Marx's Early Writings on Transcending Capitalism

MARX'S EARLY WRITINGS ON TRANSCENDING CAPITALISM

SUNDAY, APRIL 20, 2014

6:00-8:00 PM

Westside Peace Center

3916 Sepulveda Blvd., near Venice Blvd. (free parking in rear)

Suite 101-102, press #22 at door to get into building

Culver City (LA area)

Speaker:

ALI KIANI, Iranian Marxist activist and translator

In contrast to the traditional view that Marx's work is restricted to a critique of capitalism and does not contain a detailed or coherent conception of its alternative, this presentation will focus on aspects of his early critiques of political economy, from the POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY (1847) through the GRUNDRISSE (1857-58). We will discuss the notion, developed recently in Peter Hudis's MARX'S CONCEPT OF THE ALTERNATIVE TO CAPITALISM, that Marx was committed to a specific concept of a post-capitalist society that informed his critique of value production, alienated labor, and capitalist accumulation. Instead of focusing on the present with only a passing reference to the future, Marx's emphasis on capitalism's tendency towards dissolution is rooted in a specific conception of what should replace it. We will critically re-examine that conception in the context of the quest for an alternative to capitalism, something that has taken on increased importance today.

Suggested reading: Ch. 2 of Peter Hudis, MARX'S CONCEPT OF THE ALTERNATIVE TO CAPITALISM (Haymarket Books, 2013)

Sponsored by the West Coast Chapter, International Marxist-Humanist Organization

More information: arise@internationalmarxisthumanist.org

http://www.internationalmarxisthumanist.org      

Here is the link to the online announcement of the meeting for posting via email, Facebook, etc.: http://www.internationalmarxisthumanist.org/events/los-angeles-marxs-early-writings-transcending-capitalism 

Join our new Facebook page: "International Marxist-Humanist Organization" https://www.facebook.com/groups/imhorg/

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

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Precarious Communism

Communisation

PRECARIOUS COMMUNISM

Precarious Communism

Book Release London March 25th
Tuesday March 25th @ 5PM
New Academic Building LG01
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross, London SE14 6NW
http://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=7429
https://www.facebook.com/events/219778581551552

How does one demonstrate the enduring relevance of a sacred text but to help it speak to present times? This is what churches do with the Bible and what Marxists do with the writings of Marx. Come on join us to celebrate the release of Precarious Communism, in which Richard Gilman-Opalsky detourns Marx and Engels to create a mutant manifesto for an autonomist and millennial Marxism.

Richard Gilman-Opalsky is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Springfield. He is the author of Spectacular Capitalism: Guy
Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy (2011) and Unbounded Publics: Transgressive Public Spheres, Zapatismo, and Political Theory (2008).

Hosted by the Centre for Cultural Studies: http://www.gold.ac.uk/cultural-studies/

Richard will also be presenting seminars (with Stevphen Shukaitis) at:
- the Department of Politics, History and International Relations at
Loughboro University on March 26th: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/phir/research/arg/
- the Centre for Work, Organization, and Society at the University of Essex on March 28th (this will be a day long workshop)

For more information on any of these events e-mail Stevphen Shukaitis: sshuka@essex.ac.uk

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski at Academia: http://independent.academic.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

All that is Solid for Glenn Rikowski: http://rikowski.wordpress.com

Left Forum 2014: Reform and/or Revolution

 

LEFT FORUM 2014: REFORM AND/OR REVOLUTION

Left Forum 2014

May 30 – June 1, 2014

John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York

524 West 59^th Street, New York, NY, 10019

Imagining a World with Transformative Justice 

The world remains mired in the 7th year of capitalist crisis. The celebrated "recovery" benefits only the few who generated the crisis, while endless economic declines beset its victims, the vast majority. Economic, political and cultural inequalities deepen inside every country. Class divisions sharpen. Social injustice brings us all to breaking points.

