In the midst of loss and death and suffering, our charge is to figure out what freedom really means—and how we take steps to get there. ———————————————— Join Marc Lamont Hill, phillip agnew, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for an urgent conversation about the ongoing struggle for freedom in the wake of the 2020 election. The uprising of 2020 marked a new phase in the unfolding Movement for Black Lives. The brutal killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, and countless other injustices large and small, lit the spark of the largest protest movement in US history, a historic uprising against racism and the politics of disposability that the Covid-19 pandemic lays bare. In his urgent and incisive new book We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest, and Possibility, Marc Lamont Hill critically examines the “pre-existing conditions” that have led us to this moment of crisis and upheaval, guiding us through both the perils and possibilities, and helping us imagine an abolitionist future. ———————————————— Marc Lamont Hill will be joined in conversation by philip agnew and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Marc Lamont Hill is one of the leading intellectual voices in the country. He is currently the host of BET News. An award-winning journalist, Dr. Hill has received numerous prestigious awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, GLAAD, and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Dr. Hill is the Steve Charles Professor of Media, Cities, and Solutions at Temple University. Prior to that, he held positions at Columbia University and Morehouse College. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond. He is the owner of Uncle Bobbie's Bookstore in Philadelphia, PA. phillip agnew, co-founded the Dream Defenders in 2012. His work in community organizing and art is frequently cited and highlighted nationally. He is a nationally recognized educator, strategist, writer, trainer, speaker and cultural critic. In 2018, he transitioned from his role as co-director of the Dream Defenders. In July 2019 he joined the Bernie Sanders campaign as a National Surrogate and was later named a Senior Advisor. agnew currently is an organizer with the Dream Defenders and Black Men Build. agnew is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. and graduate of Florida A&M University. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. Her third book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press, was a finalist for a National Book Award for nonfiction, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/3OtCU6ichE0 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join David Harvey and Amna Akbar for a conversation about Marx's idea of human freedom. ---------------------------------------------------- The crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity for us to think again about Marx’s idea of human freedom. Emergency steps to get through the crisis also show us how we could build a different society that’s not beholden to capital. Unless we address the root cause of those problems in the structure of our economic system, we’ll never be able to solve them. This a moment where we can use this socialist imagination to construct an alternative society. This is not utopian. Our needs can only be taken care of through collective action. ---------------------------------------------------- Speakers: David Harvey is a distinguished professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His latest books are The Ways of the World and The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles. Amna Akbar is a professor of law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. She writes about policing and social movements, with a focus on grassroots demands for social change. ---------------------------------------------------- Order a copy of David Harvey's latest book, "The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles": https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9780745342092 Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/G68WFs2jBA0 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

A virtual conversation with Bedour Alagraa, Zoé Samudzi, and SA Smythe, moderated by Robin D. G. Kelley. ---------------------------------------------------- In “What the Twilight Says,” Derek Walcott wrote that “the noblest are those who are trapped, who have accepted the twilight,” a reference to the the hinge-point between old and new forms of domination, poetics, and unresolved historical conjunctures. Join Bedour Alagraa, Zoé Samudzi, and SA Smythe in conversation with Robin D.G. Kelley on the colonial, carceral, and plantation logics underpinning the defining crises of our time: what Bedour Alagraa refers to in her scholarship as “the interminable catastrophe” and SA Smythe describes as “death by numbers.” ---------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Dr. Bedour Alagraa’s The Interminable Catastrophe: Fatal Liberalisms, Plantation Logics, and Black Political Life in the Wake of Disaster charts a conceptual history of catastrophe as a political category, via its crystallization as a concept on the plantation. Alagraa explores the limits of current conversations concerning ecological catastrophe, against the discourse of “imminent disaster” and anthropocene studies, considers these occurrences as expressions of the durability of plantation modes of social relations, rendering them political conjunctures rather than ecological Events. Zoé Samudzi’s work focuses on German colonialism, the Herero and Nama genocide, and its afterlife. In examining the intimate relationship between biomedicine and Germany’s first genocide, Samudzi traces an ideological and material continuity from this 1904 genocide in southwestern Africa to the structuring of Nazi genocide less than 40 years later that illustrates yet again the colonial roots of authoritarianism. Her most recent works on Black anarchism (including As Black as Resistance, co-authored with William C. Anderson) explore our current crises of authoritarianism." Dr. SA Smythe’s Where Blackness Meets the Sea: On Crisis, Culture, and the Black Mediterranean traces a contemporary history of Europe’s racialized notions of citizenship and Black belonging in the wake of Europe’s self-initiated migration crises. Smythe explores the ongoing colonial logics of xenophobia, anti-blackness, and racial capitalism across Europe, East Africa, and the Mediterranean and emphasizes intertwined Black and migrant struggles with an analysis of literary and other political responses to the violence of national borders and Europe’s economics-driven valuation of human life. The conversation will be moderated by Robin D.G. Kelley, whose forthcoming book, Black Bodies Swinging, is a historical autopsy narrating the slave patrols and lynch law of the Deep South to segregated housing, the war on drugs, slum clearance, predatory lending, and extraction of wealth. Kelley draws a direct line from the “blood at the root”—the racial terror at the heart of the American social and economic order—to the latest casualties of that terror, including the lives and deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, and so many others. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/p9zVl0tTRwU Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Jonathan Martineau: Algorithmic Capitalism and Social Reproduction: An Exploration The advent of Algorithmic Capitalism has reconfigured capital and labor relations, but also social reproduction. Since studies of the algorithmization of housework are very scarce thus far from a social reproduction perspective, this paper seeks to start a conversation by inquiring into two aspects of this new reality : Smart home technologies, and the population of the household by connected goods. The paper (i) proposes a periodization of three periods of domestic labor (industrial, neoliberal, algorithmic), (ii) inquires into the dialectics of the algorithmic subsumption of domestic work, (iii) examines the commodification of domestic work and the imperative for "domestic data" extraction, and (iv) explores the reconfiguration of affective labor within the household by IA domestic assistant technologies. Sue Ferguson: Social Reproduction Theory: New Challenges With both Covid-19 and the BLM-led uprising in the US dramatically reshaping the current moment, SRT confronts new (and some old) challenges. In this talk I survey questions that the period poses about value, resistance, the state, violence, debt and racism. My hope is to invite a conversation about the gaps within the social reproduction tradition, and openings for addressing the pressing political issues of the day. Hester Eisensten: From Patriarchy to Social Reproduction: Some Theoretical Questions In the early days of 20th century Marxist-Feminist theorizing (in the 1970s) the debate centered on whether patriarchy and capitalism were two separate systems (dual systems theory; cf. Iris Marion Young) or whether they were a unified system (cf. Lise Vogel). In the current era I argue that patriarchy has been in part subsumed under the Social Reproduction Theory framework (cf. Tithi Bhattacharya and Cinzia Arruzza). Yet in an era where international feminist organizing has been called the cutting edge of revolution against capitalism and imperialism, patriarchal norms still threaten women individually and as a group with murder, rape, and annihilation. How do we theorize these manifestations of patriarchal violence as part of or in relation to SRT? PLEASE NOTE: All events for HM Online are free to register, however we would ask comrades who are able to please consider supporting the Historical Materialism project. Please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism journal, published by BRILL, who are currently offering a 25% discount on individual subscriptions, valid until the end of the year. To use the offer, quote the discount code 70997 when subscribing at: www.brill.com/hima Also, please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism book series through Haymarket Books. For $25 per month, this subscription gets you every new title from the Historical Materialism series when it is released (as long as your subscription remains active) plus a 50% discount on *all* Haymarket books titles via our website. Non-US subscribers will be charged an extra $20/month for international shipping. https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/894-haymarket-book-club-historical-materialism-series Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/O9T3r59Zd-A Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join us for the second of our Politics of the Pandemic panels. Participants: Andreas Malm ‘War communism in the 21st century: Searching for ways out of the chronic emergency’ Panagiotis Sotiris ‘Beyond the lockdown: the left, the pandemic and the possibility of a communist governmentality' The COVID-19 Pandemic has been both a major health emergency and the catalyst for a broader economic and social crisis. The emergence of pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 points to the destructive ecological effects of contemporary capitalist accumulation, whereas the extent of the pandemic and the cost in human lives points to the many ways that vulnerability is socially produced within contemporary neoliberal capitalism. The various measures and strategies adopted to tackle the pandemic raise important questions in regards to not only their effectiveness, but also their social and political repercussions and the deep marks they are going to leave. Consequently, the pandemic makes an anticapitalist perspective urgently and critically necessary but also raises significant political and theoretical challenges for anyone seeking such a radical left approach. The two ‘Politics of the Pandemic’ panels organised as part of HM On Line hope to contribute to this discussion. Please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism journal, published by BRILL, who are currently offering a 25% discount on individual subscriptions, valid until the end of the year. To use the offer, quote the discount code 70997 when subscribing at: www.brill.com/hima Also, please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism book series through Haymarket Books. For $25 per month, this subscription gets you every new title from the Historical Materialism series when it is released (as long as your subscription remains active) plus a 50% discount on *all* Haymarket books titles via our website. Non-US subscribers will be charged an extra $20/month for international shipping. https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/894-haymarket-book-club-historical-materialism-series Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/1NU4ou37z4U Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join Barbara Ellen Smith and Chris Hamby as the discuss their new books, Digging our Own Graves and Soul Full of Coal Dust. Employment and production in the Appalachian coal industry have plummeted over recent decades. But the lethal black lung disease, once thought to be near-eliminated, affects miners at rates never before recorded. Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle over Black Lung Disease sets this epidemic in the context of the brutal assault, begun in the 1980s and continued since, on the United Mine Workers of America and the collective power of rank-and-file coal miners in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields. This destruction of militancy and working class power reveals the unacknowledged social and political roots of a health crisis that is still barely acknowledged by the state and coal industry. Barbara Ellen Smith 's essential study, now with an updated introduction and conclusion, charts the struggles of miners and their families from the birth of the Black Lung Movement in 1968 to the present-day importance of demands for environmental justice through proposals like the Green New Deal. Through extensive interviews with participants and her own experiences as an activist, the author provides a vivid portrait of communities struggling for survival against the corporate extraction of labor, mineral wealth, and the very breath of those it sends to dig their own graves. In Soul Full of Coal Dust: A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hamby uncovers the tragic resurgence of black lung disease in Appalachia, its Big Coal cover-up, and the resilient mining communities who refuse to back down. Decades ago, a grassroots uprising forced Congress to enact long-overdue legislation designed to virtually eradicate black lung disease and provide fair compensation to coal miners stricken with the illness. Today, however, both promises remain unfulfilled. Levels of disease have surged, the old scourge has taken an aggressive new form, and ailing miners and widows have been left behind by a dizzying legal system, denied even modest payments and medical care. In this urgent work of investigative journalism, Hamby traces the unforgettable story of how these trends converge in the lives of two men: Gary Fox, a black lung-stricken West Virginia coal miner determined to raise his family from poverty, and John Cline, an idealistic carpenter. ---------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Barbara Ellen Smith is professor of women's and gender studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and the author of Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle over Black Lung Disease. Chris Hamby is an investigative reporter at The New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 2014 and was a finalist for the prize in international reporting in 2017. He has covered a range of subjects, including labor, public health, the environment, criminal justice, politics and international trade. A native of Nashville, Tennessee, he lives and works in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Soul Full of Coal Dust: A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia. ---------------------------------------------------- Get a copy of Digging Our Own Graves here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1521-digging-our-own-graves Get a copy of Soul Full of Coal Dust here: https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/chris-hamby/soul-full-of-coal-dust/9780316299497/ Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/MKjnYpLY0ow Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks