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DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190808T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190808T213000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190519T061606Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190519T061606Z
UID:10006607-1565292600-1565299800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:A Summer of Further Discontent: Noir Fiction and the City
DESCRIPTION:The powers of corruption rife in every pore surrounding the practice of capital accumulation will sell us the spikes we pump heroin into our veins with\, made from steel similar to the bullets thugs and cops will use to enforce what capital takes from within and without of shifting what is legality\, threatening each and all in cities large and small all over the world who would stand up to the corruption or seek to upend any contour of business as usual. An \nJuly 11 and 18\nNarcopolis\nJeet Thayil\nWritten in poetic and affecting prose\, Jeet Thayil’s luminous debut novel charts the evolution of a great and broken metropolis across three decades. A rich\, hallucinatory dream that captures Bombay in all its compelling squalor\, Narcopolis completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated. It is a book about drugs\, sex\, death\, perversion\, addiction\, love\, and God and has more in common in its subject matter with the work of William S. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with that of the subcontinent’s familiar literary lights. Above all\, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in a nation about to sell its soul. \nJuly 25 and August 1\nThe Expendable Man\nDorothy B. Hughes\n“It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumably educated\, civilized man.” And Hugh Denismore\, a young doctor driving his mother’s Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix\, is eminently educated and civilized. He is privileged\, would seem to have the world at his feet\, even. Then why does the sight of a few redneck teenagers disconcert him? Why is he reluctant to pick up a disheveled girl hitchhiking along the desert highway? And why is he the first person the police suspect when she is found dead in Arizona a few days later? \nDorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir. In books like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of twentieth-century prosperity. With The Expendable Man\, first published in 1963\, Hughes upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes. \nAugust 8 and 15\nThe Instant Enemy\nRoss Macdonald\nGenerations of murder\, greed and deception come home to roost in time for the most shocking conclusion ever in a Lew Archer novel. At first glance\, it’s an open-and-shut missing persons case: a headstrong daughter has run off to be with her hothead juvenile delinquent boyfriend. That is until this bush-league Bonnie & Clyde kidnap Stephen Hackett\, a local millionaire industrialist. Now\, Archer is offered a cool 100 Gs for his safe return by his coquettish heiress mother who has her own mysterious ties to this disturbed duo. But the deeper Archer digs\, the more he realizes that nothing is as it seems and everything is questionable. Is the boyfriend a psycho ex-con with murder on the brain or a damaged youngster trying to straighten out his twisted family tree? \nAugust 22 and 29\nThe End of the Wasp Season\nDenise Mina\nWhen wealthy Sarah Erroll is murdered at her home in a posh part of Glasgow the local community is stunned. Heavily pregnant with desperately-wanted twins\, DS Alex Morrow is called into a scene so violent that experienced officers can hardly bear to look. \nOn the other side of town\, Thomas Anderson is told by the headmaster at his boarding school that his tyrannical father – a banker responsible for the loss of many livelihoods in the recession – has hanged himself from the old oak tree on the lawn of their home. Thomas returns to the family home to find his mother and sister in a state of shock. The head of the household is dead\, yet their initial reaction is not that of grief\, but relief. As Alex Morrow makes the connections between the two cases\, she faces her greatest challenge yet as her work and home lives collide with potentially disastrous consequences. \nSeptember 12 and 19\nNada\nJean-Patrick Manchette\ntranslated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith\,\nwith an introduction by Luc Sante \nNada is the most overtly political of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s dark thrillers\, a critique of the terrorism that tempted a sliver of the ultra-left in France (and elsewhere) in the wake of the disillusions of 1968. The novel chronicles the kidnapping and eventual killing of an American ambassador by an anarcho-terrorist group who have espoused armed struggle. A rough equivalent to this story might be the saga of the ill-fated Symbionese Liberation Army in California\, whose fiery elimination is reminiscent of the police massacre of Manchette’s fictional direct-action group in Nada. The novel is in no sense a political pamphlet\, however\, and readers who have come to appreciate the very special qualities of Manchette’s writing\, and the cool noir style that he inherits in part from Dashiell Hammett and calls “behaviorist\,” will not be disappointed in the tour de force that is Nada. \n The MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project. The group last year completed a second summer of readings of noir\, considering works by Hammett\, Chandler\, Manchette\, and others. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the global depression of the 1930s\, borders and migration\, and the literature of mutually assured destruction and more.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/a-summer-of-further-discontent-noir-fiction-and-the-city/2019-08-08/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/SummerLit2019Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190801T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190801T213000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190519T061606Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190519T061606Z
UID:10006606-1564687800-1564695000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:A Summer of Further Discontent: Noir Fiction and the City
DESCRIPTION:The powers of corruption rife in every pore surrounding the practice of capital accumulation will sell us the spikes we pump heroin into our veins with\, made from steel similar to the bullets thugs and cops will use to enforce what capital takes from within and without of shifting what is legality\, threatening each and all in cities large and small all over the world who would stand up to the corruption or seek to upend any contour of business as usual. An \nJuly 11 and 18\nNarcopolis\nJeet Thayil\nWritten in poetic and affecting prose\, Jeet Thayil’s luminous debut novel charts the evolution of a great and broken metropolis across three decades. A rich\, hallucinatory dream that captures Bombay in all its compelling squalor\, Narcopolis completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated. It is a book about drugs\, sex\, death\, perversion\, addiction\, love\, and God and has more in common in its subject matter with the work of William S. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with that of the subcontinent’s familiar literary lights. Above all\, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in a nation about to sell its soul. \nJuly 25 and August 1\nThe Expendable Man\nDorothy B. Hughes\n“It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumably educated\, civilized man.” And Hugh Denismore\, a young doctor driving his mother’s Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix\, is eminently educated and civilized. He is privileged\, would seem to have the world at his feet\, even. Then why does the sight of a few redneck teenagers disconcert him? Why is he reluctant to pick up a disheveled girl hitchhiking along the desert highway? And why is he the first person the police suspect when she is found dead in Arizona a few days later? \nDorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir. In books like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of twentieth-century prosperity. With The Expendable Man\, first published in 1963\, Hughes upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes. \nAugust 8 and 15\nThe Instant Enemy\nRoss Macdonald\nGenerations of murder\, greed and deception come home to roost in time for the most shocking conclusion ever in a Lew Archer novel. At first glance\, it’s an open-and-shut missing persons case: a headstrong daughter has run off to be with her hothead juvenile delinquent boyfriend. That is until this bush-league Bonnie & Clyde kidnap Stephen Hackett\, a local millionaire industrialist. Now\, Archer is offered a cool 100 Gs for his safe return by his coquettish heiress mother who has her own mysterious ties to this disturbed duo. But the deeper Archer digs\, the more he realizes that nothing is as it seems and everything is questionable. Is the boyfriend a psycho ex-con with murder on the brain or a damaged youngster trying to straighten out his twisted family tree? \nAugust 22 and 29\nThe End of the Wasp Season\nDenise Mina\nWhen wealthy Sarah Erroll is murdered at her home in a posh part of Glasgow the local community is stunned. Heavily pregnant with desperately-wanted twins\, DS Alex Morrow is called into a scene so violent that experienced officers can hardly bear to look. \nOn the other side of town\, Thomas Anderson is told by the headmaster at his boarding school that his tyrannical father – a banker responsible for the loss of many livelihoods in the recession – has hanged himself from the old oak tree on the lawn of their home. Thomas returns to the family home to find his mother and sister in a state of shock. The head of the household is dead\, yet their initial reaction is not that of grief\, but relief. As Alex Morrow makes the connections between the two cases\, she faces her greatest challenge yet as her work and home lives collide with potentially disastrous consequences. \nSeptember 12 and 19\nNada\nJean-Patrick Manchette\ntranslated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith\,\nwith an introduction by Luc Sante \nNada is the most overtly political of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s dark thrillers\, a critique of the terrorism that tempted a sliver of the ultra-left in France (and elsewhere) in the wake of the disillusions of 1968. The novel chronicles the kidnapping and eventual killing of an American ambassador by an anarcho-terrorist group who have espoused armed struggle. A rough equivalent to this story might be the saga of the ill-fated Symbionese Liberation Army in California\, whose fiery elimination is reminiscent of the police massacre of Manchette’s fictional direct-action group in Nada. The novel is in no sense a political pamphlet\, however\, and readers who have come to appreciate the very special qualities of Manchette’s writing\, and the cool noir style that he inherits in part from Dashiell Hammett and calls “behaviorist\,” will not be disappointed in the tour de force that is Nada. \n The MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project. The group last year completed a second summer of readings of noir\, considering works by Hammett\, Chandler\, Manchette\, and others. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the global depression of the 1930s\, borders and migration\, and the literature of mutually assured destruction and more.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/a-summer-of-further-discontent-noir-fiction-and-the-city/2019-08-01/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/SummerLit2019Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190727T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190727T133000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190318T020507Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190517T062325Z
UID:10006027-1564225200-1564234200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 2
DESCRIPTION:The Process of Circulation of Capital\nEdited by Frederick Engels\n \nVolume I of Capital is just the beginning of unraveling the underlying laws of capitalist development. After solving the form that the production of wealth takes within a society where generalized commodity production prevails under the domination of capital —including the commodification of the capacities of the human subject and materials and powers of nature\, the two sources of wealth\, Marx takes on the next big question. How the hell can reproduction of society as a whole take place when there is no conscious social planning that insures that all needs are met and in the necessary proportions such that a continuous reproduction of the conditions of life can take place and reproduce the capitalist relations of production? By looking at capitalist social reproduction from this viewpoint\, in Volume II we discover the solution to this problem while new internal contradictions and instabilities at a societal level inherent to this mode of production are explained. The ground is then laid in combining the laws of motion peculiar to capitalism uncovered in the first two Volumes—The Process of Capitalist Production and The Process of the Circulation of Capital—to the analysis of the third Volume\, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Here\, the circle is completed and we are able to de-fetishize the machinations that appear on the surface of society and their real relationship to the production of wealth and the circulation of that wealth throughout all the competing capitalist interests and the various branches of capital\, and the different strata of the proletariat —prices\, wages\, interests\, rents\, dividends\, rates of profit\, fictitious capital—while revealing the necessity of tendential contradictions that result in episodic crisis of the system leading to periodic booms and busts! \nJoin us as we journey through this movement from the imaginary concrete to the abstract concrete to the real concrete. Come and challenge your way of thinking and understanding the world as it appears to you and begin to identify some of what needs to be overcome and done to bring about a better world. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than two years. We are a group of workers\, students\, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nAdmissions are sliding scale. No one is ever excluded for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-2/2019-07-27/
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/CapitalVol2_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190726T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190726T210000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190520T142951Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190520T142951Z
UID:10006616-1564165800-1564174800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Final Friday Film: Happy-Go-Lucky
