Brooklyn Commons
Women’s Liberation Movement: 1968-1975
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynAs the Black Freedom movement turned to Black Power, feminists took theory from Black Power and applied it to their newborn movement. We'll read original sources from both the Black-led and majority-white branches of women's liberation.
Hard Boiled Thursdays: Summer Fiction Series
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynVerbal sparring, physical clashes, between corrupt cops and the world-weary detectives, the calm façade smiling at the world concealing a maniacal murder machine, when distilled in a fast-paced pulp fiction or poetically narrated in a noir satisfy some of our needs to explain the violent social disorder thrown at us large and small by the contours of life lived by dictates of capital.
Reading Capital Politically
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynMarx’s maxim that class struggle is the “motor force” of history is to be taken literally and not viewed as simply some literary metaphor. But what does this mean in the real world? How does this work? And, how should we read Capital politically?
A New Left Forms, June and July sessions on the 1960s
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynThe bee on wheels has laments on a stick
Wags weepy banners with gypsy ribbons ...
The tiny wheeled bee has the sky on a stick
Idly waves as she buzzes through the afternoon
Kicking the tears around like bean tins.
—fragment of poem by Jeff Nuttall
Creating an Ecological Society
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynSickened by the contamination of water, air, and the Earth itself, more and more people are coming to realize that it is capitalism that is, quite literally, killing us - and indeed, degrading the Earth’s very ability to support all forms of life.
The Condition of the Working Class in England
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynThis 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.
Paris, May 1968
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynThis talk will investigate the events May 1968 in France through an analysis of the writings of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the most important and interesting of its leaders, as well as the experiences of rank and file militants
The German Revolution: False Hope or Missed Chance
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn...Over the next nine years, while the German Left became more bitterly divided than ever, the extreme nationalist and revanchist element in Germany was coalescing around a new mass party, the Nazis, who found increasing numbers of powerful supporters in the army and among the capitalists.
Fascism: Then and Now
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynDiscuss the meaning and signficance of fascism and how to recognize it and struggle against it in world politics today. We hope to debate questions such as: What is the nature of fascism in relation to nationalism/racism, misogyny, social/community dissolution?
Challenging Militarism, Climate Change, and Human Nature
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynOur ability to address urgent threats to our existence like climate change and nuclear weapons is hampered and undermined by questionable assumptions about "human nature" that underlie much political thought and action.... "There will be no liberation without us knowing how to depend on each other, how to be encumbered with and responsible for each other."
Existentialism, Anti-Psychiatry: 1960s and beyond
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyne will read a selection of this new approach to psychic individuation alongside the Laing/Cooper nexus that sprung the anti-psychiatry movement and resulted in open psychiatric institutions, mental health liberation activity, and an on-going critique of “bourgeois” psychiatry and contemporary behaviorism.
Existentialism and the Anti-Psychiatry Movement
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynWe are normal, and we want our freedom!
We will read a selection of this new approach to psychic individuation alongside the Laing/Cooper nexus that sprung the anti-psychiatry movement and resulted in open psychiatric institutions, mental health liberation activity, and an on-going critique of “bourgeois” psychiatry and contemporary behaviorism, cognitive and psycho-pharmacological approaches to the question of what is mental health.
Creating An Ecological Society
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynWith Fred Magdoff —co-author with Chris Williams of the new book Creating an Ecological Society, which assesses how capitalism is destabilizing Earth’s climate and envisions a society that is genuinely democratic, equitable, and ecologically sustainable.
The Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynMarx viewed all his economic laws as tendencies and it is hard to deny that those tendencies are becoming more and more the realities of today’s capitalism. However, to understand our society we need to do more than reading and accepting his concepts, we must critically analyze them and look for the way of thinking that produced them.
African Literature: Post-Colonial Struggles
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynDuring this term we will begin with Egypt with Mahfouz, visit West Africa with Chris Abani then travel south to South Africa with Zakes Mda then conclude in June with NoViolet Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. Again we examine four different areas of Africa as the peoples there emerge first from European colonization, then face the forces of global domination in the long late-capitalist neoliberal phase we are living through.