a short walk from this venue.\n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/black-reconstruction/2019-03-25/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ReconstructionSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190325T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190325T213000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190112T053859Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190320T044341Z
UID:10006513-1553542200-1553549400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Early American Resistance to Hamilton’s Capitalist Policies
DESCRIPTION:From the Beginning:\nEarly American Resistance to the Capitalist Policies of Alexander Hamilton\nA 5 week study and discussion with Jim Costanzo\, founder & director of the Aaron Burr Society\nMondays\, March 11—April 8\n7:30 – 9:30 Pm @ The Brooklyn Commons \nWas the U.S. Constitution a betrayal of the American Revolution? Did the founders intentionally frame the Constitution to establish a financial aristocracy based on patriarchy and white supremacy? \nFollowing independence\, there were five armed rebellions against the newly formed Republic in response to debt\, financial speculation and foreclosures. This course will examine how the working classes\, small farmers and veterans of the revolution organized to address grievances against the rise of American capitalism. Though different\, the 21st Century’s Great Recession is a continuation of the ongoing struggles against capital formation\, debt and democratic processes. The concentration of economic power was built into the Constitution and enhanced by Hamilton who imposed different forms of British capitalism upon the former colonies that had just rebelled against those policies. Appropriating the Collective Wealth of the Nation to establish an aristocracy is reflected in the phrase “too much democracy” which is often associated with the French Revolution but was popular since the end of the American Revolution. This aristocratic phrase is applicable today with radical return of gerrymandering and voter suppression.This five-week study and discussion will explore the political economy behind post-colonial American class struggles. \nThe main book for this class will be Founding Finance: How Debt\, Speculation\, Foreclosures\, Protests and Crackdowns Made Us a Nation by William Hogeland. Other references will be from various sources that will include my original research from the Pittsburgh Gazette from 1789 to 1803. Another book will be referenced but not required is Fallen Founder: the Life of Aaron Burr by Nancy Isenberg. \nThe Aaron Burr Society: Since 2008 the Aaron Burr Society has been dedicated to exposing the myths of the Free Market and Free Trade. Wall Street and their Corporate Cronies use myths in order to subvert the Sovereignty of The People in an attempt to usurp the Collective Wealth of the Nation. In addition to financial derivatives and other fraudulent monetary policies\, they divert your tax money for their profits while privatizing public programs\, like education\, designed to promote universal prosperity. Wall Street and their cronies make billions in bonuses and trillions in subsidies while we the people\, our nation and the world goes bankrupt. The real reason for the escalation of personal and national debt are the crimes committed by Wall Street and conservative politicians of both parties.The Society maintains relationships with individuals and organizations from Occupy Wall Street. However\, the crisis of capitalism has morphed and expanded by embracing 21st century forms of authoritarianism and corporate fascism. \nSuggested donations are sliding scale. No one turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/early-american-resistance-to-hamiltons-capitalist-policies/2019-03-25/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Whiskey-RebellionSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190328T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190328T213000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20181216T071121Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190320T043627Z
UID:10006417-1553801400-1553808600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Globalization and Writing
DESCRIPTION:Exploration: Exploitation/Domination • Discovery/Liberation\n4 Works • 11 Weeks \nThe MEP Literature Group \nIn this eleven-week session we will read one memoir and three novels that study the scope of empire. Written between 1899 and 2000\, the authors\, two sailors (Polish and American)\, a Jamaican social theorist\, and a British Jamaican immigrant are denied privilege because of their citizenship (or lack of it)\, class\, or color. Unwilling\, or unable to conform and accept lesser positions in their societies\, they remain within their marginality and write their unease in novels which give readers an alternative report of the results of colonization both abroad where the EuroAmerican capitalists have colonized and what consequences that colonization has made for life in the home countries. \nHeart of Darkness\nJoseph Conrad\nThe story\, written at the height of the British Empire\, reflects the physical and psychological shock Conrad himself experienced in 1890 when he worked briefly in the Belgian Congo. The experience left him disillusioned\, questioning what it meant to be civilized in the age of colonialism \nThis novella is astonishingly powerful and equally enigmatic. Its condemnation of Western imperialism—of the greed\, violence\, and exploitation that so often accompanies ventures to bring “light” and civilization to the “dark” and needy areas of the world—and its poignant look at the destructive influence of colonization on the colonized and colonizer alike\, have been widely praised. However\, some postcolonial African writers\, most notably Chinua Achebe\, deemed the book racist for its portrayal of native African cultures. \nFamiliar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands\nStuart Hall\nFamiliar Stranger takes us only as far as the mid-1960s\, after a decade during which\, for Hall\, “normal” life was suspended in favour of non-stop political agitation. The book touches on his role in the New Left; his critical involvement with CND; his early exposition of the “formal” and “unwitting” variants of British racism; and the importance of Catherine\, with whom he relocated to Birmingham at the start of his lifelong embrace of cultural studies. These recollections of a busy life in