Join us for a discussion of Monicelli’s most political film. In addition to casting Marcello Mastrioanni, Monicelli cast the film with workers from the Turin area and shot on location in one of the area’s huge textile factories. “I wanted to show all of that. The truth about what happens in the working world.”
—Mario Monicelli, interviewed in 2006
Many of us have less time to study it because, as Marx predicted, we have to work longer hours— and often more than one job—in order to survive. Fortunately, even a basic familiarity with the key concepts of the first Volume of Capital offers many tools for understanding capitalism’s dynamics.
This reading group is taking a close look at Engels’ master work, to help understand how the formation of industrial capital and the industrial working class in the nineteenth century has led us to the current conjuncture in contemporary capitalism — characterized by growing inequality, increasing precariousness for nearly everyone except the capitalist elite, and incessant attacks on the most vulnerable — and explore its lessons for our revolutionary politics in the twenty-first century.