Across the world, grassroots networks of local communities are working to realize their visions of an alternative revolutionary response to planetary destruction, often pitted against the new megaprojects promoted by greenwashed alternative energy infrastructures and the neocolonialist, technocratic policies that are the forerunners of the Green New Deal.

Gelderloos interviews food sovereignty activists in Venezuela, Indigenous communities reforesting their lands in Brazil and anarchists fighting biofuel plantations in Indonesia, looking at the battles that have cancelled airports, stopped pipelines, and helped the most marginalized to fight borders and environmental racism, to transform their cities, to win a dignified survival.

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.

James Muldoon shows how grassroots communities and transnational social movements can take back control from Big Tech. He reframes the technology debate and proposes a host of new ideas from the local to the international for how we can reclaim the emancipatory possibilities of digital platforms. Drawing on sources from forgotten histories to contemporary prototypes, he proposes an alternative system and charts a roadmap for how we can get there.