DESCRIPTION:Written and Directed by Mike Leigh\n(2008 UK 118 mins) \nThirty years old and single\, Pauline “Poppy” Cross shares a London flat with her best friend Zoe\, a fellow teacher. Poppy is free-minded\, high-spirited and kind-hearted. The film opens with Poppy trying to engage a shop employee in conversation. He ignores her\, yet his icy demeanour does not bother her. She maintains her good mood even when she discovers her bicycle has been stolen. Her main concern is not getting a new one or finding the bicycle\, but that she did not get a chance to say goodbye to it. This prompts her to decide to learn how to drive. \nWhen Poppy takes driving lessons for the first time\, her positive attitude contrasts starkly with her gloomy\, intolerant and cynical driving instructor\, Scott. He is emotionally repressed\, has anger problems and becomes extremely agitated by Poppy’s casual attitude towards driving. As Poppy gets to know him\, it becomes evident that Scott believes in conspiracy theories. His beliefs are partly attributable to his racist and misogynistic views\, which make it hard for him to get along with others. Scott seems to be angered by Poppy’s sunny personality and what he perceives as a lack of responsibility and concern for driving safety. Scott is exceptionally irritated by Poppy’s choice of footwear (a pair of high-heeled boots)\, which he feels compromises her ability to drive. From the outset\, he feels Poppy does not take her lessons seriously and is careless. \nFrom The Guardian (UK):\n“Happy Go Lucky has been extravagantly admired since it premiered at the Berlin film festival earlier this year\, and I find myself liking it more and more. Mike Leigh’s trademarked cartoony dialogue\, as ever lending a neo-Dickensian compression and intensity to the proceedings\, is an acquired taste and I have gladly acquired it\, though some haven’t. I am not quite sure what I think about the big\, final confrontation between Poppy and Scott. It is well-acted and composed\, and Marsan is ferociously convincing\, yet the episode is closed off a little too neatly\, and Poppy seems eerily unaffected by this or anything else. The effect is a kind of odd and steely invulnerability: not unattractive exactly\, but disconcerting. \n“Sally Hawkins plays it superbly though: exactly right for the part and utterly at ease with a role that is uniquely demanding. In the factory-farmed blandness of the movies\, Happy-Go-Lucky has a strong\, real taste.” \nLike other wholly original artists\, Mike Leigh has staked out his own territory. His London is as distinctive as Fellini’s Rome or Ozu’s Tokyo. In the 1970s and ’80s his career moved between theatre and making films for BBC Television\, many of which were characterized by a gritty kitchen sink realism style. His well-known films include the comedy-dramas Life is Sweet (1990) and Career Girls (1997)\, the Gilbert and Sullivan biographical film Topsy-Turvy (1999)\, and the bleak working-class drama All or Nothing (2002). His most notable works are the black comedy-drama Naked (1993)\, for which he won the Best Director Award at Cannes.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/final-friday-film-happy-go-lucky/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Film Screenings
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/HGL1.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190725T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190725T213000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190519T061606Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190519T061606Z
UID:10006605-1564083000-1564090200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:A Summer of Further Discontent: Noir Fiction and the City
DESCRIPTION:The powers of corruption rife in every pore surrounding the practice of capital accumulation will sell us the spikes we pump heroin into our veins with\, made from steel similar to the bullets thugs and cops will use to enforce what capital takes from within and without of shifting what is legality\, threatening each and all in cities large and small all over the world who would stand up to the corruption or seek to upend any contour of business as usual. An \nJuly 11 and 18\nNarcopolis\nJeet Thayil\nWritten in poetic and affecting prose\, Jeet Thayil’s luminous debut novel charts the evolution of a great and broken metropolis across three decades. A rich\, hallucinatory dream that captures Bombay in all its compelling squalor\, Narcopolis completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated. It is a book about drugs\, sex\, death\, perversion\, addiction\, love\, and God and has more in common in its subject matter with the work of William S. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with that of the subcontinent’s familiar literary lights. Above all\, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in a nation about to sell its soul. \nJuly 25 and August 1\nThe Expendable Man\nDorothy B. Hughes\n“It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumably educated\, civilized man.” And Hugh Denismore\, a young doctor driving his mother’s Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix\, is eminently educated and civilized. He is privileged\, would seem to have the world at his feet\, even. Then why does the sight of a few redneck teenagers disconcert him? Why is he reluctant to pick up a disheveled girl hitchhiking along the desert highway? And why is he the first person the police suspect when she is found dead in Arizona a few days later? \nDorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir. In books like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of twentieth-century prosperity. With The Expendable Man\, first published in 1963\, Hughes upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes. \nAugust 8 and 15\nThe Instant Enemy\nRoss Macdonald\nGenerations of murder\, greed and deception come home to roost in time for the most shocking conclusion ever in a Lew Archer novel. At first glance\, it’s an open-and-shut missing persons case: a headstrong daughter has run off to be with her hothead juvenile delinquent boyfriend. That is until this bush-league Bonnie & Clyde kidnap Stephen Hackett\, a local millionaire industrialist. Now\, Archer is offered a cool 100 Gs for his safe return by his coquettish heiress mother who has her own mysterious ties to this disturbed duo. But the deeper Archer digs\, the more he realizes that nothing is as it seems and everything is questionable. Is the boyfriend a psycho ex-con with murder on the brain or a damaged youngster trying to straighten out his twisted family tree? \nAugust 22 and 29\nThe End of the Wasp Season\nDenise Mina\nWhen wealthy Sarah Erroll is murdered at her home in a posh part of Glasgow the local community is stunned. Heavily pregnant with desperately-wanted twins\, DS Alex Morrow is called into a scene so violent that experienced officers can hardly bear to look. \nOn the other side of town\, Thomas Anderson is told by the headmaster at his boarding school that his tyrannical father – a banker responsible for the loss of many livelihoods in the recession – has hanged himself from the old oak tree on the lawn of their home. Thomas returns to the family home to find his mother and sister in a state of shock. The head of the household is dead\, yet their initial reaction is not that of grief\, but relief. As Alex Morrow makes the connections between the two cases\, she faces her greatest challenge yet as her work and home lives collide with potentially disastrous consequences. \nSeptember 12 and 19\nNada\nJean-Patrick Manchette\ntranslated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith\,\nwith an introduction by Luc Sante \nNada is the most overtly political of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s dark thrillers\, a critique of the terrorism that tempted a sliver of the ultra-left in France (and elsewhere) in the wake of the disillusions of 1968. The novel chronicles the kidnapping and eventual killing of an American ambassador by an anarcho-terrorist group who have espoused armed struggle. A rough equivalent to this story might be the saga of the ill-fated Symbionese Liberation Army in California\, whose fiery elimination is reminiscent of the police massacre of Manchette’s fictional direct-action group in Nada. The novel is in no sense a political pamphlet\, however\, and readers who have come to appreciate the very special qualities of Manchette’s writing\, and the cool noir style that he inherits in part from Dashiell Hammett and calls “behaviorist\,” will not be disappointed in the tour de force that is Nada. \n The MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project. The group last year completed a second summer of readings of noir\, considering works by Hammett\, Chandler\, Manchette\, and others. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the global depression of the 1930s\, borders and migration\, and the literature of mutually assured destruction and more.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/a-summer-of-further-discontent-noir-fiction-and-the-city/2019-07-25/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/SummerLit2019Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190720T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190720T133000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190318T020507Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190517T062325Z
UID:10006026-1563620400-1563629400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 2
DESCRIPTION:The Process of Circulation of Capital\nEdited by Frederick Engels\n \nVolume I of Capital is just the beginning of unraveling the underlying laws of capitalist development. After solving the form that the production of wealth takes within a society where generalized commodity production prevails under the domination of capital —including the commodification of the capacities of the human subject and materials and powers of nature\, the two sources of wealth\, Marx takes on the next big question. How the hell can reproduction of society as a whole take place when there is no conscious social planning that insures that all needs are met and in the necessary proportions such that a continuous reproduction of the conditions of life can take place and reproduce the capitalist relations of production? By looking at capitalist social reproduction from this viewpoint\, in Volume II we discover the solution to this problem while new internal contradictions and instabilities at a societal level inherent to this mode of production are explained. The ground is then laid in combining the laws of motion peculiar to capitalism uncovered in the first two Volumes—The Process of Capitalist Production and The Process of the Circulation of Capital—to the analysis of the third Volume\, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Here\, the circle is completed and we are able to de-fetishize the machinations that appear on the surface of society and their real relationship to the production of wealth and the circulation of that wealth throughout all the competing capitalist interests and the various branches of capital\, and the different strata of the proletariat —prices\, wages\, interests\, rents\, dividends\, rates of profit\, fictitious capital—while revealing the necessity of tendential contradictions that result in episodic crisis of the system leading to periodic booms and busts! \nJoin us as we journey through this movement from the imaginary concrete to the abstract concrete to the real concrete. Come and challenge your way of thinking and understanding the world as it appears to you and begin to identify some of what needs to be overcome and done to bring about a better world. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than two years. We are a group of workers\, students\, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nAdmissions are sliding scale. No one is ever excluded for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-2/2019-07-20/
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/CapitalVol2_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190718T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190718T213000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190519T061606Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190519T061606Z
UID:10006604-1563478200-1563485400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:A Summer of Further Discontent: Noir Fiction and the City
DESCRIPTION:The powers of corruption rife in every pore surrounding the practice of capital accumulation will sell us the spikes we pump heroin into our veins with\, made from steel similar to the bullets thugs and cops will use to enforce what capital takes from within and without of shifting what is legality\, threatening each and all in cities large and small all over the world who would stand up to the corruption or seek to upend any contour of business as usual. An \nJuly 11 and 18\nNarcopolis\nJeet Thayil\nWritten in poetic and affecting prose\, Jeet Thayil’s luminous debut novel charts the evolution of a great and broken metropolis across three decades. A rich\, hallucinatory dream that captures Bombay in all its compelling squalor\, Narcopolis completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated. It is a book about drugs\, sex\, death\, perversion\, addiction\, love\, and God and has more in common in its subject matter with the work of William S. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with that of the subcontinent’s familiar literary lights. Above all\, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in a nation about to sell its soul. \nJuly 25 and August 1\nThe Expendable Man\nDorothy B. Hughes\n“It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumably educated\, civilized man.” And Hugh Denismore\, a young doctor driving his mother’s Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix\, is eminently educated and civilized. He is privileged\, would seem to have the world at his feet\, even. Then why does the sight of a few redneck teenagers disconcert him? Why is he reluctant to pick up a disheveled girl hitchhiking along the desert highway? And why is he the first person the police suspect when she is found dead in Arizona a few days later? \nDorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir. In books like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of twentieth-century prosperity. With The Expendable Man\, first published in 1963\, Hughes upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes. \nAugust 8 and 15\nThe Instant Enemy\nRoss Macdonald\nGenerations of murder\, greed and deception come home to roost in time for the most shocking conclusion ever in a Lew Archer novel. At first glance\, it’s an open-and-shut missing persons case: a headstrong daughter has run off to be with her hothead juvenile delinquent boyfriend. That is until this bush-league Bonnie & Clyde kidnap Stephen Hackett\, a local millionaire industrialist. Now\, Archer is offered a cool 100 Gs for his safe return by his coquettish heiress mother who has her own mysterious ties to this disturbed duo. But the deeper Archer digs\, the more he realizes that nothing is as it seems and everything is questionable. Is the boyfriend a psycho ex-con with murder on the brain or a damaged youngster trying to straighten out his twisted family tree? \nAugust 22 and 29\nThe End of the Wasp Season\nDenise Mina\nWhen wealthy Sarah Erroll is murdered at her home in a posh part of Glasgow the local community is stunned. Heavily pregnant with desperately-wanted twins\, DS Alex Morrow is called into a scene so violent that experienced officers can hardly bear to look. \nOn the other side of town\, Thomas Anderson is told by the headmaster at his boarding school that his tyrannical father – a banker responsible for the loss of many livelihoods in the recession – has hanged himself from the old oak tree on the lawn of their home. Thomas returns to the family home to find his mother and sister in a state of shock. The head of the household is dead\, yet their initial reaction is not that of grief\, but relief. As Alex Morrow makes the connections between the two cases\, she faces her greatest challenge yet as her work and home lives collide with potentially disastrous consequences. \nSeptember 12 and 19\nNada\nJean-Patrick Manchette\ntranslated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith\,\nwith an introduction by Luc Sante \nNada is the most overtly political of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s dark thrillers\, a critique of the terrorism that tempted a sliver of the ultra-left in France (and elsewhere) in the wake of the disillusions of 1968. The novel chronicles the kidnapping and eventual killing of an American ambassador by an anarcho-terrorist group who have espoused armed struggle. A rough equivalent to this story might be the saga of the ill-fated Symbionese Liberation Army in California\, whose fiery elimination is reminiscent of the police massacre of Manchette’s fictional direct-action group in Nada. The novel is in no sense a political pamphlet\, however\, and readers who have come to appreciate the very special qualities of Manchette’s writing\, and the cool noir style that he inherits in part from Dashiell Hammett and calls “behaviorist\,” will not be disappointed in the tour de force that is Nada. \n The MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project. The group last year completed a second summer of readings of noir\, considering works by Hammett\, Chandler\, Manchette\, and others. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the global depression of the 1930s\, borders and migration\, and the literature of mutually assured destruction and more.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/a-summer-of-further-discontent-noir-fiction-and-the-city/2019-07-18/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/SummerLit2019Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190717T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190717T210000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190609T210249Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190609T210249Z
UID:10006619-1563390000-1563397200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:How America Became Capitalist
DESCRIPTION:Imperial Expansion and the Conquest of the West\nAn epic history of the formation of American capitalism\, focusing on gender\, race and empire. \nA presentation and discussion with author James Parisot\n“Parisot’s rich and lively analysis of the domestic history of US empire helps readers understand what it was about the development of US economic\, social and political institutions that made the American state so central in the making of global capitalism.”  —Leo Panitch \n“The historical transformation from a society with capitalism to a capitalist society\, then\, meant\, in the American case\, the two hundred and fifty or so year process through which bits and pieces of capitalist relations slowly came to predominate and incorporate non‐capitalist forms of social life. And this history of the rise of capitalist dominance was simultaneously a history of empire building. By empire I refer to the total structure of power over space and territory that emerged from the earliest days of white‐settler colonization through the extension of continental expansion and the globalization of US power.” —James Parisot\, 2017 \n \nHas America always been capitalist?Today\, the US sees itself as the heartland of the international capitalist system\, its society and politics intertwined deeply with its economic system. Parisot’s book looks at the history of North America from the founding of the colonies to debunk the myth that America is ‘naturally’ capitalist. \nFrom the first white-settler colonies\, capitalist economic elements were apparent\, but far from dominant\, and did not drive the early colonial advance into the West. Society\, too\, was far from homogeneous – as the role of the state fluctuated. Racial identities took time to imprint\, and slavery\, whilst at the heart of American imperialism\, took both capitalist and less-capitalist forms. Additionally\, gender categories and relations were highly complex\, as standards of ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ shifted over time to accommodate capitalism\, and as there were always some people challenging this binary. \nBy looking at this fascinating and complex picture\, James Parisot weaves a groundbreaking historical materialist perspective on the history of American expansion. \nJames Parisot received his PhD in Sociology from Binghamton University. He has published articles in a variety of scholarly journals\, is co-editor of the book American Hegemony and the Rise of Emerging Powers: Cooperation or Conflict? (Routledge\, 2017). \nPrices are sliding scale. No one is denied admission for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/how-america-became-capitalist/
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/2019/06/EarlyCapitalInUSA.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190713T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190713T133000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190318T020507Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190517T062325Z
UID:10006025-1563015600-1563024600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 2
DESCRIPTION:The Process of Circulation of Capital\nEdited by Frederick Engels\n \nVolume I of Capital is just the beginning of unraveling the underlying laws of capitalist development. After solving the form that the production of wealth takes within a society where generalized commodity production prevails under the domination of capital —including the commodification of the capacities of the human subject and materials and powers of nature\, the two sources of wealth\, Marx takes on the next big question. How the hell can reproduction of society as a whole take place when there is no conscious social planning that insures that all needs are met and in the necessary proportions such that a continuous reproduction of the conditions of life can take place and reproduce the capitalist relations of production? By looking at capitalist social reproduction from this viewpoint\, in Volume II we discover the solution to this problem while new internal contradictions and instabilities at a societal level inherent to this mode of production are explained. The ground is then laid in combining the laws of motion peculiar to capitalism uncovered in the first two Volumes—The Process of Capitalist Production and The Process of the Circulation of Capital—to the analysis of the third Volume\, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Here\, the circle is completed and we are able to de-fetishize the machinations that appear on the surface of society and their real relationship to the production of wealth and the circulation of that wealth throughout all the competing capitalist interests and the various branches of capital\, and the different strata of the proletariat —prices\, wages\, interests\, rents\, dividends\, rates of profit\, fictitious capital—while revealing the necessity of tendential contradictions that result in episodic crisis of the system leading to periodic booms and busts! \nJoin us as we journey through this movement from the imaginary concrete to the abstract concrete to the real concrete. Come and challenge your way of thinking and understanding the world as it appears to you and begin to identify some of what needs to be overcome and done to bring about a better world. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than two years. We are a group of workers\, students\, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nAdmissions are sliding scale. No one is ever excluded for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-2/2019-07-13/
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/CapitalVol2_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190711T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190711T213000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190519T061606Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190519T061606Z
UID:10006603-1562873400-1562880600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:A Summer of Further Discontent: Noir Fiction and the City
DESCRIPTION:The powers of corruption rife in every pore surrounding the practice of capital accumulation will sell us the spikes we pump heroin into our veins with\, made from steel similar to the bullets thugs and cops will use to enforce what capital takes from within and without of shifting what is legality\, threatening each and all in cities large and small all over the world who would stand up to the corruption or seek to upend any contour of business as usual. An \nJuly 11 and 18\nNarcopolis\nJeet Thayil\nWritten in poetic and affecting prose\, Jeet Thayil’s luminous debut novel charts the evolution of a great and broken metropolis across three decades. A rich\, hallucinatory dream that captures Bombay in all its compelling squalor\, Narcopolis completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated. It is a book about drugs\, sex\, death\, perversion\, addiction\, love\, and God and has more in common in its subject matter with the work of William S. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with that of the subcontinent’s familiar literary lights. Above all\, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in a nation about to sell its soul. \nJuly 25 and August 1\nThe Expendable Man\nDorothy B. Hughes\n“It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumably educated\, civilized man.” And Hugh Denismore\, a young doctor driving his mother’s Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix\, is eminently educated and civilized. He is privileged\, would seem to have the world at his feet\, even. Then why does the sight of a few redneck teenagers disconcert him? Why is he reluctant to pick up a disheveled girl hitchhiking along the desert highway? And why is he the first person the police suspect when she is found dead in Arizona a few days later? \nDorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir. In books like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of twentieth-century prosperity. With The Expendable Man\, first published in 1963\, Hughes upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes. \nAugust 8 and 15\nThe Instant Enemy\nRoss Macdonald\nGenerations of murder\, greed and deception come home to roost in time for the most shocking conclusion ever in a Lew Archer novel. At first glance\, it’s an open-and-shut missing persons case: a headstrong daughter has run off to be with her hothead juvenile delinquent boyfriend. That is until this bush-league Bonnie & Clyde kidnap Stephen Hackett\, a local millionaire industrialist. Now\, Archer is offered a cool 100 Gs for his safe return by his coquettish heiress mother who has her own mysterious ties to this disturbed duo. But the deeper Archer digs\, the more he realizes that nothing is as it seems and everything is questionable. Is the boyfriend a psycho ex-con with murder on the brain or a damaged youngster trying to straighten out his twisted family tree? \nAugust 22 and 29\nThe End of the Wasp Season\nDenise Mina\nWhen wealthy Sarah Erroll is murdered at her home in a posh part of Glasgow the local community is stunned. Heavily pregnant with desperately-wanted twins\, DS Alex Morrow is called into a scene so violent that experienced officers can hardly bear to look. \nOn the other side of town\, Thomas Anderson is told by the headmaster at his boarding school that his tyrannical father – a banker responsible for the loss of many livelihoods in the recession – has hanged himself from the old oak tree on the lawn of their home. Thomas returns to the family home to find his mother and sister in a state of shock. The head of the household is dead\, yet their initial reaction is not that of grief\, but relief. As Alex Morrow makes the connections between the two cases\, she faces her greatest challenge yet as her work and home lives collide with potentially disastrous consequences. \nSeptember 12 and 19\nNada\nJean-Patrick Manchette\ntranslated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith\,\nwith an introduction by Luc Sante \nNada is the most overtly political of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s dark thrillers\, a critique of the terrorism that tempted a sliver of the ultra-left in France (and elsewhere) in the wake of the disillusions of 1968. The novel chronicles the kidnapping and eventual killing of an American ambassador by an anarcho-terrorist group who have espoused armed struggle. A rough equivalent to this story might be the saga of the ill-fated Symbionese Liberation Army in California\, whose fiery elimination is reminiscent of the police massacre of Manchette’s fictional direct-action group in Nada. The novel is in no sense a political pamphlet\, however\, and readers who have come to appreciate the very special qualities of Manchette’s writing\, and the cool noir style that he inherits in part from Dashiell Hammett and calls “behaviorist\,” will not be disappointed in the tour de force that is Nada. \n The MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project. The group last year completed a second summer of readings of noir\, considering works by Hammett\, Chandler\, Manchette\, and others. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the global depression of the 1930s\, borders and migration\, and the literature of mutually assured destruction and more.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/a-summer-of-further-discontent-noir-fiction-and-the-city/2019-07-11/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/SummerLit2019Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190706T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190706T133000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190318T020507Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190517T062325Z
UID:10006024-1562410800-1562419800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 2
