3.1 Proletarian Power, Counter Revolution, The Old Mole, and Us

11/1/2025

We will think about the attempted Parisian worker’s revolution of 1848, repression during the Second Empire, the Commune of 1871, and our current troubles.

Further Readings

• Benjamin, Walter. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. The Arcades Project. Harvard. 2014.
• Bernes, Jasper. The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising. Verso 2025.
• Lissagaray, Olivier. The History of the Paris Commune of 1871. Verso. 2012.
• Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte.
• Marx, Karl. The Civil War In France.

3.3 Beginnings of Socialism & Anarchism

12/6/2025

This unit explores early anarchist ideas and key thinkers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It revolves around when and in relation to who and what anarchism becomes a named political philosophy/praxis and explores three themes within classic anarchist texts: power/state, mutual aid/cooperativism, alternative feminisms.

Recommended Readings

• Bakunin, “Power Corrupts the Best” [we will read this during class]
• Kropotkin, “Introduction” to Mutual Aid
• Goldman, “The Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation”

3.2 What is Capitalism?

11/15/2025

We will think about the system that immiserates us.

Further Readings

• Marx, Karl. Capital Volumes 1-3. Ask about recommended translations and editions.

3.4 Transatlanticism & Racial Capitalism

1/17/2026

This session explores the historical context around and continued utility of anti-racist and anti-colonial thought and action. We will discuss the oft-forgotten Haitian intellectual and political agitator, Anténor Firmin (1850-1911). Focusing on his 1885 treatise “The Equality of the Human Races,” written as direct countertext during the heyday of 19th century race science, we can ask questions both about how to place him globally in critical race and anti-colonial thought, position him specifically within the local/global vantage point of a free black Haiti, and ask what utility remains in his debunking of the basic premises of race science in an era defined by a return to overtly racist thinking in the form of fascist anti-immigration policies, “white genocide” paranoia, and politicized misrepresentations of human variation along racial lines. We will also think about a more localized US “Midwest” history through the lens of Native American resistance and look at efforts to form a pan-native confederacy by the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa (The Prophet) to contain settler colonial expansion westward during the early post revolutionary period of the US, also to ask ontological-spiritual questions about who or what constitutes a political actor or what exercises political agency, since Tecumseh was also a “celestial panther.”

Recommended Readings

• Anténor Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races (chapters 6 “Artificial Ranking of the Human Races” and 17 “The Role of the Black Race in the History of Civilization” in particular)
• Philip Deloria, “Defiance”

5.1 Land or Death: Liberationist Lessons from the Andes in the 1960s

2/21/2026

When Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, thousands of Indigenous peasants in the Peruvian Andes were mobilizing to recover their lands. These lands were exploited for centuries by colonial representatives or criollo families. One percent of the population owned 80% of the territory. Haciendas and plantations alike employed semi-slavery, debt peonage, land rentals, and various other mechanisms to extract free labor from indios for the construction of buildings, roads, and domestic service.

The peasants’ land occupations and national mobilization culminated in the Agrarian Reform of 1969. Rethinking the political potencies of the 1960s in this context—illuminated in the pamphlet Land or Death: Hugo Blanco and the Peasant Struggle in Peru, published by the Young Socialist Alliance of New York in 1967—this workshop aims to explore questions such as:

• What was the U.S. counterinsurgent role in this historical episode?
• How does the pamphlet organize a vision of internationalism?
• What challenges does this Indigenous liberation movement pose to Euro-American theorizations of the 1960s?
• How did aesthetic representations in film and visual imagery shape this peasant revolution?
• In a present of techno-feudalism, how can we extrapolate this recent past of feudal labor and anti-indigenous domination for capitalist extraction?

Further Readings

• TBD

6.1 Capitalism & Desire

3/21/2026

Relationship between Marx & Freud. Marcuse & One-Dimensional Man. Situationist International. Colonization of everyday life. Fantasy and surplus repression. Negative vs. positive concepts of desire. The turn to the Grundrisse. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Fanon and sociogeny.

Further Readings

• TBD

6.3 Black Power & Towards a Black International

5/16/2026

Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. The League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression. Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the International African Friends of Abyssinia. George Padmore, CLR James, and the International African Service Bureau. Black membership in the Communist Party. Wave of labor struggles in the Caribbean and West Africa in the 1930s and 40s. Du Bois and Black radical historiography. Nkrumah and the Fifth Pan-African Congress. Bandung Conference.

Recommended Readings

• TBD

6.2 May 1968 & Its Afterlives

4/18/2026

Revolt of 1968 in France. Student-Worker Action Committees. Operaismo and Autonomia in Italy. Italy’s Hot Autumn. Jacques Cammatte & Invariance. Gilles Dauvé. Early history of the anti-globalization movement and the rise of insurrectionary politics. Lotta Feminista & social reproduction theory. Communization.

Further Readings

• TBD