This reading group is taking a close look at Engels' master work, to help understand how the formation of industrial capital and the industrial working class in the nineteenth century has led us to the current conjuncture in contemporary capitalism — characterized by growing inequality, increasing precariousness for nearly everyone except the capitalist elite, and incessant attacks on the most vulnerable — and explore its lessons for our revolutionary politics in the twenty-first century.

Sickened by the contamination of water, air, and the Earth itself, more and more people are coming to realize that it is capitalism that is, quite literally, killing us - and indeed, degrading the Earth’s very ability to support all forms of life.

The bee on wheels has laments on a stick
Wags weepy banners with gypsy ribbons ...
The tiny wheeled bee has the sky on a stick
Idly waves as she buzzes through the afternoon
Kicking the tears around like bean tins.
—fragment of poem by Jeff Nuttall

How do we develop a political organization capable of avoiding the same traps of the past? Are communist parties inevitably social democratic and bureaucratic? Can existing parties in the US be saved? In this panel, Marxist organizations come together to learn from the experience in India and elsewhere. This public event is both a workshop and a frank and sober discussion about the road ahead.

We will meet at the entrance to the Great Hall of Cooper Union and proceed to 77 St. Marks Place, where the offices of the Russian language newspaper Novy Mir, were housed in 1917. Here Trotsky and other future Bolshevik leaders worked daily. From there the tour will take a walk to the building of the Jewish Daily Forward.

...a Marxian version of Freudian free association—the chain of hidden links that leads us from the surface of everyday life and experience to the very sources of production itself. —Fredric Jameson