DESCRIPTION:The Process of Circulation of Capital\nEdited by Frederick Engels\n \nVolume I of Capital is just the beginning of unraveling the underlying laws of capitalist development. After solving the form that the production of wealth takes within a society where generalized commodity production prevails under the domination of capital —including the commodification of the capacities of the human subject and materials and powers of nature\, the two sources of wealth\, Marx takes on the next big question. How the hell can reproduction of society as a whole take place when there is no conscious social planning that insures that all needs are met and in the necessary proportions such that a continuous reproduction of the conditions of life can take place and reproduce the capitalist relations of production? By looking at capitalist social reproduction from this viewpoint\, in Volume II we discover the solution to this problem while new internal contradictions and instabilities at a societal level inherent to this mode of production are explained. The ground is then laid in combining the laws of motion peculiar to capitalism uncovered in the first two Volumes—The Process of Capitalist Production and The Process of the Circulation of Capital—to the analysis of the third Volume\, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Here\, the circle is completed and we are able to de-fetishize the machinations that appear on the surface of society and their real relationship to the production of wealth and the circulation of that wealth throughout all the competing capitalist interests and the various branches of capital\, and the different strata of the proletariat —prices\, wages\, interests\, rents\, dividends\, rates of profit\, fictitious capital—while revealing the necessity of tendential contradictions that result in episodic crisis of the system leading to periodic booms and busts! \nJoin us as we journey through this movement from the imaginary concrete to the abstract concrete to the real concrete. Come and challenge your way of thinking and understanding the world as it appears to you and begin to identify some of what needs to be overcome and done to bring about a better world. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than two years. We are a group of workers\, students\, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nAdmissions are sliding scale. No one is ever excluded for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-2/2019-07-06/
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/CapitalVol2_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190629T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190629T133000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190318T020507Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190517T062325Z
UID:10006023-1561806000-1561815000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 2
DESCRIPTION:The Process of Circulation of Capital\nEdited by Frederick Engels\n \nVolume I of Capital is just the beginning of unraveling the underlying laws of capitalist development. After solving the form that the production of wealth takes within a society where generalized commodity production prevails under the domination of capital —including the commodification of the capacities of the human subject and materials and powers of nature\, the two sources of wealth\, Marx takes on the next big question. How the hell can reproduction of society as a whole take place when there is no conscious social planning that insures that all needs are met and in the necessary proportions such that a continuous reproduction of the conditions of life can take place and reproduce the capitalist relations of production? By looking at capitalist social reproduction from this viewpoint\, in Volume II we discover the solution to this problem while new internal contradictions and instabilities at a societal level inherent to this mode of production are explained. The ground is then laid in combining the laws of motion peculiar to capitalism uncovered in the first two Volumes—The Process of Capitalist Production and The Process of the Circulation of Capital—to the analysis of the third Volume\, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Here\, the circle is completed and we are able to de-fetishize the machinations that appear on the surface of society and their real relationship to the production of wealth and the circulation of that wealth throughout all the competing capitalist interests and the various branches of capital\, and the different strata of the proletariat —prices\, wages\, interests\, rents\, dividends\, rates of profit\, fictitious capital—while revealing the necessity of tendential contradictions that result in episodic crisis of the system leading to periodic booms and busts! \nJoin us as we journey through this movement from the imaginary concrete to the abstract concrete to the real concrete. Come and challenge your way of thinking and understanding the world as it appears to you and begin to identify some of what needs to be overcome and done to bring about a better world. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than two years. We are a group of workers\, students\, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nAdmissions are sliding scale. No one is ever excluded for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-2/2019-06-29/
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/CapitalVol2_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190628T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190628T213000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190520T012535Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190520T012641Z
UID:10006614-1561746600-1561757400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Final Friday Film: Camp de Thiaroye
DESCRIPTION:Directed by Ousmane Sembène \nFrom a screenplay by Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow \n(1987 Senegal 153 mins) \n \n“In this powerful and moving film Sembène\, in collaboration with Thierno Faty Sow\, who co-scripted and co-directed\, reclaims and tells to the world another of those fragments of history concealed by colonialism which he sees it as his task to disinter. Such stories are part of the history not only of Africa\, but of the colonial powers\, in this case France\, as well. “You don’t know natives or the colonies”\, Capt. Raymond is informed when\, at a meeting at the General’s H.Q.\, he insists that the Army should honour its obligations to the tirailleurs. France\, he argues\, cannot successfully reconstruct by “robbing natives”\, particularly those who have\, as he outspokenly reminds the assembled officers\, been fighting the war “in your place\, gentlemen”\, a reminder that the authorities in Senegal initially collaborated with Vichy. Ironically\, it is not his ignorance of “natives or the colonies” that limits Raymond\, but his naivety about his fellow Frenchmen: “An officer who does not keep his word is not worthy to wear the French uniform.” When he hears of the massacre in Diatta’s village he is quick to point out that it occurred in 1942\, under Vichy. (In Sembène’s 1971 film Emitai massacres in the Diola region from which Diatta comes are shown as continuing after the liberation of France\, and De Gaulle’s assumption of power.) Diatta argues that the mentality of colonial armies\, be they French or Nazi\, is the same\, going on to point out that collaborators are surrounding the leader of the Free French and being put in charge of the colonies. Despite his greater historical awareness (Raymond is\, in fact\, often prepared to defer to his erudition) Diatta too is taken in when the General apparently gives in to the tirailleurs‘ demands\, and offers his word “as a general officer”. \n“Secondly\, debate is very important in African cinema. It draws on the political rituals of traditional society\, which\, though feudal\, had its system of checks and balances\, which resulted in some degree of democratic exchange of opinion. In Camp de Thiaroye the tirailleurs use the traditional\, highly rhetorical\, almost theatrical\, mode of debate of their various societies\, but adapt this ritual form to the only language they have in common: the pidgin which the French insultingly call “petit nègre”\, a language which is both a result and a tool of colonial exploitation. Here it is revealed as having a potential for eloquence\, allowing it to become a moving medium for the articulation of feelings\, needs\, grievances and resistance\, and thus ultimately for the development of the tirailleurs‘ collective political awareness and consciousness of themselves as Africans. One consequence of the latter is the decision to choose their own leaders\, selecting a representative from each barracks\, rather than relying on their nonetheless much loved and respected Sergeant-Major\, who has been promoted by the whites. The structures they evolve grow out of their historical situation\, and compare strikingly with the rigid hierarchies of colonialism and the military: “The army is discipline. Obedience to your superiors”\, the General tells them. The formal pageantry of the parade-ground serves to stifle debate\, mask conflict\, hide betrayal and destruction\, whereas the theatrical exchanges of the traditional discourse offer a forum for debate\, evolution and reconciliation.”                    —James Leahy\, Sense of Cinema\, October\, 2003 \nOusmane Sembène was the son of a fisherman\, born in Ziguinchor in Casamance to a Lebou family. From childhood Sembène was exposed to Serer religion especially the Tuur festival\, in which he was made cult servant. Although the Tuur demands offerings of curdled milk to the ancestral spirits (Pangool)\, Sembène did not take his responsibility as cult servant seriously and was known for drinking the offerings made to the ancestors. Some of his adult work draws on Serer themes. His maternal grandmother reared him and greatly influenced him. Women play a major role in his works. \nIn 1944\, Sembène was drafted into the Senegalese Tirailleurs (a corps of the French Army). His later World War II service was with the Free French Forces. After the war\, he returned to his home country and in 1947 participated in a long railroad strike on which he later based his seminal novel God’s Bits of Wood. \n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/final-friday-films-camp-de-thiaroye/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Film Screenings
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/SembenePhoto.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190627T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190627T213000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190320T140344Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190419T050329Z
UID:10006038-1561663800-1561671000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:A Spring Fever of World Literature
DESCRIPTION:A Spring Fever of World Literature\n“The progression from a critical reading of literature to an expansive conception of politics proved not only increasingly persuasive intellectually\, but also compelling.” – Stuart Hall\, Familiar Stranger\nLooking at the last century through the lens of literature (and what it tell us about the present moment and those moments that are soon to come). \nG. by John Berger (UK)\nThe Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville (UK)\nThe God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (India)\nGraceLand by Chris Abani (Nigeria) \n“Only in fiction can we share another person’s specific experiences. Outside fiction we have to generalize.” — John Berger\, The Success and Failure of Picasso \n“…when I write my novels\, I’m not writing them to make political points. I’m writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism\, and what I want to do is communicate that. But\, because I come at this with a political perspective\, the world that I’m creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. […] I’m trying to say I’ve invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that too\, that’s fantastic. But if not\, isn’t this a cool monster?” — China Miéville \n“It didn’t matter that the story had begun\, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings.”— Arundhati Roy\, The God of Small Things \nG.\nBerger sets the story of G. against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898\, the Boer War\, and the first flight across the Alps\, making G. a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in history’s private moments. \nGiovanni – G – the product of an Italian merchant’s adulterous fling is sent to cousins on a farm in England\, where a piano-playing governess awakens the lust that proves the keynote in a series of fragmented episodes set during the years before the first world war – a prospect G relishes on account of all the women it will widow. \nThe Last Days of New Paris\nChina Miéville\n1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille\, American engineer—and occult disciple—Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group\, including Surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats\, exiled revolutionaries\, and avant-garde artists\, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares\, changing the war and the world forever. \n“So there I am\, wondering what to do\, and I see you\, and I see what you’re carrying. And that is why I came running after you. Because I do not believe in coincidence.”  \n1950. A lone Surrealist fighter\, Thibaut\, walks a new\, hallucinogenic Paris\, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict\, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts—and by the forces of Hell. To escape the city\, he must join forces with Sam\, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins\, and make common cause with a powerful\, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse. \nThe God of Small Things\nArundathi Roy\n“It didn’t matter that the story had begun\, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings.” \nIn addition to commentary on Indian history and politics\, Roy evaluates the Indian post-colonial complex\, or the cultural attitudes of many Indians toward their former British rulers. After Ammu calls her father a “[shit]-wiper” in Hindi for his blind devotion to the British\, Chacko explains to the twins Rahel and Estha\, that they come from a family of Anglophiles\, or lovers of British culture\, “trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps.” He goes on to say that they despise themselves because of this. Nearly all of the relationships in the novel are somehow colored by cultural and class tension. \nGraceLand\nChris Abani\nGraceLand is a 2004 novel by Chris Abani\, which tells the story of a teenager named Elvis\, who is trying to get out of the ghettos of Lagos\, Nigeria. Chris Abani depicts the poverty and violence in Lagos and how it affects the everyday lives of Elvis and his family. Having emigrated from Nigeria himself as a result of the Biafran War\, Abani’s novel touches on many issues relevant to corruption\, poverty\, and violence within the country. Elvis’s story also touches on issues related to globalization\, and how Nigeria’s impoverished communities are affected by this phenomenon. The main focus of this story is on Elvis and how he survives in the often harsh environment that is Nigeria’s largest city; Elvis himself is a complex and sympathetic character who clearly cares for his family despite a turbulent upbringing. However\, this is complicated by the numerous illegal and morally questionable jobs he takes part in with his friend Redemption. \n “The rain had cleared the oppressive heat that had already dropped like a blanket over Lagos; but the smell of garbage from refuse dumps\, unflushed toilets and stale bodies was still overwhelming. Elvis turned from the window\, dropping the threadbare curtain. Today was his sixteenth birthday\, and as with all the others\, it would pass uncelebrated. It had been that way since his mother died eight years before. He used to think that celebrating his birthday was too painful for his father\, a constant reminder of his loss. But Elvis had since come to the conclusion that his father was simply self-centered. The least I should do is get some more sleep\, he thought\, sitting on the bed. But the sun stabbed through the thin fabric\, bathing the room in sterile light. The radio played Bob Marley….”
