Final Friday Film: American Dream by Barbara Kopple

American Dream chronicles the six-month strike that followed during 1985 and 1986 at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota. In addition to union-company tension, there’s union-union in-fighting. Hormel holds firm; scabs, replacement workers, brothers on opposite sides, a union coup d’état, and a new contract materialize. Full neoliberal agenda focussed on small town America.

Capital, Volume 1, inter-session

This three-week session will focus on the General Laws of Capitalist Accumulation as we return from the winter holiday. By unraveling the commoditized forms of our interactions with nature and each other, it provides tools to understand capitalism’s astounding innovativeness and productivity, intertwined with growing inequality and misery, alienation, stunting of human potential, and ecological destruction all over the globe.

Pictures of a Gone City

This sweeping account of the Bay Area in the age of the tech boom covers many bases. It begins with the phenomenal concentration of IT in Greater Silicon Valley, the fabulous economic growth of the bay region and the unbelievable wealth piling up for the 1% and high incomes of Upper Classes—in contrast to the fate of the working class and people of color earning poverty wages and struggling to keep their heads above water.

No Blood for Oil!

In his book George Caffentzis shows how Marxism accounts for the peculiar role that the oil industry plays in contemporary capitalism as generator of ecological devastation, war and exploitation.

An Intro to Marxism—in Newark, New Jersey

With short readings, focused presentations, and discussions, we will look at the rise of industrial capitalism and nationalism, the general characteristics of capitalist political economy and class, and the state, imperialism and war, workers organizations and collective power, and, finally, political action and questions of reform or revolution.

Solidarity Without Borders

Borderlands Studies: These four essential themes of our times will be discussed: the diversity of new migrant political actors; solidarity and new alliances across borders; avoiding misplaced alliances; and spaces of resistance.