labor

Wed 5.01.13 | May Day Meanings

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What do you think of when May Day comes around? Aziz Choudry, Jodi Dean, Chris Dixon, Max Haiven, and Richard Peet weigh in with their reflections. Also featured are clips from a Pacifica Radio Archives documentary that explores the origins of International Workers' Day and the labor firebrands and struggles the day commemorates. It includes archival May Day reports from Vietnam, Africa, and elsewhere.

Mon 1.14.13 | Why So Radical?

Tony Michels, Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History NYU Press, 2012

Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York Harvard U. Press, 2009 (paper)

The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936–1951 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum

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Why were they so radical? What accounts for the disportionate involvement of American Jews in leftist causes, socialist parties, and radical debates? In a new book, Tony Michels traces the significant contributions of Jewish immigrants and their offspring to left-wing theory and movements. Also, Colleen Stockmann discusses New York's Photo League, to which many Jews belonged.

Mon 11.12.12 | Zombies, Labor, and Catastrophism

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Halloween may have passed, but zombie imagery is ubiquitous. In the new book Catastrophism, David McNally links the powerful cultural resonance of zombies to the deadening experience of wage labor and other everyday castastrophes under capitalism. Sasha Lilley, in her contribution to the volume, describes two versions of left-wing catastrophism and why we should steer clear of both.

Wed 10.31.12 | University as Factory

The Edu-factory Collective, Toward a Global Autonomous University Autonomedia, 2009

Gigi Roggero, The Production of Living Knowledge Temple U. Press, 2011

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What role do colleges and universities play in the global capitalist order? How does escalating student debt fit within broader political-economic trends and tendencies? What does the Edu-factory Collective mean when it claims that "what was once the factory is now the university"? Max Haiven navigated these issues in a recent talk.

 

Tues 10.23.12 | More Federici, and Occupy

Sylvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero PM Press/Autonomedia, 2012

Part One of the Federici interview

Schrager Lang & Lang/Levitsky, eds., Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement New Internationalist, 2012

Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin speak at KPFA benefit tomorrow

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In Part Two of our interview with Sylvia Federici, the radical feminist scholar and veteran activist talks about elder care, abortion, technology, and collective struggles against austerity and privatization. Also, Daniel Lang/Levitsky discusses a new volume that features writings and images produced by Occupy movement participants.

Wed 10.17.12 | Federici on "Reproductive Work"

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Housewives toil without pay; the family home has become a private, isolated space; immigrant caregivers leave behind their own children; capitalism devalues domestic work in order to cut the cost of labor power: It's not a pretty picture, but it needs to be made visible and put into context, and Sylvia Federici has done both with distinction, over several decades of writing and activism and in her new book.

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