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/a-spring-fever-of-world-literature/2019-06-27/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Spring19Books_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190624T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190624T210000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190423T040443Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190610T142846Z
UID:10006045-1561402800-1561410000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Racial Boundaries: The Origin and Consequences of the Color Line in the USA
DESCRIPTION:4-week reading and discussion group\nThe Revolutions Study Group\nThis group is for for anyone who wants to better understand why White and Black retain their significance in U.S. society for so many years after the abolition of slavery. W.E.B. DuBois’ groundbreaking Black Reconstruction\, and the recent PBS documentary on the same subject are both useful for these discussions. However\, we are now taking on two readings which are keys to unlocking the power of the color line in shaping the political economy our world and in shaping the lives of African Americans. Theodore Allen’s pamphlet “Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race\,” from 1975\, explores why and how skin color became the basis of a rigid caste system in the U.S. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk is his first important book\, takes readers into the world of racial caste as uniquely experienced by African Americans. \nOur four week reading sources will be: Theodore W. Allen\, “Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race\,” first published 1975\, 34 pages\, available as printed pamphlet and a downloadable PDF (http://readsettlers.org/settlers-data/ii/02_THEODOREWALLEN_ClassStruggleAndTheOriginsOfSlavery_Somerville1976_p34.pdf)\, and W.E.B Du Bois\, The Souls of Black Folk\, 1903\, available in all formats including free e-book\, 189 pages\, in the 1989 Bantam paperback\, available in libraries \nAdmission is sliding scale. No one is turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/racial-boundaries-the-origin-and-consequences-of-the-color-line-in-the-usa/2019-06-24/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Rex_theatre.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190622T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190622T133000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190318T020507Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190517T062325Z
UID:10006022-1561201200-1561210200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 2
DESCRIPTION:The Process of Circulation of Capital\nEdited by Frederick Engels\n \nVolume I of Capital is just the beginning of unraveling the underlying laws of capitalist development. After solving the form that the production of wealth takes within a society where generalized commodity production prevails under the domination of capital —including the commodification of the capacities of the human subject and materials and powers of nature\, the two sources of wealth\, Marx takes on the next big question. How the hell can reproduction of society as a whole take place when there is no conscious social planning that insures that all needs are met and in the necessary proportions such that a continuous reproduction of the conditions of life can take place and reproduce the capitalist relations of production? By looking at capitalist social reproduction from this viewpoint\, in Volume II we discover the solution to this problem while new internal contradictions and instabilities at a societal level inherent to this mode of production are explained. The ground is then laid in combining the laws of motion peculiar to capitalism uncovered in the first two Volumes—The Process of Capitalist Production and The Process of the Circulation of Capital—to the analysis of the third Volume\, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Here\, the circle is completed and we are able to de-fetishize the machinations that appear on the surface of society and their real relationship to the production of wealth and the circulation of that wealth throughout all the competing capitalist interests and the various branches of capital\, and the different strata of the proletariat —prices\, wages\, interests\, rents\, dividends\, rates of profit\, fictitious capital—while revealing the necessity of tendential contradictions that result in episodic crisis of the system leading to periodic booms and busts! \nJoin us as we journey through this movement from the imaginary concrete to the abstract concrete to the real concrete. Come and challenge your way of thinking and understanding the world as it appears to you and begin to identify some of what needs to be overcome and done to bring about a better world. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than two years. We are a group of workers\, students\, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nAdmissions are sliding scale. No one is ever excluded for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-2/2019-06-22/
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/CapitalVol2_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190620T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190620T213000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190320T140344Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190419T050329Z
UID:10006037-1561059000-1561066200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:A Spring Fever of World Literature
DESCRIPTION:A Spring Fever of World Literature\n“The progression from a critical reading of literature to an expansive conception of politics proved not only increasingly persuasive intellectually\, but also compelling.” – Stuart Hall\, Familiar Stranger\nLooking at the last century through the lens of literature (and what it tell us about the present moment and those moments that are soon to come). \nG. by John Berger (UK)\nThe Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville (UK)\nThe God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (India)\nGraceLand by Chris Abani (Nigeria) \n“Only in fiction can we share another person’s specific experiences. Outside fiction we have to generalize.” — John Berger\, The Success and Failure of Picasso \n“…when I write my novels\, I’m not writing them to make political points. I’m writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism\, and what I want to do is communicate that. But\, because I come at this with a political perspective\, the world that I’m creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. […] I’m trying to say I’ve invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that too\, that’s fantastic. But if not\, isn’t this a cool monster?” — China Miéville \n“It didn’t matter that the story had begun\, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings.”— Arundhati Roy\, The God of Small Things \nG.\nBerger sets the story of G. against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898\, the Boer War\, and the first flight across the Alps\, making G. a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in history’s private moments. \nGiovanni – G – the product of an Italian merchant’s adulterous fling is sent to cousins on a farm in England\, where a piano-playing governess awakens the lust that proves the keynote in a series of fragmented episodes set during the years before the first world war – a prospect G relishes on account of all the women it will widow. \nThe Last Days of New Paris\nChina Miéville\n1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille\, American engineer—and occult disciple—Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group\, including Surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats\, exiled revolutionaries\, and avant-garde artists\, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares\, changing the war and the world forever. \n“So there I am\, wondering what to do\, and I see you\, and I see what you’re carrying. And that is why I came running after you. Because I do not believe in coincidence.”  \n1950. A lone Surrealist fighter\, Thibaut\, walks a new\, hallucinogenic Paris\, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict\, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts—and by the forces of Hell. To escape the city\, he must join forces with Sam\, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins\, and make common cause with a powerful\, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse. \nThe God of Small Things\nArundathi Roy\n“It didn’t matter that the story had begun\, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings.” \nIn addition to commentary on Indian history and politics\, Roy evaluates the Indian post-colonial complex\, or the cultural attitudes of many Indians toward their former British rulers. After Ammu calls her father a “[shit]-wiper” in Hindi for his blind devotion to the British\, Chacko explains to the twins Rahel and Estha\, that they come from a family of Anglophiles\, or lovers of British culture\, “trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps.” He goes on to say that they despise themselves because of this. Nearly all of the relationships in the novel are somehow colored by cultural and class tension. \nGraceLand\nChris Abani\nGraceLand is a 2004 novel by Chris Abani\, which tells the story of a teenager named Elvis\, who is trying to get out of the ghettos of Lagos\, Nigeria. Chris Abani depicts the poverty and violence in Lagos and how it affects the everyday lives of Elvis and his family. Having emigrated from Nigeria himself as a result of the Biafran War\, Abani’s novel touches on many issues relevant to corruption\, poverty\, and violence within the country. Elvis’s story also touches on issues related to globalization\, and how Nigeria’s impoverished communities are affected by this phenomenon. The main focus of this story is on Elvis and how he survives in the often harsh environment that is Nigeria’s largest city; Elvis himself is a complex and sympathetic character who clearly cares for his family despite a turbulent upbringing. However\, this is complicated by the numerous illegal and morally questionable jobs he takes part in with his friend Redemption. \n “The rain had cleared the oppressive heat that had already dropped like a blanket over Lagos; but the smell of garbage from refuse dumps\, unflushed toilets and stale bodies was still overwhelming. Elvis turned from the window\, dropping the threadbare curtain. Today was his sixteenth birthday\, and as with all the others\, it would pass uncelebrated. It had been that way since his mother died eight years before. He used to think that celebrating his birthday was too painful for his father\, a constant reminder of his loss. But Elvis had since come to the conclusion that his father was simply self-centered. The least I should do is get some more sleep\, he thought\, sitting on the bed. But the sun stabbed through the thin fabric\, bathing the room in sterile light. The radio played Bob Marley….”
