Week of Events
The Political Writings of Marx and Engels: Social Classes, Revolution, and Human Freedom
The Political Writings of Marx and Engels: Social Classes, Revolution, and Human Freedom
This group will read and discuss original texts by Marx and Engels about their theory of class struggles as the motive force of human social evolution and the modern working class as the political antagonist of the capitalist system - the class that has the power, by abolishing itself, to usher in a society beyond class exploitation.
Woman, Life, Freedom: Iran through the Lens of Antonio Gramsci
Woman, Life, Freedom: Iran through the Lens of Antonio Gramsci
Juxtaposing documentary video footage with selected readings from Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, we will deepen our understanding of the current uprising among women and young people in Iran. Applying Gramsci's dual perspective on Individuality/Universality, Hegemony/Authority, Force/Consent, Terror/Legitimacy, Strategy/Tactic, Agitation/Propaganda, and State/Civil Society, we will examine spontaneous movements, subaltern groups, and the balance of domestic and international forces. Convened and facilitated by Piruz Alemi.
Staring Down the Apocalypse: Three Visions of Earth’s Future
Staring Down the Apocalypse: Three Visions of Earth’s Future
The Science and Visionary Fiction Reading Group will read three powerful explorations of human agency, individual and collective--three debut novels from three different time periods. Seventy years ago, in the midst of the Cold War, Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 classic Childhood's End starkly portrayed one path for humanity in addressing its social ills. Kim Stanley ... Read more
Invention of the White Race – Fall 2022
Invention of the White Race – Fall 2022
A reading and discussion group convened with Sean Ahern, on Theodore W. Allen's The Invention of the White Race. 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.
Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism
Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism
This study group is reading and discussing Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism.