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.

While we are observing the new impetus of global uprising against capitalism and the state, the catastrophic situation is arising in Japan. Triggered by the earthquake and tsunami of maximal scale, Northeastern part of Honshu has been devastated by the increasing number of losses and refugees, and the worsening nuclear disaster. The activity of the planet has shown not only its unequivocal nonhuman force but also the degree in which our societies and their apparatuses forged by capitalism are relying on, merging with, implicated in and expanding over the planet in an extremely ominous manner. What the so-called natural disaster is showing on this occasion is nothing but the implication of the apparatus in the environment and its fatal effects.

In this situation, we intend to translate, quote and analyze as much information as possible from Japanese into English, and translate your encouragements, comments, suggestions, analysis, proposals and anything written in English into Japanese for the vantage point of the people struggling there and everywhere.

For more information, see the site: http://jfissures.wordpress.com/ and the updates and writings posted by the J-Fissures Editorial.

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.

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.

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).

At the height of the French Revolutionary Wars of the 1790s, hundreds of mutinies repeatedly pushed military discipline in Europe’s war-fleets to the very brink of collapse, and sometimes beyond. Please join Niklas Frykman in remembering one of the largest, most radical frontline resistance movements of our history.

The event will take place at Bluestockings Bookstore at 7pm on Saturday, OCT 3rd.  Niklas Frykman currently lives in Pittsburgh where he is finishing his PhD with Marcus Rediker (author of The Many-Headed Hydra with Peter Linebaugh) at the University of Pittsburgh.

You can find Frykman’s article, “Seamen on Late 18th-Century European Warships“ here.

Saturday (10AM to 12PM) will be Capitalist Crisis, Energy and the Commons featuring Iain Boal, Peter Linebaugh, George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici.

Sunday (also 10AM to 12PM) will be Class Struggle and the Crisis: From Workers to Capital and Back Again and will include presentations from George Caffentzis, Silvia Federici, Peter Linebaugh, Monty Neill, and Eddie Yuen.  This second panel will coincide with the launching of a new publication by Midnight Notes that is a political inquiry into the current  capitalist crisis. 

NOTE: You can find exact room information in person at the registration table of the conference or at the Bluestockings tables in the Exhibition room.

Please see UPCOMING EVENTS for more info.