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/a-spring-fever-of-world-literature/2019-06-20/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Spring19Books_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190617T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190617T210000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190423T040443Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190610T142846Z
UID:10006044-1560798000-1560805200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Racial Boundaries: The Origin and Consequences of the Color Line in the USA
DESCRIPTION:4-week reading and discussion group\nThe Revolutions Study Group\nThis group is for for anyone who wants to better understand why White and Black retain their significance in U.S. society for so many years after the abolition of slavery. W.E.B. DuBois’ groundbreaking Black Reconstruction\, and the recent PBS documentary on the same subject are both useful for these discussions. However\, we are now taking on two readings which are keys to unlocking the power of the color line in shaping the political economy our world and in shaping the lives of African Americans. Theodore Allen’s pamphlet “Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race\,” from 1975\, explores why and how skin color became the basis of a rigid caste system in the U.S. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk is his first important book\, takes readers into the world of racial caste as uniquely experienced by African Americans. \nOur four week reading sources will be: Theodore W. Allen\, “Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race\,” first published 1975\, 34 pages\, available as printed pamphlet and a downloadable PDF (http://readsettlers.org/settlers-data/ii/02_THEODOREWALLEN_ClassStruggleAndTheOriginsOfSlavery_Somerville1976_p34.pdf)\, and W.E.B Du Bois\, The Souls of Black Folk\, 1903\, available in all formats including free e-book\, 189 pages\, in the 1989 Bantam paperback\, available in libraries \nAdmission is sliding scale. No one is turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/racial-boundaries-the-origin-and-consequences-of-the-color-line-in-the-usa/2019-06-17/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Rex_theatre.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190615T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190615T133000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190318T020507Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190517T062325Z
UID:10006021-1560596400-1560605400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 2
DESCRIPTION:The Process of Circulation of Capital\nEdited by Frederick Engels\n \nVolume I of Capital is just the beginning of unraveling the underlying laws of capitalist development. After solving the form that the production of wealth takes within a society where generalized commodity production prevails under the domination of capital —including the commodification of the capacities of the human subject and materials and powers of nature\, the two sources of wealth\, Marx takes on the next big question. How the hell can reproduction of society as a whole take place when there is no conscious social planning that insures that all needs are met and in the necessary proportions such that a continuous reproduction of the conditions of life can take place and reproduce the capitalist relations of production? By looking at capitalist social reproduction from this viewpoint\, in Volume II we discover the solution to this problem while new internal contradictions and instabilities at a societal level inherent to this mode of production are explained. The ground is then laid in combining the laws of motion peculiar to capitalism uncovered in the first two Volumes—The Process of Capitalist Production and The Process of the Circulation of Capital—to the analysis of the third Volume\, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Here\, the circle is completed and we are able to de-fetishize the machinations that appear on the surface of society and their real relationship to the production of wealth and the circulation of that wealth throughout all the competing capitalist interests and the various branches of capital\, and the different strata of the proletariat —prices\, wages\, interests\, rents\, dividends\, rates of profit\, fictitious capital—while revealing the necessity of tendential contradictions that result in episodic crisis of the system leading to periodic booms and busts! \nJoin us as we journey through this movement from the imaginary concrete to the abstract concrete to the real concrete. Come and challenge your way of thinking and understanding the world as it appears to you and begin to identify some of what needs to be overcome and done to bring about a better world. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than two years. We are a group of workers\, students\, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nAdmissions are sliding scale. No one is ever excluded for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-2/2019-06-15/
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/CapitalVol2_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190613T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190613T213000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190320T140344Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190419T050329Z
UID:10006036-1560454200-1560461400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:A Spring Fever of World Literature
DESCRIPTION:A Spring Fever of World Literature\n“The progression from a critical reading of literature to an expansive conception of politics proved not only increasingly persuasive intellectually\, but also compelling.” – Stuart Hall\, Familiar Stranger\nLooking at the last century through the lens of literature (and what it tell us about the present moment and those moments that are soon to come). \nG. by John Berger (UK)\nThe Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville (UK)\nThe God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (India)\nGraceLand by Chris Abani (Nigeria) \n“Only in fiction can we share another person’s specific experiences. Outside fiction we have to generalize.” — John Berger\, The Success and Failure of Picasso \n“…when I write my novels\, I’m not writing them to make political points. I’m writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism\, and what I want to do is communicate that. But\, because I come at this with a political perspective\, the world that I’m creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. […] I’m trying to say I’ve invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that too\, that’s fantastic. But if not\, isn’t this a cool monster?” — China Miéville \n“It didn’t matter that the story had begun\, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings.”— Arundhati Roy\, The God of Small Things \nG.\nBerger sets the story of G. against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898\, the Boer War\, and the first flight across the Alps\, making G. a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in history’s private moments. \nGiovanni – G – the product of an Italian merchant’s adulterous fling is sent to cousins on a farm in England\, where a piano-playing governess awakens the lust that proves the keynote in a series of fragmented episodes set during the years before the first world war – a prospect G relishes on account of all the women it will widow. \nThe Last Days of New Paris\nChina Miéville\n1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille\, American engineer—and occult disciple—Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group\, including Surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats\, exiled revolutionaries\, and avant-garde artists\, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares\, changing the war and the world forever. \n“So there I am\, wondering what to do\, and I see you\, and I see what you’re carrying. And that is why I came running after you. Because I do not believe in coincidence.”  \n1950. A lone Surrealist fighter\, Thibaut\, walks a new\, hallucinogenic Paris\, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict\, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts—and by the forces of Hell. To escape the city\, he must join forces with Sam\, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins\, and make common cause with a powerful\, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse. \nThe God of Small Things\nArundathi Roy\n“It didn’t matter that the story had begun\, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings.” \nIn addition to commentary on Indian history and politics\, Roy evaluates the Indian post-colonial complex\, or the cultural attitudes of many Indians toward their former British rulers. After Ammu calls her father a “[shit]-wiper” in Hindi for his blind devotion to the British\, Chacko explains to the twins Rahel and Estha\, that they come from a family of Anglophiles\, or lovers of British culture\, “trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps.” He goes on to say that they despise themselves because of this. Nearly all of the relationships in the novel are somehow colored by cultural and class tension. \nGraceLand\nChris Abani\nGraceLand is a 2004 novel by Chris Abani\, which tells the story of a teenager named Elvis\, who is trying to get out of the ghettos of Lagos\, Nigeria. Chris Abani depicts the poverty and violence in Lagos and how it affects the everyday lives of Elvis and his family. Having emigrated from Nigeria himself as a result of the Biafran War\, Abani’s novel touches on many issues relevant to corruption\, poverty\, and violence within the country. Elvis’s story also touches on issues related to globalization\, and how Nigeria’s impoverished communities are affected by this phenomenon. The main focus of this story is on Elvis and how he survives in the often harsh environment that is Nigeria’s largest city; Elvis himself is a complex and sympathetic character who clearly cares for his family despite a turbulent upbringing. However\, this is complicated by the numerous illegal and morally questionable jobs he takes part in with his friend Redemption. \n “The rain had cleared the oppressive heat that had already dropped like a blanket over Lagos; but the smell of garbage from refuse dumps\, unflushed toilets and stale bodies was still overwhelming. Elvis turned from the window\, dropping the threadbare curtain. Today was his sixteenth birthday\, and as with all the others\, it would pass uncelebrated. It had been that way since his mother died eight years before. He used to think that celebrating his birthday was too painful for his father\, a constant reminder of his loss. But Elvis had since come to the conclusion that his father was simply self-centered. The least I should do is get some more sleep\, he thought\, sitting on the bed. But the sun stabbed through the thin fabric\, bathing the room in sterile light. The radio played Bob Marley….”
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/a-spring-fever-of-world-literature/2019-06-13/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Spring19Books_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190613T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190613T193000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190520T013726Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190623T044549Z
UID:10006615-1560448800-1560454200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital Crisis: 2008 Global Slump
DESCRIPTION:A 7 Session Class\nJointly led by Ecosocialism Study Group and the Capital Studies Group\nIn the first paragraph of the Introduction to his book\, The Global Slump\, David McNally wrote as follows: “We find it difficult to view our current moment as profoundly historical. Yet\, the present is invariably saturated with elements of the future\, with possibilities that have not yet come to fruition\, and may not do so—as the road to the future is always contested. That is why\, if we wish to make history\, we ‘must be able to comprehend the present as a becoming.’ [Georg Lukács\, History and Class Consciousness]. One would think that it should be easier to see things this way during moments of profound crisis in our social and economic system\, like that which broke out in 2008. As the tectonic plates of the global economy shifted\, financial shocks rocked the world’s banks\, leveling many of them. Panic gripped money markets\, stocks plunged\, factories shut down. Tens of millions of people were thrown out of work; millions lost their homes. An extraordinary uncertainty shook the world’s ruling class. The mood of the moment was captured in the confession by senior writers with the Financial Times that\, “The world of the past three decades is gone. Within a year or so\, however\, candid statements like this disappeared from the mainstream press. The ruling class regrouped and regained its arrogance…. \n \nA decade has passed but the crisis is not over. Indeed we might even say that we are only beginning to see the effects of this greatest crisis of capitalism: the rise of anti neo-liberal populism of the right and left in Trump and Sanders\, Brexit\, extreme austerity\, all the labor and social movements such as the teachers movement in the US and the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) in France and the deepening crisis in the Middle East. The ruling class has regrouped and regained its arrogance\, continuing their political and economic assault imposing ever deeper social wage cuts while ideologically taking aim at hard won democratic and civil rights. It remains important for us to understand the underlying causes within this late stage of capitalist development that led to the 2008 crisis so that we of the working classes develop our capacity to effectively take on the political\, ideological and economic challenges we are facing now and in the struggles ahead for a better life for all. \nAll of this to say that to become more effective it is reasonable to turn to a social theory that see crises as an inherent aspect of the capitalist mode of production\, that is Marxist theory. McNally’s Global Slump is an impressive attempt to provide such a Marxist understanding for the crisis and a good example to see the explanatory power of Marx’s social theory as laid out in the three volumes of Capital. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than two years. We are a group of workers\, students\, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. We begin a close reading Volume 2 on May 11. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nTHE ECOSOCIALISM STUDY GROUP with FRED MURPHY and STEVE KNIGHT who 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. \nListed fees are sliding scale. No one is turned away for inability to pay. \nParticipants outside the New York City area or those with mobility challenges are welcome to join using Zoom teleconferencing for a $7 per session teleconference fee. Send a request to AnotherWorldNYC@gmail.org. \n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/5578/2019-06-13/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/CapCrisisClass_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190610T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190610T210000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190423T040443Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190610T142846Z
UID:10006043-1560193200-1560200400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Racial Boundaries: The Origin and Consequences of the Color Line in the USA
