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.

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).

Tina arrived in Copenhagen before the summit started and left after it ended. She wrote daily about events inside the Bella Center and demos and actions outside on the streets.

She will bring us her reflections from COP15 as well as the climate justice movement.  Tonight’s event will lay out in simple and understandable terms what the Copenhagen Accord includes, what it means, and how it contrasts with the science demands and what other groups of nations, such as the G77, AOSIS and the EU, as well as science calls for. Additionally, we have an opportunity to discuss actions related to the summit, exploring new directions, potentials, limits and the implications of state repression.

On the next evening, Tuesday, JANUARY 12th at 7PM, join Ben Trott, member of the Turbulence Collective, for a presentation and discussion of Issue 5 of their journal, entitled “And Now For Something Completely Different?”

Turbulence: Ideas for Movement is a journal that explores many of the political and strategic directions of the ‘movement of movements’ of the counter-globalization days and into the development of global movements today.  The journal is a key space for debate and investigation into core logics, practices, and visions of an international network of movements.

The current issue discusses the condition of anti-capitalist movements in the wake of various crises: of financial capital, of the doctrines of neoliberalism, of our planetary commons and the environment, of social and political forms of equitable life, and of our movements themselves.

Ben will be presenting the arguments of the collective’s  article “Life in Limbo?” that introduces the new issue as well as the political project of the journal itself.

Both events will take place at 7PM at Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen Street, NYC 10002. Print copies of the journal will be available to all attendees.  You can find more information about Turbulence here as well as download the entire issue here.

The publication is an initial attempt to clear the field of many muddled interpretations of our current situation as well as a call to others in the planetary movement of anti-capitalist struggles to share political and organizational insights.  

The pamphlet is available online on the Midnight Notes website as well as for purchase through Autonomedia Distribution.  If you are in NYC, you can also get the pamphlet at Bluestockings Bookstore.

Team Colors included an article of hers in their 2008 publication ‘In the Middle of a Whirlwind.”  You can find that article here.

Please see UPCOMING EVENTS for more info.

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.

The series emerged out of a 2005 seminar hosted by Bluestockings Bookstore called “Strategies of Refusal” and came into its own throughout much of 2006 and late into 2007, engaging in numerous discussions both formal and informal.  We put together a few more events under the formal title of the series in 2008 before embarking on other projects.  Now in 2009, we find ourselves galvanized by two recent events:  first, the tremendous effort of Team Colors in putting together the “In the Middle of a Whirlwind” journal (May 2008) and second, the increasing urgency in which movements across the world are responding to capitalist crisis and formulating their own ‘exits’ from capitalist command. 

As we reconstitute and look around, we have a lot of questions about the shape of many movements to come.  We hope you will join us and look forward to seeing you at the next event.