The thick-layered chronicle doesn’t sweep across time so much as it escorts the audience through indelible composite events that bristle with personal, social, and political characteristics….Since [when it was made] 1900 has come to stand as an organic cinematic journey through chapters of a rich apocryphal history that evinces an ongoing struggle between the world’s rich elite and everyone else.”—Cole Smithey
Stephen Maher and Rafael Khachaturian’s essay Socialist Strategy and the Democratic Capitalist State examines the the state in its liberal-democratic form, arguing that we should move beyond both vanguardist and social democratic models toward a view of the state as a contradictory site of class and social struggles. Paul Christoher Gray’s article on Socialist Project is taken from his recently published From the Streets to the State: Changing the World by Taking Power, where he takes on the limitations of dual power and extra-parliamentarism and the flaws inherent in the electoralist approaches and where there can be some reconciliation of the best aspects of these tendencies.
In Camp de Thiaroye the tirailleurs use the traditional, highly rhetorical, almost theatrical, mode of debate of their various societies, but adapt this ritual form to the only language they have in common: the pidgin which the French insultingly call “petit nègre”, a language which is both a result and a tool of colonial exploitation. Here it is revealed as having a potential for eloquence, allowing it to become a moving medium for the articulation of feelings, needs, grievances and resistance, and thus ultimately for the development of the tirailleurs‘ collective political awareness and consciousness of themselves as Africans.
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.
Bringing together lab workers, doctors, physicians assistants, maintenance staff at hospitals, those who construct our places of treatment and recovery, mental, dental and visual health workers with the class at large, and left movement organizations — all of whom have real interests in taking on this fight — could break the ideological and legislative lock-hold American capital maintains that persistently denies working class health, imposing misery and premature mortality.
Join us for an evening of discussion on the potential strength our class has the ability to utilize in facing capital dominance during our period where capital has of necessity created this points that really give us the means of “choking” their power.
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
This group will read over the next period a number of books on raising consciousness, organization and various methods and theories on how to develop a strong anti-capitalist movement.
This group will read over the next period a number of books on raising consciousness, organization and various methods and theories on how to develop a strong anti-capitalist movement.
This group will read over the next period a number of books on raising consciousness, organization and various methods and theories on how to develop a strong anti-capitalist movement.