Britain nonetheless remain haunted by the ghostly presence of his earlier years in Jamaica. With its resonant subtitle\, A Life Between Two Islands\, it encourages the reader to draw such parallels as that between Jamaica’s 1938 rebellion and the Brixton riots of 1981. It was Hall’s belief that the British had never fully come to terms with colonialism and decolonization. \nDog Soldiers\nRobert Stone\nDog Soldiers deals with the fall of the counterculture in America\, the rise of mass cynicism and the end of the optimism of the 1960s. California has moved on from the Summer of Love to post-Manson paranoia. Converse\, a once-promising writer now unable to do more than observe\, waits for artistic inspiration as a correspondent in Vietnam. Symbolic of his moral corruption is his decision to traffic in heroin\, which the 1960s counterculture never embraced as they did marijuana and LSD. \nWhite Teeth\nZadie Smith\nThis may be the first novel ever written that truly feels at home in our borderless\, globalized\, intermarried\, post-colonial age\, populated by “children with first and last names on a direct collision course.” Published when Smith was just 24\, White Teeth follows the friendship of two Londoners\, a pub-going working-class bloke named Archie and a Muslim from Bangladesh named Samad. Archie marries a Jamaican; Samad has twin sons\, one of whom becomes a religious militant\, the other a rabid Anglophile. The overlapping fates of Smith’s characters seem to trace the new structures of 21st-century life and test their sturdiness as framework for peace and happiness. Both deeply Dickensian and playfully post-modern\, White Teeth doesn’t quail before the rampantly ramifying novelistic complexities of a multicultural world. It revels in them. \nThe MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project following a presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on her Indigenous Peoples History of the United States and her recommendation that we take up literature with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of The Dead. The group has recently completed readings of Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years following by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Our second summer of noir\, considered works by Hammett\, Chandler\, Manchette\, and others. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the global depression of the 1930s\, and novels on border politics\, migrations and labor organizing.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/globalization-and-writing/2019-03-28/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/GlobalizedLitJan24_Site2.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190329T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190329T210000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190316T054724Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190320T044427Z
UID:10006015-1553882400-1553893200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:The Working Class Goes to Heaven
DESCRIPTION:Final Friday Film Series\na continuation of The Anti-Bourgeois Film Series\n \nLa Classe Operaia Va In Paradiso\nItaly\, 1971\, 125 Min\nDIRECTED BY Elio Petri\nCAST Gian Maria Volontè\, Mariangela Melato\, Gino Pernice\, Luigi Diberti\, Donato Castellaneta\, Giuseppe Fortis\, Flavio Bucci\, Ezio Marano\, Adriano Amidei Migliano\nMUSIC Ennio Morricone \nIf this Italian drama were any less well told\, it would come off as a pure union propaganda piece. Instead\, it is a worthy film for the director who made the acclaimed film Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. In any manufacturing situation\, it simply doesn’t pay to be the fastest and hardest working person on the assembly line. In the first place\, you probably can’t keep up the pace you’ve set. In the second place\, you make all your co-workers a) look bad and b) have to work harder; they will not thank you for this.Lulu Massa (Gian Maria Volonte) is a highly productive worker at a factory paying piece work but is disliked by his colleagues as his efficiency is used by management to justify their demands for higher output. While employees are told to care for and rely on their machines\, they see radical students outside the factory campaigning for higher pay rates and less work. Lulu lives with Lidia and her son. He puts his lack of interest in sex with her down to the pressures of the job. \nLulu loses a finger in a work accident\, which the workers blame on the faster times. Shocked\, he adopts the students’ analysis and takes strike action to end piece work\, against the unions’ policy\, which is for simply an increase in piece work rates. \nDuring that time\, he visits a colleague who shows him not only the error of his own ways\, but the horror of his whole working situation. When he goes back to work\, Massa tries to organize a union.            –adapted from the allmovie guide\, 2011is
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/the-working-class-goes-to-heaven/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/WorldClassGoesSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190330T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190330T140000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190111T053528Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140647Z
UID:10006503-1553943600-1553954400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 1
DESCRIPTION:CLASS & DISCUSSION with CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP\nKarl Marx’s Capital remains the fundamental text for understanding how capitalism works. By unraveling the commoditized forms of our interactions with nature and each other\, it provides tools to understand capitalism’s astounding innovativeness and productivity\, intertwined with growing inequality and misery\, alienation\, stunting of human potential\, and ecological destruction all over the globe. In this way\, Capital offers the reader a methodology for doing our own analysis of current developments. We will conclude Volume One this term and begin our first 12-week session on Volume Two on Saturday\, April 27. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nNo one turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-1-2/2019-03-30/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalAccumulationSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190401T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190401T210000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190109T164958Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140844Z
