Concerning Violence, Riots, and Mindless Criminality: Can Frantz Fanon help us understand the 2011 UK riots?

IMPORTANT: Due to unforeseen circumstances, this meeting will now take place on Tuesday 18 October, 7pm, SOAS – room B320 of the Brunei Gallery building.

August 2011 saw rioting and looting spread across London and several other UK cities. In the context of the worst social unrest London has seen in decades, the SOAS Counterfire Reading Group will meet on Tuesday 11 October, at 6.30pm in room B101 of the Brunei Gallery building, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Russell Square, London, for a discussion of the riots in relation to the writing of Frantz Fanon.

The meeting is open to anyone. You can read The Wretched of the Earth online at http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=9701586. We will start our discussion of Fanon and the riots in relation to the following 3 questions: 1) Riotous lumpens or violent youth? 2) Race or class? 3) What role for intellectuals and the organised left?

Frantz Fanon’s 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth was written during and in relation to the Algerian struggle for independence from colonial rule. Fanon argues that revolutionary groups should look to the lumpenproletariat as a revolutionary force, because only this group has sufficient independence from the colonial power to successfully rise up and expel them. In Marxist theory, the lumpenproletariat is a term used to describe the lowest stratum of the working class, especially criminals, vagrants, the unemployed and others with no stake in the existing system. Much of Marxist theory assumes that the lumpenproletariat cannot be a revolutionary force because they lack class consciousness. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon challenges this view through an in-depth discussion of the psyche of different classes under colonialism.

Re-examining Marxism: 27 June

After a 6-month hiatus, the London Marxist Reading Group will be meeting on 27 June, 7-9pm in room 389 in the main SOAS building in Russell Square. The focus of this meeting will be a discussion around the topic outlined in the short text Reexamining Marxism. As preparation for the meeting, people attending the meeting are invited to read the first chapter of Terry Eagleton’s new book Why Marx was right (click here for a review in the Guardian) and a text by Seymour titled “Critical Notes on the ‘Death of Communism’ and the Ideological Conditions of the Post-Soviet World” (Workers Vanguard No 949, 1 January 2010). Eagleton’s book is probably an easier read, and available online at http://library.nu/docs/MLWQCB1G80/Why%20Marx%20Was%20Right. Alternatively, if you write to me at brendandonegan AT hotmail.com I can probably get you a 10% discount on Eagleton’s book.

Cheers

Brendan

Reference:

Why Marx Was Right [Hardcover]
Terry Eagleton
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press, New Haven and London; 1St Edition edition (April 12, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0300169434
ISBN-13: 978-0300169430

Vote now to re-elect Clare Solomon

It’s been an exceptional year for the student movement, with the biggest student protests ever and a near-unprecedented wave of occupations. ULU was at the absolute centre of it all, organising the 9 December demonstration on the day of the tuition fees vote, when 30,000 marched in defence of education (and despite NUS telling them not to). It’s provided a space for activists to organise, including the London Student Assembly and the new Justice Movement. And its President, Clare Solomon, has stood up for students against all comers – whether Jeremy Paxman or Nick Clegg.

So the elections are very important. There are three excellent candidates standing for the full-time positions:

Clare Solomon for President, current ULU President and leading anti-cuts, anti-fees campaigner;
Sean Rillo Razcka for Vice President, current chair at Birkbeck Students’ Union, NUS NEC member – Sean has been absolutely central to building the movement in London
Hesham Zakai for editor London Student – Hesham promises an independent, campaigning newspaper for London Students.

The deadline for voting in the elections for University of London Union is 12 noon today. It is crucial that London students vote to re-elect Clare Solomon. Voting is online, and dead easy – you should have been sent details and your password (search your inbox for “ULU admin” if you can’t find them) but email elect2011@ulu.lon.ac.uk if there are problems.

Value, Price and Profit (over and over again)

After a couple of cancelled meetings, the Marxist Reading Group will meet on Tuesday 15 February to discuss Marx’s pamphlet ‘Value, Price and Profit’. It’s a relatively short pamphlet first delivered as a speech to the International Working Men’s Association and is an excellent introduction to Marx’s ideas about the capitalist economy and how it works, much shorter than Capital Vol. I but containing many of the same arguments.  

You can read the pamphlet for free online and the wonderful people at the Marxist Internet Archive have also put together a study guide highlighting questions raised by the text.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/index.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/guide.htm

The meeting is 7-9pm, Tuesday 15 February, room FG05 (in the Faber building, ask at SOAS reception for directions).

Value, Price and Profit

The Marxist Reading Group will start the new year be looking at Marx’s pamphlet ‘Value, Price and Profit’. It’s a relatively short pamphlet first delivered as a speech to the International Working Men’s Association and is an excellent introduction to Marx’s ideas about the capitalist economy and how it works, much shorter than Capital Vol. I but containing many of the same arguments.

You can read the pamphlet for free online and the wonderful people at the Marxist Internet Archive have also put together a study guide highlighting questions raised by the text.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/index.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/guide.htm

The meeting is 7-9pm, Tuesday 18 January, room FG05 (in the Faber building, ask at SOAS reception for directions).

Value, Price and Profit

 At the next meeting of the reading group we will be looking at Marx’s pamphlet Value, Price and Profit, a relatively short pamphlet first delivered as a speech to the International Working Men’s Association and is an excellent introduction to Marx’s ideas about the capitalist economy and how it works, much shorter than Capital vol. 1 but contains many of the same arguments. Its relevance to understanding the total failure of free-market capitalism in recent years is obvious.

You can read the pamphlet for free online and the wonderful people at the Marxist Internet Archive have also put together a study guide highlighting questions raised by the text.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/guide.htm

 

The meeting is 7-9pm, Tuesday 23 November, room FG05 (in the Faber building, ask at SOAS reception for directions).

Over and Over Again – Book Launch

You might find this interesting. Or you might not. Just google Jan Sowa for his marxist bits.
best,
k

 

 

The Edgware Road Project

 

 

Saturday 13 November, 2-5pm

Possible Exchanges: Over and Over Again

Book launch, screening and discussion

Centre for  Possible Studies

64 Seymour Street, W1H 5BW

Free

 

 

 

As part of a series of events concerning the role of art in political struggle, Aneta Szyłak and Jan Sowa, editors of the book Over and Over Again: 1989–2009, will be joined by scholar Tim Beasley-Murray to discuss the history of cultural action as it recurs in contemporary Poland and the UK. The discussion will be accompanied by a screening of the film The Major, or the Revolt of the Dwarves by Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz. 

 

Booking is essential.

Contact

amalk@serpentinegallery.org

Organised in collaboration with:

 

Harry Cleaver “Reading Capital Politically”

Next week we will be discussing “Reading Capital Politically” by Harry Cleaver, a study of Vol. I of Marx’s Capital. Cleaver is a Professor of Economics at the University of Texas and through his book seeks to rescue Capital from the confines of academia and rediscover it as a political tool. Cleaver is an autonomist Marxist and so his interpretation is controversial.

There’s a copy in the library or you can read the whole thing online: http://libcom.org/library/reading-capital-politically-cleaver

The meeting is on 9 November, 7-9pm, room FG05 (in the Faber building). Our discussion will focus on the introduction to Cleaver’s book, and make linkages to what is going on in wider society today.

Blurb for the new academic year

The Marxist Reading Group was set up in November 2009 as a space for discussing Marxist writings and ideas. We meet fortnightly, discussing a different text each time. We welcome anyone, whatever your experience, background, or perspective. Most of those who attend are students and/or actively involved with various political organisations and parties, taking theory from lecture rooms and trying to put it into practice on the streets. We want to understand and interpret the world in order to change it – if you do too, come along to our meetings and check this blog for information, theory and events.

In the 2009/10 academic year we had meetings discussing the following:

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx On the Jewish Question

Karl Marx Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Friedrich Engels The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

V.I. Lenin The State and Revolution

Georg Lukacs History and Class Consciousness

Antonio Gramsci Selections from the Prison Notebooks

Paulo Freire Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Our first event of the 2010/11 academic year is a talk by Michael Albert, co-author of ‘ParEcon: Life After Capitalism‘, co-founder of ZCommunications and leading US social activist. Michael Albert will present ‘Participatory Economics’, a vision for a type of democratic economy based on equitable co-operation that is put forward as an alternative to capitalism and also to other 20^th-century systems that have gone under the label ‘socialism’. It includes new institutions that seek to foster self-management, equity, diversity and solidarity. Parecon is a direct and natural outgrowth of hundreds of years of struggle for economic justice as well as contemporary efforts with their accumulated wisdom and lessons. This meeting will take place on Wednesday October 20^th, 7-9pm, in room B111 at SOAS.

Marxist Reading Group at SOAS Freshers Fayre and first meeting of academic year‏

Is anyone available to help host a stall for the Marxist Reading Group student society at the SOAS Freshers’ Fayre this Saturday? As far as I know the idea is that the stall should be there from 10-4 in the SOAS main building so that interested students can sign up to join the society and get into long rambling discussions if they so wish. It would be great if you could let me know if you want to help for an hour or more.

I anticipate that now that the academic year has started we can have a reading group meeting at some point in the next couple of weeks. Let me know if you have any preference for days, times, or topics/texts for discussion.