The event will be at 16 Beaver at 12PM.  See UPCOMING EVENTS and SEMINARS for information.

The seminar runs from THURSDAY, August 18th to SATURDAY, August 20th. Start times are listed below. For full schedule including a description of the seminar and list of suggested readings, see UPCOMING EVENTS and SEMINARS.

Thursday, August 18th, doors at 4pm
Friday, August 19th, doors at 4pm
Saturday, August 20th, doors at 1pm

RAGS make paper
PAPER makes money
MONEY makes banks
BANKS make loans
LOANS make beggars
BEGGARS make
RAGS

Click here to download Introductory Remarks for the Seminar, with schedule and recommended readings.

[NOTE] The seminar is free but reservation is encouraged and can be sent, along with other inquiries, to seminars[AT]16beavergroup.com.  A special website dedicated to the seminar has been created and is the best place to follow changes or updates.

Activist-researcher, writer and ecofeminist, Maria Mies is one of the world’s original thinkers. Combined memoir and political tract, “The Village and the World,” packs in seventy-seven years of militant living: from the peasant origins of German village childhood to the world of the Indian subcontinent, from international campaigns to groundbreaking theory and feminist organizing.  Silvia Federici, autonomist feminist thinker and close collaborator, will present on behalf of Mies, connecting issues of her life and times to urgent political questions of the day.

Maria Mies’ achievements include developing groundbreaking praxis and theory around the concept of “housewifisation”, the violence of colonisation and profound writings about ecofeminism. She fights the Multilateral Agreement of Investment, she fights the General Agreement on Trade in Services, she fights against the patenting of life and tackles reproductive and genetic engineering as well as food security, but she never gives up hope that there is an alternative to present day injustice and exploitation; that “the good life” is possible. Her books include Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Stage

Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher, and internationally renowned activist of autonomist feminist Marxist tradition. She is the author of Caliban and the Witch and editor of several books including Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and Its Others.

The event will be at Bluestockings Bookstore at 7PM.  Discussion to follow.

Noel Ignatiev is a teacher at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, the editor of Lesson of the Hour: Wendell Phillips on Abolition and Strategy, the co-editor of Race Traitor and the author of How the Irish Became White. He lives in Boston.

Can the Marxian framework comprehend the new, financialized, character of class struggle today?  Despite important differences between Marx’s time and ours, there are also significant similarities.  His was also an era of financial innovation, financial integration, and international financial crisis.  Specifying what is new and what is not is a first step toward clarifying how Marx might analyze finance today.  Likewise, examining how capital responded to financial crisis in the past can clarify where we may want to put our energies today.

Discussion to follow.

Conrad Herold is Professor of Economics and History at Hofstra University, New York. His research interest is contemporary Latin American Political Economy and Macroeconomics. He was born and raised in South America.

On Easter Sunday we will present a daylong, open-ended, collaborative and community screening of Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas’ The Hour of the Furnaces. In organizing such an event the usual questions arise: what does a film about Argentina mean to us in the United States; what does a film from 1968 mean to us in 2010; and, more broadly, what is the function of a political film, a revolutionary cinema, in our contemporary cultural political and digitally mediated landscape.

The Hour of the Furnaces is historically seen as a benchmark, a landmark, of militant cinema; but with that it also becomes a remnant of a certain time and a place, a relic of a long-since-passed Zeitgeist. The danger
comes from the potential of presenting a memorial service; that the ceremonial structure of such an event will be an acting out, an anachronism.

The film’s tone, scope, scale, and exhibition demands necessitate a certain theatricality. Furnaces has a 4-hour running time, and three distinct parts with built-in intermissions designed for audience participation and open discussion. We will discuss all of this with a focus on the present. Coffee, tea, juice, bagels, and a simple brunch will be available throughout the day.

–The Hour of the Furnaces: Notes and Testimonies on Neocolonialism, Violence and Liberation -

Octavio Getino & Fernando Ezequiel Solanas,
1968, 230 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 230 minutes | Digital Projection

Thursday, 25 March, 7pm
Red & Black Cafe – 400 SE 12th avenue (at Oak)
www.redandblackcafe.com <http://www.redandblackcafe.com/>

This is Forever: An Exploration of Contemporary Autonomist Politics
An evening with Autonomedia, Minor Compositions and the Team Colors Collective.

Join us for an evening with two autonomist authors and organizers from Portland and London in exploring contemporary politics, the continued imposition of work, current struggles in the University and elsewhere, militant and co-research, and in celebrating the release of their recent books.  In the U.S. and across the planet struggles against enclosures, the dismantling of the University, for public and community space, against “the endless imposition of work”, and against a form of life that is increasingly precarious – are currently taking place.  By “reading” these and neighboring struggles we seek to create a world in which many worlds fit. A discussion on these issues and other topics will follow short talks.

“This is Forever” is a discussion series based in Bluestockings Books (NYC) and currently expanding to other cities around the United States.

Event presenters:
Stevphen Shukaitis | Autonomedia / Minor Compositions. Shukaitis is the author of the recently book Imaginal Machines: Autonomy and Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life (Minor Compositions, 2009), an editor at Autonomedia and lecturer at the University of Essex. He is the editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labor.  www.autonomedia.org & www.minorcompositions.info.

Kevin Van Meter | Team Colors Collective. As member of the militant research collective, Van Meter has been involved in editing the collectives forthcoming collection Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States (AK Press, 2010), co-authoring Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (Pamphlet, 2010), and has participated in radical community organizing initiatives for more then a decade. www.warmachines.info.

Copies of Imaginal Machines and Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible will be available at the event.

Team Colors is a national militant research collective. Their approach has developed from involvement in community organizing projects, resistance activities and radical research efforts for more than a decade.  Their forthcoming pamphlet “Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible” will be available for sale at the event.

Rooted in an inquiry into the past 30 years of criminalizing communities of color and how that has shaped the lives of migrant communities of color in the United States, tonight’s discussion will also attempt to expound the uses of militant research in better understanding and circulating these struggles.

As this international student and university movement spreads, points on the map of recent mass demonstrations, occupations, and self-organized university initiatives belie a true sense of how the university world-wide is the site of an increasingly militant struggle.  Both the geographic, social and analytic scale of this movement requires careful attention in order to understand the implications, connections, and points of divergence of a struggle that seeks to simultaneously transform the present conditions of labor and creativity that circulate through the university as well as create autonomous universities organized as a commons.

Tonight’s discussion aims to circulate political insights and perspectives on this movement as well as connect to organizing efforts for the March 4th Day of Action to Defend Public Education.

The event is also sponsored by Edu-Factory and Autonomedia. Edu-factory is a transnational collective engaged in the transformations of the global university and conflicts in knowledge production. The website of the global network (www.edu-factory.org) collects and connects theoretical investigations and reports from university struggles. The network has organized meetings all around the world, paying particular attention to the intertwining of student and faculty struggles. In addition to English, the collective has published the volume in Italian, as Univerisità globale: Il nuovo mercato del sapere (Manifestolibri, 2008), and in Spanish, as Universidad en Conflicto (Traficantes de sueños, 2010).