Big business and the rich maximize social controls to protect and preserve their dominance. Everywhere they and their politicians impose austerities while reserving public resources to bail out banks and other failed mega-corporations. Capitalism's "new normal" for most people features poor job and income prospects, unsustainable debts, ecological decline, and right-wingers aiming to deflect social discontent against their usual scapegoats.

Human and natural resources wasted and abused expose this system's immense social costs. Even as the environmental crisis reaches epic proportions, the forces of capital either sit idly by or actively oppose serious measures to address it. We can surely do better than this system. The 1% have managed the crisis for their benefit.

The question is whether we can now solve the crisis and build a system that serves instead the 99%. This question is on the minds of millions now, more than at any time in half a century. The Left Forum 2014 offers a place for us to explore and debate our common needs for reforms, a revolution, or both.

As the system fails so many so badly, activists for democracy, sustainability, equality, and the abolition of oppression and exploitation increasingly grasp their shared demand for basic social justice. Fifty years of anti-communism, anti-radicalism, hesitant social criticism, and activists' mutual suspicions are fading into irrelevance.

Pressing questions loom for justice-seeking social forces: What is to be done today when a reform brings us one step forward, while leaving other important struggles worse off in the process? What type of movements will it take to overcome such challenges? What type of institutions, systems and societal conditions are possible when transformed conditions of justice no longer take the forms of, "the aggrieved speaking to the grievance alleviators"? How do these issues raise the question of the relation of reform to revolution? More than ever, people know that a new and different world is urgently needed. How do we get there from here: reforms, revolution, or strategic combinations of both?

Please come analyze, debate, build, ally, and strategize at Left Forum, 2014.  

Download the Theme: http://www.leftforum.org/files/Left-Forum-2014-Theme.pdf

Register for the conference – here while early discounts last

​​Call for Panels/Workshops: Download or forward – here 

LEFT FORUM: http://www.leftforum.org

Please Forward Far and Wide

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski at Academia: https://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

All that is Solid for Glenn Rikowski: http://rikowski.wordpress.com

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Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

The Communism of Capital?

THE COMMUNISM OF CAPITAL?

Ephemera Volume 13 Number 3 (August 2013)

Ephemera is at: http://www.ephemerajournal.org

ISBN 9781906948207

Current Issue

The communism of capital? What could this awkward turn of phrase mean, and what might it signify with regards to the state of the world today? Does it merely describe a reality in which communist demands are twisted to become productive of capital, a capitalist realism supplemented by a disarmed communist ideology? Or does the death of the capitalist utopia mean that capital cannot contain the antagonism expressed by Occupy and other movements any more, and therefore must confront communism upfront?

The 12 contributions to this latest issue of ephemera explore the valances of the paradoxical and seemingly incoherent expression that is ‘the communism of capital’. Collectively they stake out new territory for the theorisation and organization of political struggle in a context in which capital has become increasingly aware that its age-old nemesis might today be lurking at its very heart.

You can order a print copy of the whole issue now at your local bookstore!

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editorial

The communism of capital?

Armin Beverungen

Anna-Maria Murtola

Gregory Schwartz

article

Spectre of the commons: Spectrum regulation in the communism of capital

Rachel O’Dwyer

article

Infecting capitalism with the common: The class process, communication, and surplus

David Carlone

article

Pro Bono? On philanthrocapitalism as ideological answer to inequality

Mikkel Thorup

article

Communism, occupy and the question of form

Saroj Giri

note

Does capital need a commons fix?

