Tune in for a debate between Kshama Sawant and Eric Blanc, on the relevance of the Russian Revolution Today.
Few political questions from the 20th century were so fraught as how to understand the Russian Revolution. Inspiring example of workers throwing off the Tsarist yoke and rattling the foundations of capitalism, or well-spring of tyranny and the antithesis of the benighted values of ‘The West’? Even among its most ardent defenders debates raged about what lessons to draw from the experience of the revolution, and how (or whether) to replicate the organizational model of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party.
Though these very questions animated several generations of activists and organizers on the Left in countries across the globe, how relevant are they for today’s burgeoning socialist movement in a modern democratic state? What lessons can we apply to the current world situation?
Taking as their starting point the ground-breaking contributions of Eric Blanc’s Revolutionary Social Democracy, Blanc and Seattle’s socialist city councilwoman Kshama Sawant will debate exactly what we can learn from the Russian Revolution for our contemporary struggles.
Blanc and Sawant will be joined by Bryan Koulouris of Socialist Alternative, for a debate moderated by Bhaskar Sunkara.
Get a copy of Revolutionary Social Democracy from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1907-revolutionary-social-democracy
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Speakers:
Kshama Sawant is a Seattle city councilwoman and member of Socialist Alternative and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Eric Blanc is the author of Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire, 1882-1917, a member of Democratic Socialists of America, and an organizer with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.
Bryan Koulouris is the national organizer for Socialist Alternative, and an executive committee member of International Socialist Alternative
Bhaskar Sunkara (moderator) is the founding editor of Jacobin and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality.
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More Episodes
Feb 25, 2021
Capitalism Is The Disease Mike Davis on the Coronavirus Crisis (3-31-20)
An online teach-in with renowned activist-scholar Mike Davis, author of numerous books, including The Monster at Our Door, In Praise of Barbarians, and the forthcoming Set the Night on Fire.
Fifteen years ago, in his prescient book, The Monster At Our Door, Mike Davis warned that a viral catastrophe was being cooked up in the toxic vat built by the combined dangers of global capitalist production, ecological devastation, and the intentional, politically motivated neglect of public services the world over. As coronavirus continues to spread, largely unabated, we are witnessing both profound acts of solidarity among working people, and the grotesque depths to which the ruling class is willing to sink for the sake of maintaining their profits. And these are only the early days of what will likely become a medical Katrina.
The pandemic has shown that capitalist globalization is biologically unsustainable in the absence of a truly international public health infrastructure, and we can say for sure that such an infrastructure will never exist until peoples’ movements break the power of Big Pharma and for-profit health care. Doing so will demand an independent socialist design for human survival well beyond even a Second New Deal.
In this virtual teach-in, Mike Davis will offer his appraisal of the crisis so far, discuss the urgent need for international solidarity to end this (and future) pandemics, and take questions from our digital audience.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/xOp9G5hoQnM
Mar 1, 2021
After Bernie—Amidst Pandemic with Naomi Klein and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor(4-9-20)
Join Naomi Klein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Astra Taylor, and Hari Kondabolu for a discussion of what comes next after Bernie.
The current crisis is laying bare the extreme injustices and inequalities of our economic and social system.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/6Gi5qGHRJ9c
Buy books from Haymarket: haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
We are in a battle of visions for how we’re going to respond to this crisis. We will either be catapulted backward to an even more brutal winner-takes-all system — or this will be a wake-up call.
Ideas that were dismissed as too radical just a week ago are starting to seem like the only reasonable path to get out of this crisis and prevent future ones.
We need to use every tool that we have that allows us to hear each other’s voices, to read each other’s words, to see each other’s faces, even if it’s just on screens, to stay organized and stay connected. We have to create spaces where we’re able to deliberate and strategize about what it means to protect our neighbors, our rights, and our planet.
We have to have the confidence to say this is the moment when we change everything.
Sponsored by Haymarket Books, The Leap, Debt Collective, and Democratic Socialists of America
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/6Gi5qGHRJ9c
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
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Mar 1, 2021
Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (4-14-20)
Join us for the launch of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, a landmark literary collection of essays, poems, and prose that are a testament to the profound political power of defying shame. Haymarket Books convenes a panel of contributors from this powerful volume for a conversation on the personal-political fight for abortion rights.
With reading and discussions by:
Annie Finch, poet and editor of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion
Soniah Kamal, author of Unmarriageable
Desiree Cooper, writer and producer of the short film "The Choice"
Alexis Quinlan, poet and educator
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/V-tfKGuxbj0
Buy books from Haymarket: haymarketbooks.org
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Mar 1, 2021
Covid-19, Decarceration, and Abolition with Ruth Wilson Gilmore & Naomi Murakawa (4-16-20)
How should abolitionists respond to the coronavirus pandemic? Join Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Naomi Murakawa for an urgent discussion of abolition and the pandemic.
How can we achieve urgently needed decarceration for the millions of people caged in jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers?
Abolitionism doesn’t just say no to police, prisons, border control, and the current punishment system. It requires persistent organizing for what we need, organizing that’s already present in the efforts people cobble together to achieve access to schools, health care and housing, art and meaningful work, and freedom from violence and want.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY Graduate Center. A co-founder of California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, she is author of the prize-winning book Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Her forthcoming Haymarket Books title, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition, is the inaugural book in the new Abolitionist Papers book series, edited by Naomi Murakawa.
Naomi Murakawa is an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She studies the reproduction of racial inequality in 20th and 21st century American politics, with specialization in crime policy and the carceral state. She is the author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/hf3f5i9vJNM
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
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Mar 1, 2021
Too Much Midnight with Krista Franklin, Mahogany L. Browne & more (4-19-20)
Haymarket Books, Bowery Poetry, and The BreakBeat Poets present: Krista Franklin’s Too Much Midnight
Krista Franklin will be joined by special guests Aricka Foreman, and avery r. young, for an event to launch her new book Too Much Midnight hosted by Mahogany L. Browne
While this event is free for all to attend, we hope you’ll consider making a donation to support the work of these artists. All donations received will be shared between the performers.
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1460-too-much-midnight
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Krista Franklin’s Too Much Midnight draws on Pan African histories, Black Surrealism, Afrofuturism, pop culture, art history, and the historical and present-day micro-to-macro violence inflicted upon Black people and other people of color, working to forge imaginative spaces for radical possibilities and visions of liberation.
Featuring 30 poems, 30 artworks, an author statement and an interview, Too Much Midnight chronicles the intersections between art and life, art and writing, the historical and the speculative, cultural and personal identity, the magical and the mundane.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/t2KanIZv0O0
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Mar 1, 2021
Remaking Schools in the Time of Coronavirus (4-22-20)
Three leading voices in the struggle for education justice (Jesse Hagopian, Wayne Au, and Noliwe Rooks) discuss the remaking of public schools in the time of crisis.
What has this crisis taught us about the role of public schools in society?
What have we learned about what really matters in education during this time?
When we re-open schools, what kind of education will we have, will we demand?
The Covid-19 crisis has upended public education around the country. Join three radical education activists in conversation about what this crisis means for public education now and how moving forward we can continue to fight for the schools our students deserve.
Jesse Hagopian is an award-winning educator and a leading voice on issues of educational equity and social justice unionism. He is an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine and is the co-editor of Teaching for Black Lives, and editor of More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing.
Noliwe Rooks is the W.E.B Du Bois Professor of Literature at Cornell University and the author of Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education which won an award for non-fiction from the Hurston/Wright Foundation.
Wayne Au is a Professor in the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington Bothell. He is a long-time Rethinking Schools editor, co-editor of Teaching for Black Lives and author of A Marxist Education: Learning to Change the World.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/rDnP663yEbM
Buy books from Haymarket: haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
