In The Invention of the White Race Volumes I & II, Theodore W. Allen offers a historical materialist analysis of racial slavery; a system put in place in the decades following the second phase of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 when an army of European and African chattel bond laborers burnt Jamestown to the ground and temporarily drove Governor Berkeley into exile across the Chesapeake Bay. In a conscious response to labor solidarity the plantation bourgeoisie enacted a series of laws and practices in the late 17th and early 18th century which first put in place the system of white racial privileges which enabled the imposition of racial slavery and “white” male supremacy.

Taking to the streets by the millions and withstanding brutal police assaults, the working people of Chile have beaten back austerity measures and forced the right-wing Piñera regime to accede to a new constitution to replace the restrictive one imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship.

In review of Volumes One and Two of Capital and in preparation for our study of Volume 3 we will have a 4 week intersession reading from Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho’s Karl Marx’s Capital. These sessions are suggested as a good review for those who would like to join in for the coming sessions of our close reading of Volume 3 which will begin on January 18. Of course, anyone interested in a review of Capital and/or would simply like to read and discuss the Fine and Saad-Filho book are encouraged to attend as well.

Join 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. In Volume 2 we further our ability 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!