Rubbish. Waste. Trash. Whatever term you choose to describe the things we throw away, the connotations are the same; of something dirty, useless and incontrovertibly 'bad'. But does such a dismissive rendering mask a more nuanced reality? In RUBBISH BELONGS TO THE POOR Patrick O'Hare journeys to the heart of Uruguay’s waste disposal system in order to reconceptualize rubbish as a 21st century commons, at risk of enclosure.

In 1972, after over 30 years of activism in the labor and communist movements, Allen shared the following strategic insight with a new generation of revolutionaries: “The most vulnerable point at which a decisive blow can be struck against bourgeois rule in the United States is white supremacy.  White supremacy is both the keystone (in the arch) and the Achilles heel of U.S. bourgeois democracy, the historic form of bourgeois rule in the US.  It is a vulnerable point because it is a historically developed and unresolvable internal contradiction of US bourgeois democracy.  It is the decisive vulnerable point because – as history has repeatedly proved – the basic class contradictions in bourgeois democracy can never fully mature until and unless the anti-proletarian nature of white supremacy has been completely established in the minds of the proletarian masses.”
Allen spent the next 20 years researching the primary sources and writing his magnum opus. 

The main reading for these sessions will be Alex Blanchette’s PORKOPOLIS: AMERICAN ANIMALITY, STANDARDIZED LIFE, AND THE FACTORY FARM, with supplemental texts on nonhuman animal work in the history of capitalism, Marxism and animal liberation, biological reproduction in animal agriculture, and related topics.

“Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.” – Neil Gaiman

The Marxist Education Project Lit reading group revisits some literary classics along with contemporary novels that are prescient and compelling –challenging us to think about our understanding of history and how we will confront the present moment.

“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

The Covid crisis drove home both the absurdity of linking healthcare to employment and the importance of treating healthcare as a decommodified public good. But the politics of the emerging post pandemic period are not conducive to big, transformative initiatives like Medicare for All.