Our speakers will trace the development of the Kurdish women’s movement and discuss the growth of Rojava’s cooperative economy, highlighting women’s autonomous economic organizing.

Emre Sahin is a participant and researcher of social movements, particularly the Kurdish movement, and a sociologist at Binghamton University. 
Meghan Bodette is a researcher focused on Turkey, Syria and Kurdish issues.

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. 

“We are living in a time of unprecedented historical crisis, which affects all forms of the capital system, not just capitalism. It is easy to understand, then, that the only thing that could produce a viable solution to the contradictions that we have to face would be a radical socialist alternative to capital’s mode of social metabolic control.”   István Mészáros

The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations

A focus on Ecology with John Bellamy Foster and a presentation on Communism with Marcello Musto.
“Scornful neglect and intemperate hostility, haughty dismissal and marginal course adoption, selective co-optation and selective bowdlerization: these are some of the strategies of establishment intellectuals over the years in response to the challenger of the thinker born 204 years ago in Trier. Yet, here we are near the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, and it sometimes seems that Karl Marx’s ideas have never been as topical, or as commanding of respect and interest, as they are today.” —Marcello Musto, from the Preface, The Marx Revival