Massimo De Angelis

note

Communicity

Colin Cremin

note

Common as silence

Peter Fleming

note

Recomposing precarity: Notes on the laboured politics of class composition

Stevphen Shukaitis

review

Theorizing debt for social change

Miranda Joseph

review

The spectre of anarchism

Thomas Swann

review

Friendship and counter-conduct in the neoliberal regime of truth

Richard Weiskopf

review

'Of luck and leverage'

Joyce Goggin

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Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo (new remix, and new video, 2012)  

'Cheerful Sin' – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

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Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Alain Badiou Talks About the Communist Hypothesis

ALAIN BADIOU TALKS ABOUT THE COMMUNIST HYPOTHESIS

In conversation

Alain Badiou talks about

The Communist Hypothesis

18.30, Thursday 28 October 2010

Arthur & Paula Lucas Lecture Theatre (S-2.18), Strand Building

King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS

This event is free - but please let us know by emailing european-studies@kcl.ac.uk if you'd like to attend.

This event is hosted by the European Studies Programme http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/depts/european/ at King's College London as part of the Arts & Humanities Week and in association with Verso Books.

Alain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at the International Graduate School, is one of the most celebrated philosophers in the world. Among a vast output, his philosophical reputation rests especially on the two-volume work Being and the Event (1988) and Logics of Worlds (2006). The New Statesman has described him as ‘an heir to Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser’, seeking to continue both Althusser’s anti-humanism and Sartre’s preoccupation with subjectivity.

A veteran of May 1968 and a Maoist militant during the 1960s and 1970s, Badiou has emerged as one of France’s leading public intellectuals in recent years. His opposition to banning the burqa was followed by The Meaning of Sarkozy (2007). This polemic first advanced what he called the ‘Communist Hypothesis’, which reasserts the idea of an alternative to capitalism based on the universal principle of equality. These ideas are further developed in The Communist Hypothesis, recently published by Verso.

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‘I believe in the afterlife.
It starts tomorrow,
When I go to work’
Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Human Herbs’ at: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic (recording) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h7tUq0HjIk (live)

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All that is Solid for Glenn Rikowski: http://rikowski.wordpress.com
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The Ockress: http://www.theockress.com

Beyond Resistance: The Commune Summer School

BEYOND RESISTANCE: THE COMMUNE SUMMER SCHOOL

A day of communist discussion and debate

From 11am-6pm on Saturday 19th June
At 96-100 Clifton Street, London EC2

To purchase tickets and download leaflets see http://thecommune.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/19th-june-summer-school/

The last few years have seen a series of crises for our rulers. Millions of us are angry at the ongoing economic crisis, the scandalous behaviour of ‘our’ MPs and the endless wars in the Middle East.

All of these crises are part and parcel of capitalist rule, but rarely is this system itself challenged. We are constantly told there is no alternative to capitalism. Every day at work and in our communities we live out the same capitalist order, the same hierarchies, the same alienation.

But the spectre of communism has not gone away. The idea of a society fit for human beings lives on. It is an idea raised every time workers demand the living standards we need, not what our rulers are prepared to give us; whenever we reject the state’s oppression and interference in our lives; and whenever we stand up to sexism, homophobia and anti-immigrant hysteria.

We need to build on these acts of resistance. But that is not enough. Our movement needs ideas. We need a clear vision of a communist alternative to the capitalist order, and how we can make it happen.

That is why The Commune is hosting a summer school on Saturday 19th June to discuss what we should be fighting for and how we should fight for it. Join the debate.

Proposed sessions:
Britain after the general election;
What is capitalism?
Why capitalism is in crisis;
The changed shape of the working class;
Alienation and the critique of everyday life;
How migrant workers fight back;
Tenants’ struggles and community organisation;
Socialist feminist approach to organisation;
Breaking up the UK state;
Communism or representative democracy?
Recomposition of the communist movement.

Full agenda shortlyPlease get in touch at uncaptiveminds@gmail.com if you have any questions about the event or have special requirements.http://thecommune.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/19th-june-summer-school/

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski
All that is Solid for Glenn Rikowski: http://rikowski.wordpress.com
The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk
Cold Hands & Quarter Moon at MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic
Cold Hands & Quarter Moon Profile: http://rikowski.wordpress.com/cold-hands-quarter-moon/
The Ockress: http://www.theockress.com