This 10-week session has four sessions remaining which feature a close reading of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. We will look to connect cultures and their human rights struggles. We will also explore those who influenced Gramsci, particularly Marx, but also Machiavelli and Croce. This seminar is accessible to people at all levels of familiarity with Gramsci’s work, including those just beginning their studies of Gramsci. Join at any time.

We will read and discuss three books: The Corona Crash (Verso), by Grace Blakeley, details how the pandemic is ushering in a new era in which the corporate economy collapses into the arms of the state, and behemoths like Amazon and Netflix balloon in profit and power. White Skin, Black Fuel (Verso), by Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, takes a comprehensive look at how extreme-right currents are responding to ecological crises with with authoritarian and xenophobic proposals while remaining ardent supporters of fossil capital – black fuels to support white supremacy. And A People’s Green New Deal (Pluto), by Max Ajl, engages critically with various Green New Deal proposals and sketches out a radical alternative committed to degrowth, anti-imperialism and agro-ecology.

In the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century; the black would be put back; the strikes of white workers would not be tolerated; the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression – a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth.” —Howard Zinn

This is a seminar about New York City and its people. It is not a study of architectural styles and objects, - although the physical stuff of cities does play a role—but it is a course about the experience of the way in which modernity builds and destroys cities.

“Delfanti has done here what more critics of Amazon should — listen carefully to the people whose work makes the corporation function. Those of us fighting for a better future than Amazon's dystopia have much to learn from this book”.  — Dania Rajendra, Inaugural Director, Athena Coalition

Theodore W. Allen spent 30 years researching the primary sources and writing The Invention of the White Race (2 volumes), which provides a historical materialist analysis of racial oppression and the white identity which emerged as a principal form of social control over rebellious laboring class of European and Africans in the pattern setting colonies of Virginia and Maryland in the late 17th early 18th century.

Jeffrey B Perry describes Harrison “as the most class conscious of the race radicals and the most race conscious of the class radicals in those years” adding that he is “a key link in the two great trends of the Civil Rights/Black Liberation struggle—the labor and civil rights trend associated associated with A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the race and nationalist trend associated with Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X.”

“Forces of production and social relations - two different sides of the development of the social individual - appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high...” —Karl Marx, The Grundrisse

“Perhaps Gramsci’s political science is … a “necessary expression of his time, the short twentieth century, an era now ended, the ae of three words divided between Fordist capitalism, bureaucratic communism and the post-colonial settlements of decolonization. If this is true, is there a future for Gramsci’s legacy?” —Michael Denning