Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay INSANE DIALECTICAL POSSE present:
WORLD CAPITALIST CRISIS & PROSPECTS FOR A RADICAL RESPONSE
Los Angeles event:
Saturday, August 28, 2010 at 7:00 p.m.
Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park
4800 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90027 (directions)
Presentation by Loren Goldner, to be followed by discussion:
That world capitalism is in a profound crisis is no secret, especially in hard-hit areas such as California. But a radical response requires an understanding of the deep, “epochal” causes of the crisis, beyond now-mainstream banter about financialization or sub-prime or Wall Street bailouts and bonuses. What has happened since 2008 is merely an acceleration of the “slow motion” crisis that has been with us in reality since the late 1960’s/early 1970’s. The crisis is global, and the response to it must ultimately be global.
Loren will give an overview of this decades-long crisis and its deepening in the past three years, and discuss what must be done to avoid the obvious capitalist “solutions” to it, which are much greater austerity and possibly a major war. He will talk about some attempts to organize against the crisis, such as in Greece or California or the recent strikes in China.
Quote:
Loren Goldner is a writer based in New York. He lived in South Korea from 2005 to 2009 working on a book on the Korean working class. He is an editor of the new on-line journal Insurgent Notes.
Much of his work is available on the Break Their Haughty Power web site
To have a more focused discussion, people attending might look at these recent articles by Goldner on the crisis:
Global Leveraged Buyout or the ‘Longest Boom in Capitalist History’
The Biggest October Surprise of All: A World Capitalist Collapse
Oakland event:
Tuesday, August 31, 2010, at 7:00 p.m.
Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library
6501 Telegraph Avenue (at 65th Street), Oakland
(510) 595-7417
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Monday, September 6 (Labor Day), 2010 at 6:00 p.m.
Loren Goldner will present on his book:
Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic Man. Race, Class and the Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology in an American Renaissance Writer, (2006). ISBN 0-9700-308-2-7. 291 p.
In Europe, after 1848, bourgeois consciousness in revolt sought a new universal in the working class but soon found itself in the orbit of the state civil service; in America, bourgeois consciousness in revolt found a new universal in what Melville called “antemosaic” reality, Queequeg, embodied in the multiracial working class, the “anacharsis Cloots deputation,” in radical antithesis to the state. Through a series of scholarly, linked essays, Goldner examines the works of Melville, the dispossessed grand bourgeois, and his treatment of race and class. The 1848-1850 conjuncture in the Atlantic world witnessed the birth of communism (Marx), modern art (Courbet, Flaubert), the end of classical political economy, and the formulation of the entropy law, or Second Law of Thermodynamics. Their simultaneity was not accidental, and Melville’s work echoes each of them. Echoing the work of CLR James, this is a majestic, multidisciplinary sweep through history, culture, politics, philosophy and art.
Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library
6501 Telegraph Avenue (at 65th Street), Oakland
(510) 595-7417