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Indybay Feature

Marx is Back

marx_is_back_1_1_1.jpg
Date:
Monday, April 27, 2009
Time:
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Event Type:
Speaker
Organizer/Author:
Haymarket Books
Location Details:
Laney College
Student Conference Room
Laney Student Center, 4th floor
Oakland, CA

They said that Marx was dead--that capitalism had triumphed. Then came the realities of globalization. Then came endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then came the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Now, Marx's ideas seem to explain the world a lot better than what you see on Fox News.

But Marx also predicted that the inequalities of capitalism would give rise to resistance. And we've only just begun to see the emergence of a new generation of struggles, from the protests for immigrant rights, to the factory occupations of workers in Chicago, to the massive outpouring of solidarity with the people of Gaza and Palestine.

Come to a discussion of Marx's ideas and how they apply to today, and then get involved in helping us to build a movement that puts Marx’s ideas into practice! As Marx himself said, "Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it!"

Featured Speakers:

Ragina Johnson has been a leading activist in the anti-war and Palestinian Solidarity movements. In 2006 she coordinated the successful College Not Combat campaign for Prop. I which passed in S.F. and is currently fighting for LGBT rights and the overturn of Prop. 8. Her recent political studies focus on the face of poverty in the United States, attempting to debunk the politics of personal responsibility.

Sid Patel is a Bay Area socialist activist. He was a founding member of the Campus Antiwar Network, and has also organized for immigrant rights, gay marriage, and against the death penalty. He contributes to SocialistWorker.org, most recently with coverage of the No on Prop 8 demonstrations.
Added to the calendar on Wed, Apr 1, 2009 11:11PM

Comments (Hide Comments)
by Yawner
So let's see here. No one has emerged from the political left to discuss world issues in 150 years? Marx is an anachronism. The societies that were built on his ideas were a crushing failure and caused immense pain, suffering and death. If Marx is back, I hope you're talking about Groucho.

Time for some new ideas. Let's get serious and stop living in the past. Let's actually learn from history and not ignore it. That's the only way the left will gain some traction.
One doesn't have to be a "Marxist" to learn a lot from Marx. Marx himself developed and changed some of his ideas over time, and said that he was not a "Marxist".

Serious critical discussion of Marx's ideas is a lot better point of departure for understanding capitalism today than is the work of all the mainstream economists put together.
by Aaron Aarons
Yawner yawns: "Marx is an anachronism. The societies that were built on his ideas were a crushing failure and caused immense pain, suffering and death."

The socialist countries like the USSR and Mao's China were built on Marx's ideas only in the sense that Franco's Spain, or the Western Christian countries that built their economies on African slavery followed by colonization, were built on Jesus' ideas.

But, to be fair to Stalin and Mao, the crushing SUCCESS of Western imperialism has caused far more pain, suffering and death in the world than they could have begun to match, and more even than Pol Pot, that nationalist fanatic with a left mask (and U.S. support against then-socialist Vietnam), could have caused in several millennia. And, to the extent that the Soviet Union helped Cuba and (in a limited, inconsistent, way) liberation movements and independent governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia, it helped reduce the pain, suffering and death caused by imperialism.
by Aaron Aarons (indy [at] aarons.f-m.fm)
We need both Marx Brothers, Karl and Groucho! We need Karl to help us understand and undermine the world of capital and Groucho to help us laugh at it.
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