MoNday, June 13th, 3:15 - 4:45pm

Marxist Dependency Theory: Dialectics of Dependency

Facilitators: Tavid Mulder, Ericka Beckman, Pavel Andrade

Required Reading: 

• Ruy Mauro Marini, Dialectics of Dependency 

Suggested Readings: 

• Jaime Osorio, “Dialectics, Superexploitation, and Dependency: Notes on the Dialectics of Dependency” 

• John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis (Chapter 7: Global Labor Arbitrage) 

• Adrián Sotelo Valencia, The Future of Work: Super-Exploitation and Social Precariousness in the 21st Century (Chapter 4: Surplus-Value and the Super-Exploitation of Labour)  

Tuesday, June 14th, 10:45 am - 12:15 pm

Lukács and Aesthetics

Facilitators: Nicholas Brown, Emilio Sauri, and Davis Smith-Brecheisen

Required Readings:

• Lukács, “On Schiller’s Aesthetics”

Suggested Readings:

• Lukács, “Goethe and His Age”

• Lukács, “Young Hegel,” part III

• Hegel, Selections from Aesthetics

Wednesday, June 15th, 3:15 - 4:45 PM

“Periodization without transition”: Reading Transition in Benjamin and Adorno

Facilitators: Matthew Gannon, Ed Graham, Josh Robinson

Required Reading:

•  Walter Benjamin, “Blanqui”; “The Study Begins with Some Reflections on the Influence of Les Fleurs du Mal”; “Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” from Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940

•  Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress”

• Adorno, “Court of Appeal” from Minima Moralia

• Adorno, “Detemporalization of Time”; “Dialectics Cut Short by Hegel”; “Nihilism” from Negative Dialectics

Suggested Reading:

•  Adorno “Parataxis: On Holderlin’s Late Poetry”, “On Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop: A Lecture”

• Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”; “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”;

• Steven Helmling, “Constellation and Critique: Adorno’s Constellation, Benjamin’s Dialectical Image”

• Jewel Spears Brooker, T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination

• Fredric Jameson, The Benjamin Files

Thursday, June 16th, 11 am - 12:30 pm

Race and capitalism

facilitators: Sarika Chandra and Leerom Medovoi

required readings:

• Nancy Fraser, “Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism: A Reply to Michael Dawson” 

• Robert Nichols, Theft is Property!: Dispossession and Critical Theory (“Chapter 2: Marx after the Feast”) 

• Charisse Burden-Stelley, “Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism” 

• Hylton White, “How is Capitalism Racial? Fanon, Critical Theory, and the Fetish of Antiblackness” 

Thursday, june 16th, 1:45 - 3:15 pm

“The Origins of Capitalist Development”: Readings in the Transition Debates

facilitators: Paul Stasi, Bret Benjamin, Amie Zimmerman, Farhana Islam, and Pooya Jamaly

Required Readings:

• Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development”

suggested readings:

• Utsa Patnaik, Agrarian Relations and Accumulation: The ‘Mode of Production’ Debate in India

• Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System”

Friday, june 17th, 1:30 - 3 pm

Transition to Fascism

Facilitators: Giacomo Bianchino, Susan Comfort, Pat Keeton, John Maerhofer, Corinna Mullin, Tony O’Brien

Required readings:

• R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (1934): Chapter XII, pp. 290-309. 

• Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950): The U.S. Anti-Fascism Reader, pp. 193-201. 

• Andreas Malm, “Towards Fossil Fascism?” (2021): White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism, pp. 223-253. 

• Kali Akuno, “Some Thoughts on What Can be Done to Withstand the Neo-Confederate, Neo-Fascist Conquest of Power” (2022), 10 pp.

suggested readings:

• Clara Zetkin, Comintern Resolution on Fascism (1923), 4 pp.

• Georgi Dimitrov, The United Front: The Struggle against Fascism and War (1938): pp. 19-27, 77-88.  

• Black Panther Party, “Call for a United front against Fascism” (1969), 2 pp.