DESCRIPTION:4-week reading and discussion group\nThe Revolutions Study Group\nThis group is for for anyone who wants to better understand why White and Black retain their significance in U.S. society for so many years after the abolition of slavery. W.E.B. DuBois’ groundbreaking Black Reconstruction\, and the recent PBS documentary on the same subject are both useful for these discussions. However\, we are now taking on two readings which are keys to unlocking the power of the color line in shaping the political economy our world and in shaping the lives of African Americans. Theodore Allen’s pamphlet “Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race\,” from 1975\, explores why and how skin color became the basis of a rigid caste system in the U.S. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk is his first important book\, takes readers into the world of racial caste as uniquely experienced by African Americans. \nOur four week reading sources will be: Theodore W. Allen\, “Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race\,” first published 1975\, 34 pages\, available as printed pamphlet and a downloadable PDF (http://readsettlers.org/settlers-data/ii/02_THEODOREWALLEN_ClassStruggleAndTheOriginsOfSlavery_Somerville1976_p34.pdf)\, and W.E.B Du Bois\, The Souls of Black Folk\, 1903\, available in all formats including free e-book\, 189 pages\, in the 1989 Bantam paperback\, available in libraries \nAdmission is sliding scale. No one is turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/racial-boundaries-the-origin-and-consequences-of-the-color-line-in-the-usa/2019-06-10/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Rex_theatre.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190608T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190608T133000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190318T020507Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190517T062325Z
UID:10006020-1559991600-1560000600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 2
DESCRIPTION:The Process of Circulation of Capital\nEdited by Frederick Engels\n \nVolume I of Capital is just the beginning of unraveling the underlying laws of capitalist development. After solving the form that the production of wealth takes within a society where generalized commodity production prevails under the domination of capital —including the commodification of the capacities of the human subject and materials and powers of nature\, the two sources of wealth\, Marx takes on the next big question. How the hell can reproduction of society as a whole take place when there is no conscious social planning that insures that all needs are met and in the necessary proportions such that a continuous reproduction of the conditions of life can take place and reproduce the capitalist relations of production? By looking at capitalist social reproduction from this viewpoint\, in Volume II we discover the solution to this problem while new internal contradictions and instabilities at a societal level inherent to this mode of production are explained. The ground is then laid in combining the laws of motion peculiar to capitalism uncovered in the first two Volumes—The Process of Capitalist Production and The Process of the Circulation of Capital—to the analysis of the third Volume\, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Here\, the circle is completed and we are able to de-fetishize the machinations that appear on the surface of society and their real relationship to the production of wealth and the circulation of that wealth throughout all the competing capitalist interests and the various branches of capital\, and the different strata of the proletariat —prices\, wages\, interests\, rents\, dividends\, rates of profit\, fictitious capital—while revealing the necessity of tendential contradictions that result in episodic crisis of the system leading to periodic booms and busts! \nJoin us as we journey through this movement from the imaginary concrete to the abstract concrete to the real concrete. Come and challenge your way of thinking and understanding the world as it appears to you and begin to identify some of what needs to be overcome and done to bring about a better world. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than two years. We are a group of workers\, students\, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nAdmissions are sliding scale. No one is ever excluded for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-2/2019-06-08/
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/CapitalVol2_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190606T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190606T213000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190320T140344Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190419T050329Z
UID:10006035-1559849400-1559856600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:A Spring Fever of World Literature
DESCRIPTION:A Spring Fever of World Literature\n“The progression from a critical reading of literature to an expansive conception of politics proved not only increasingly persuasive intellectually\, but also compelling.” – Stuart Hall\, Familiar Stranger\nLooking at the last century through the lens of literature (and what it tell us about the present moment and those moments that are soon to come). \nG. by John Berger (UK)\nThe Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville (UK)\nThe God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (India)\nGraceLand by Chris Abani (Nigeria) \n“Only in fiction can we share another person’s specific experiences. Outside fiction we have to generalize.” — John Berger\, The Success and Failure of Picasso \n“…when I write my novels\, I’m not writing them to make political points. I’m writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism\, and what I want to do is communicate that. But\, because I come at this with a political perspective\, the world that I’m creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. […] I’m trying to say I’ve invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that too\, that’s fantastic. But if not\, isn’t this a cool monster?” — China Miéville \n“It didn’t matter that the story had begun\, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings.”— Arundhati Roy\, The God of Small Things \nG.\nBerger sets the story of G. against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898\, the Boer War\, and the first flight across the Alps\, making G. a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in history’s private moments. \nGiovanni – G – the product of an Italian merchant’s adulterous fling is sent to cousins on a farm in England\, where a piano-playing governess awakens the lust that proves the keynote in a series of fragmented episodes set during the years before the first world war – a prospect G relishes on account of all the women it will widow. \nThe Last Days of New Paris\nChina Miéville\n1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille\, American engineer—and occult disciple—Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group\, including Surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats\, exiled revolutionaries\, and avant-garde artists\, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares\, changing the war and the world forever. \n“So there I am\, wondering what to do\, and I see you\, and I see what you’re carrying. And that is why I came running after you. Because I do not believe in coincidence.”  \n1950. A lone Surrealist fighter\, Thibaut\, walks a new\, hallucinogenic Paris\, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict\, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts—and by the forces of Hell. To escape the city\, he must join forces with Sam\, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins\, and make common cause with a powerful\, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse. \nThe God of Small Things\nArundathi Roy\n“It didn’t matter that the story had begun\, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings.” \nIn addition to commentary on Indian history and politics\, Roy evaluates the Indian post-colonial complex\, or the cultural attitudes of many Indians toward their former British rulers. After Ammu calls her father a “[shit]-wiper” in Hindi for his blind devotion to the British\, Chacko explains to the twins Rahel and Estha\, that they come from a family of Anglophiles\, or lovers of British culture\, “trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps.” He goes on to say that they despise themselves because of this. Nearly all of the relationships in the novel are somehow colored by cultural and class tension. \nGraceLand\nChris Abani\nGraceLand is a 2004 novel by Chris Abani\, which tells the story of a teenager named Elvis\, who is trying to get out of the ghettos of Lagos\, Nigeria. Chris Abani depicts the poverty and violence in Lagos and how it affects the everyday lives of Elvis and his family. Having emigrated from Nigeria himself as a result of the Biafran War\, Abani’s novel touches on many issues relevant to corruption\, poverty\, and violence within the country. Elvis’s story also touches on issues related to globalization\, and how Nigeria’s impoverished communities are affected by this phenomenon. The main focus of this story is on Elvis and how he survives in the often harsh environment that is Nigeria’s largest city; Elvis himself is a complex and sympathetic character who clearly cares for his family despite a turbulent upbringing. However\, this is complicated by the numerous illegal and morally questionable jobs he takes part in with his friend Redemption. \n “The rain had cleared the oppressive heat that had already dropped like a blanket over Lagos; but the smell of garbage from refuse dumps\, unflushed toilets and stale bodies was still overwhelming. Elvis turned from the window\, dropping the threadbare curtain. Today was his sixteenth birthday\, and as with all the others\, it would pass uncelebrated. It had been that way since his mother died eight years before. He used to think that celebrating his birthday was too painful for his father\, a constant reminder of his loss. But Elvis had since come to the conclusion that his father was simply self-centered. The least I should do is get some more sleep\, he thought\, sitting on the bed. But the sun stabbed through the thin fabric\, bathing the room in sterile light. The radio played Bob Marley….”
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/a-spring-fever-of-world-literature/2019-06-06/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Spring19Books_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190603T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190603T210000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190423T040443Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190610T142846Z
UID:10006042-1559588400-1559595600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Racial Boundaries: The Origin and Consequences of the Color Line in the USA
DESCRIPTION:4-week reading and discussion group\nThe Revolutions Study Group\nThis group is for for anyone who wants to better understand why White and Black retain their significance in U.S. society for so many years after the abolition of slavery. W.E.B. DuBois’ groundbreaking Black Reconstruction\, and the recent PBS documentary on the same subject are both useful for these discussions. However\, we are now taking on two readings which are keys to unlocking the power of the color line in shaping the political economy our world and in shaping the lives of African Americans. Theodore Allen’s pamphlet “Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race\,” from 1975\, explores why and how skin color became the basis of a rigid caste system in the U.S. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk is his first important book\, takes readers into the world of racial caste as uniquely experienced by African Americans. \nOur four week reading sources will be: Theodore W. Allen\, “Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race\,” first published 1975\, 34 pages\, available as printed pamphlet and a downloadable PDF (http://readsettlers.org/settlers-data/ii/02_THEODOREWALLEN_ClassStruggleAndTheOriginsOfSlavery_Somerville1976_p34.pdf)\, and W.E.B Du Bois\, The Souls of Black Folk\, 1903\, available in all formats including free e-book\, 189 pages\, in the 1989 Bantam paperback\, available in libraries \nAdmission is sliding scale. No one is turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/racial-boundaries-the-origin-and-consequences-of-the-color-line-in-the-usa/2019-06-03/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Rex_theatre.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190601T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190601T133000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190318T020507Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190517T062325Z
UID:10006019-1559386800-1559395800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 2
DESCRIPTION:The Process of Circulation of Capital\nEdited by Frederick Engels\n \nVolume I of Capital is just the beginning of unraveling the underlying laws of capitalist development. After solving the form that the production of wealth takes within a society where generalized commodity production prevails under the domination of capital —including the commodification of the capacities of the human subject and materials and powers of nature\, the two sources of wealth\, Marx takes on the next big question. How the hell can reproduction of society as a whole take place when there is no conscious social planning that insures that all needs are met and in the necessary proportions such that a continuous reproduction of the conditions of life can take place and reproduce the capitalist relations of production? By looking at capitalist social reproduction from this viewpoint\, in Volume II we discover the solution to this problem while new internal contradictions and instabilities at a societal level inherent to this mode of production are explained. The ground is then laid in combining the laws of motion peculiar to capitalism uncovered in the first two Volumes—The Process of Capitalist Production and The Process of the Circulation of Capital—to the analysis of the third Volume\, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Here\, the circle is completed and we are able to de-fetishize the machinations that appear on the surface of society and their real relationship to the production of wealth and the circulation of that wealth throughout all the competing capitalist interests and the various branches of capital\, and the different strata of the proletariat —prices\, wages\, interests\, rents\, dividends\, rates of profit\, fictitious capital—while revealing the necessity of tendential contradictions that result in episodic crisis of the system leading to periodic booms and busts! \nJoin us as we journey through this movement from the imaginary concrete to the abstract concrete to the real concrete. Come and challenge your way of thinking and understanding the world as it appears to you and begin to identify some of what needs to be overcome and done to bring about a better world. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than two years. We are a group of workers\, students\, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nAdmissions are sliding scale. No one is ever excluded for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-2/2019-06-01/
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/2019/03/CapitalVol2_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190531T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190531T210000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190429T042215Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190429T042348Z
UID:10006046-1559327400-1559336400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Final Friday Film: American Dream by Barbara Kopple
DESCRIPTION:Directed by Barbara Kopple\nUSA\, 1990\, 100 min \n In 1984 the Hormel meat-packing company offered the union workers in Austin\, Minnesota a new contract\, cutting their wages from $10.69 per hour to $8.25 per hour—benefits would be cut by 30 percent. The workers were not filled with joy. The company had just declared an annual profit of $29 million\, the cuts were inspired by owners wanting to maximize profits beyond that on the backs and cuts in health and life spans of the workers and their families. \nAmerican Dream chronicles the six-month strike that followed during 1985 and 1986 at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin\, Minnesota. The local union\, P-9 of the Food and Commercial Workers\, overwhelmingly rejected a contract offer with a $2/hour wage cut. Following this the meat workers strike and hire a New York consultant to manage a national media campaign against Hormel. Despite support from P-9’s rank and file\, FCWU’s international disagrees with the strategy. In addition to union-company tension\, there’s union-union in-fighting. Hormel holds firm; scabs\, replacement workers\, brothers on opposite sides\, a union coup d’état\, and a new contract materialize. The film asks\, was it worth it\, or was the strike a long-term disaster for organized labor? \nIn many ways\, the Hormel plant in bucolic Minnesota seemed like the least likely site for a labor-management inferno. The company’s founders had been of a paternalistic bent\, and Austin’s hourly wage of $10.69 was the industry standard. But in 1984\, despite profits of $29 million\, Hormel announced plans to cut that wage by 23%. “What are we going to have to give up\,” one worker worried\, “when they show a loss for the quarter?”—Kenneth Turan\, Los Angeles Times\, March 1992 \nBarbara Kopple\, who had previously covered an extended miner’s strike in the acclaimed 1976 documentary Harlan County\, USA\, focuses on the personalities and emotions behind the strike\, creating a highly charged portrait of labor that is sympathetic to the workers’ distress without ignoring the strike’s greater ambiguities. \n  \nTicket prices are sliding scale. No one is turned away for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/final-friday-film-american-dream-by-barbara-kopple/
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/2019/04/AmericanDreamSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190530T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190530T213000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190320T140344Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190419T050329Z
UID:10006034-1559244600-1559251800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:A Spring Fever of World Literature
DESCRIPTION:A Spring Fever of World Literature\n“The progression from a critical reading of literature to an expansive conception of politics proved not only increasingly persuasive intellectually\, but also compelling.” – Stuart Hall\, Familiar Stranger\nLooking at the last century through the lens of literature (and what it tell us about the present moment and those moments that are soon to come). \nG. by John Berger (UK)\nThe Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville (UK)\nThe God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (India)\nGraceLand by Chris Abani (Nigeria) \n“Only in fiction can we share another person’s specific experiences. Outside fiction we have to generalize.” — John Berger\, The Success and Failure of Picasso \n“…when I write my novels\, I’m not writing them to make political points. I’m writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism\, and what I want to do is communicate that. But\, because I come at this with a political perspective\, the world that I’m creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. […] I’m trying to say I’ve invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that too\, that’s fantastic. But if not\, isn’t this a cool monster?” — China Miéville \n“It didn’t matter that the story had begun\, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings.”— Arundhati Roy\, The God of Small Things \nG.\nBerger sets the story of G. against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898\, the Boer War\, and the first flight across the Alps\, making G. a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in history’s private moments. \nGiovanni – G – the product of an Italian merchant’s adulterous fling is sent to cousins on a farm in England\, where a piano-playing governess awakens the lust that proves the keynote in a series of fragmented episodes set during the years before the first world war – a prospect G relishes on account of all the women it will widow. \nThe Last Days of New Paris\nChina Miéville\n1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille\, American engineer—and occult disciple—Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group\, including Surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats\, exiled revolutionaries\, and avant-garde artists\, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares\, changing the war and the world forever. \n“So there I am\, wondering what to do\, and I see you\, and I see what you’re carrying. And that is why I came running after you. Because I do not believe in coincidence.”  \n1950. A lone Surrealist fighter\, Thibaut\, walks a new\, hallucinogenic Paris\, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict\, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts—and by the forces of Hell. To escape the city\, he must join forces with Sam\, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins\, and make common cause with a powerful\, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse. \nThe God of Small Things\nArundathi Roy\n“It didn’t matter that the story had begun\, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings.” \nIn addition to commentary on Indian history and politics\, Roy evaluates the Indian post-colonial complex\, or the cultural attitudes of many Indians toward their former British rulers. After Ammu calls her father a “[shit]-wiper” in Hindi for his blind devotion to the British\, Chacko explains to the twins Rahel and Estha\, that they come from a family of Anglophiles\, or lovers of British culture\, “trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps.” He goes on to say that they despise themselves because of this. Nearly all of the relationships in the novel are somehow colored by cultural and class tension. \nGraceLand\nChris Abani\nGraceLand is a 2004 novel by Chris Abani\, which tells the story of a teenager named Elvis\, who is trying to get out of the ghettos of Lagos\, Nigeria. Chris Abani depicts the poverty and violence in Lagos and how it affects the everyday lives of Elvis and his family. Having emigrated from Nigeria himself as a result of the Biafran War\, Abani’s novel touches on many issues relevant to corruption\, poverty\, and violence within the country. Elvis’s story also touches on issues related to globalization\, and how Nigeria’s impoverished communities are affected by this phenomenon. The main focus of this story is on Elvis and how he survives in the often harsh environment that is Nigeria’s largest city; Elvis himself is a complex and sympathetic character who clearly cares for his family despite a turbulent upbringing. However\, this is complicated by the numerous illegal and morally questionable jobs he takes part in with his friend Redemption. \n “The rain had cleared the oppressive heat that had already dropped like a blanket over Lagos; but the smell of garbage from refuse dumps\, unflushed toilets and stale bodies was still overwhelming. Elvis turned from the window\, dropping the threadbare curtain. Today was his sixteenth birthday\, and as with all the others\, it would pass uncelebrated. It had been that way since his mother died eight years before. He used to think that celebrating his birthday was too painful for his father\, a constant reminder of his loss. But Elvis had since come to the conclusion that his father was simply self-centered. The least I should do is get some more sleep\, he thought\, sitting on the bed. But the sun stabbed through the thin fabric\, bathing the room in sterile light. The radio played Bob Marley….”
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/a-spring-fever-of-world-literature/2019-05-30/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Spring19Books_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190525T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190525T133000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190318T020507Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190517T062325Z
UID:10006018-1558782000-1558791000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 2
DESCRIPTION:The Process of Circulation of Capital\nEdited by Frederick Engels\n \nVolume I of Capital is just the beginning of unraveling the underlying laws of capitalist development. After solving the form that the production of wealth takes within a society where generalized commodity production prevails under the domination of capital —including the commodification of the capacities of the human subject and materials and powers of nature\, the two sources of wealth\, Marx takes on the next big question. How the hell can reproduction of society as a whole take place when there is no conscious social planning that insures that all needs are met and in the necessary proportions such that a continuous reproduction of the conditions of life can take place and reproduce the capitalist relations of production? By looking at capitalist social reproduction from this viewpoint\, in Volume II we discover the solution to this problem while new internal contradictions and instabilities at a societal level inherent to this mode of production are explained. The ground is then laid in combining the laws of motion peculiar to capitalism uncovered in the first two Volumes—The Process of Capitalist Production and The Process of the Circulation of Capital—to the analysis of the third Volume\, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Here\, the circle is completed and we are able to de-fetishize the machinations that appear on the surface of society and their real relationship to the production of wealth and the circulation of that wealth throughout all the competing capitalist interests and the various branches of capital\, and the different strata of the proletariat —prices\, wages\, interests\, rents\, dividends\, rates of profit\, fictitious capital—while revealing the necessity of tendential contradictions that result in episodic crisis of the system leading to periodic booms and busts! \nJoin us as we journey through this movement from the imaginary concrete to the abstract concrete to the real concrete. Come and challenge your way of thinking and understanding the world as it appears to you and begin to identify some of what needs to be overcome and done to bring about a better world. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than two years. We are a group of workers\, students\, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nAdmissions are sliding scale. No one is ever excluded for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-2/2019-05-25/
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/2019/03/CapitalVol2_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190523T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190523T213000
DTSTAMP:20260418T105856
CREATED:20190320T140344Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190419T050329Z
UID:10006033-1558639800-1558647000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:A Spring Fever of World Literature
DESCRIPTION:A Spring Fever of World Literature\n“The progression from a critical reading of literature to an expansive conception of politics proved not only increasingly persuasive intellectually\, but also compelling.” – Stuart Hall\, Familiar Stranger\nLooking at the last century through the lens of literature (and what it tell us about the present moment and those moments that are soon to come). \nG. by John Berger (UK)\nThe Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville (UK)\nThe God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (India)\nGraceLand by Chris Abani (Nigeria) \n“Only in fiction can we share another person’s specific experiences. Outside fiction we have to generalize.” — John Berger\, The Success and Failure of Picasso \n“…when I write my novels\, I’m not writing them to make political points. I’m writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism\, and what I want to do is communicate that. But\, because I come at this with a political perspective\, the world that I’m creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. […] I’m trying to say I’ve invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that too\, that’s fantastic. But if not\, isn’t this a cool monster?” — China Miéville \n“It didn’t matter that the story had begun\, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings.”— Arundhati Roy\, The God of Small Things \nG.\nBerger sets the story of G. against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898\, the Boer War\, and the first flight across the Alps\, making G. a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in history’s private moments. \nGiovanni – G – the product of an Italian merchant’s adulterous fling is sent to cousins on a farm in England\, where a piano-playing governess awakens the lust that proves the keynote in a series of fragmented episodes set during the years before the first world war – a prospect G relishes on account of all the women it will widow. \nThe Last Days of New Paris\nChina Miéville\n1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille\, American engineer—and occult disciple—Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group\, including Surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats\, exiled revolutionaries\, and avant-garde artists\, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares\, changing the war and the world forever. \n“So there I am\, wondering what to do\, and I see you\, and I see what you’re carrying. And that is why I came running after you. Because I do not believe in coincidence.”  \n1950. A lone Surrealist fighter\, Thibaut\, walks a new\, hallucinogenic Paris\, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict\, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts—and by the forces of Hell. To escape the city\, he must join forces with Sam\, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins\, and make common cause with a powerful\, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse. \nThe God of Small Things\nArundathi Roy\n“It didn’t matter that the story had begun\, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings.” \nIn addition to commentary on Indian history and politics\, Roy evaluates the Indian post-colonial complex\, or the cultural attitudes of many Indians toward their former British rulers. After Ammu calls her father a “[shit]-wiper” in Hindi for his blind devotion to the British\, Chacko explains to the twins Rahel and Estha\, that they come from a family of Anglophiles\, or lovers of British culture\, “trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps.” He goes on to say that they despise themselves because of this. Nearly all of the relationships in the novel are somehow colored by cultural and class tension. \nGraceLand\nChris Abani\nGraceLand is a 2004 novel by Chris Abani\, which tells the story of a teenager named Elvis\, who is trying to get out of the ghettos of Lagos\, Nigeria. Chris Abani depicts the poverty and violence in Lagos and how it affects the everyday lives of Elvis and his family. Having emigrated from Nigeria himself as a result of the Biafran War\, Abani’s novel touches on many issues relevant to corruption\, poverty\, and violence within the country. Elvis’s story also touches on issues related to globalization\, and how Nigeria’s impoverished communities are affected by this phenomenon. The main focus of this story is on Elvis and how he survives in the often harsh environment that is Nigeria’s largest city; Elvis himself is a complex and sympathetic character who clearly cares for his family despite a turbulent upbringing. However\, this is complicated by the numerous illegal and morally questionable jobs he takes part in with his friend Redemption. \n “The rain had cleared the oppressive heat that had already dropped like a blanket over Lagos; but the smell of garbage from refuse dumps\, unflushed toilets and stale bodies was still overwhelming. Elvis turned from the window\, dropping the threadbare curtain. Today was his sixteenth birthday\, and as with all the others\, it would pass uncelebrated. It had been that way since his mother died eight years before. He used to think that celebrating his birthday was too painful for his father\, a constant reminder of his loss. But Elvis had since come to the conclusion that his father was simply self-centered. The least I should do is get some more sleep\, he thought\, sitting on the bed. But the sun stabbed through the thin fabric\, bathing the room in sterile light. The radio played Bob Marley….”
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/a-spring-fever-of-world-literature/2019-05-23/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
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