UID:10006487-1554145200-1554152400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Black Reconstruction
DESCRIPTION:Black Reconstruction: An American Revolutionary Period\nwith the Revolutions Study Group \n13-week session \nSome have called the U.S. Civil War the “second American revolution” or the completion of the first American revolution. Others claim that the war of independence and Civil War were not revolutions\, but had tremendous revolutionary potential. By whichever historical claim\, the great social revolution of that momentous period following the Civil War was surely the “reconstruction” of social relations in the former slave states. In his groundbreaking study (1935)\, W.E.B. DuBois reveals that this social revolution was both initiated by slaves in the midst of the war and carried through by the emancipated Black population during and after the period when federal troops occupied the former Confederate states. DuBois is concerned to refute the multiple slanders imputed to “Reconstruction” during the counter-revolutionary “Jim Crow” period that followed and to record the real advancements of democracy and social reform made under Reconstruction and partly lost when it was defeated. We will read DuBois’ Black Reconstruction (Oxford University Press\, 2007) in whole\, and for more recent research\, the middle part of Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South (Harvard University Press\, 2003). Both books are readily available new and used\, as e-books\, and in libraries. Email to info@marxedproject.org for a reading syllabus. \n \nTHE REVOLUTIONS STUDY GROUP (originally at the Brecht Forum) has been meeting for 10 years. Individual participants have come and gone\, however the group has held together\, studying in depth a wide range of history including the French Revolution\, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917\, the Mau-Mau Revolt in Kenya\, the Haitian Revolution\, the European Revolutions of 1848\, the May movement in France of 1968 and the Hot Autumn of Italy the following year\, the Spanish Civil War\, the Mexican Revolution\, the Socialist (2nd) International\, the German revolutionary period of 1918-1924\, and the Chinese revolutionary process of the 20th Century. \nThe listed fees are sliding scale. No one is denied admission for inability to pay. \n  \nTONIGHT\, FEBRUARY 11 ONLY: The class will meet at The Brooklyn Commons\, 388 Atlantic Avenue. A or G trains to Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop is a short walk from this venue.\n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/black-reconstruction/2019-04-01/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ReconstructionSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190401T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190401T213000
DTSTAMP:20260406T114837
CREATED:20190112T053859Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190320T044341Z
UID:10006514-1554147000-1554154200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Early American Resistance to Hamilton’s Capitalist Policies
DESCRIPTION:From the Beginning:\nEarly American Resistance to the Capitalist Policies of Alexander Hamilton\nA 5 week study and discussion with Jim Costanzo\, founder & director of the Aaron Burr Society\nMondays\, March 11—April 8\n7:30 – 9:30 Pm @ The Brooklyn Commons \nWas the U.S. Constitution a betrayal of the American Revolution? Did the founders intentionally frame the Constitution to establish a financial aristocracy based on patriarchy and white supremacy? \nFollowing independence\, there were five armed rebellions against the newly formed Republic in response to debt\, financial speculation and foreclosures. This course will examine how the working classes\, small farmers and veterans of the revolution organized to address grievances against the rise of American capitalism. Though different\, the 21st Century’s Great Recession is a continuation of the ongoing struggles against capital formation\, debt and democratic processes. The concentration of economic power was built into the Constitution and enhanced by Hamilton who imposed different forms of British capitalism upon the former colonies that had just rebelled against those policies. Appropriating the Collective Wealth of the Nation to establish an aristocracy is reflected in the phrase “too much democracy” which is often associated with the French Revolution but was popular since the end of the American Revolution. This aristocratic phrase is applicable today with radical return of gerrymandering and voter suppression.This five-week study and discussion will explore the political economy behind post-colonial American class struggles. \nThe main book for this class will be Founding Finance: How Debt\, Speculation\, Foreclosures\, Protests and Crackdowns Made Us a Nation by William Hogeland. Other references will be from various sources that will include my original research from the Pittsburgh Gazette from 1789 to 1803. Another book will be referenced but not required is Fallen Founder: the Life of Aaron Burr by Nancy Isenberg. \nThe Aaron Burr Society: Since 2008 the Aaron Burr Society has been dedicated to exposing the myths of the Free Market and Free Trade. Wall Street and their Corporate Cronies use myths in order to subvert the Sovereignty of The People in an attempt to usurp the Collective Wealth of the Nation. In addition to financial derivatives and other fraudulent monetary policies\, they divert your tax money for their profits while privatizing public programs\, like education\, designed to promote universal prosperity. Wall Street and their cronies make billions in bonuses and trillions in subsidies while we the people\, our nation and the world goes bankrupt. The real reason for the escalation of personal and national debt are the crimes committed by Wall Street and conservative politicians of both parties.The Society maintains relationships with individuals and organizations from Occupy Wall Street. However\, the crisis of capitalism has morphed and expanded by embracing 21st century forms of authoritarianism and corporate fascism. \nSuggested donations are sliding scale. No one turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/early-american-resistance-to-hamiltons-capitalist-policies/2019-04-01/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Whiskey-RebellionSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR