This ten-session study group (starting My 21st) looks at three foundational materialist studies of capitalist development–all written by revolutionaries. In the previous study group, where we read Marx’s Capital over the series of eleven sessions, we covered the fundamental laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production, inseparable as they are from the mode of production’s historical development. In this study group we see Marx’s method of historical materialism applied to the world-system as it develops roughshod through the 20th century.
Each study session’s direction and substance will be dictated by the collective present that day. Each session will be nominally led by a participating member, who will prepare questions/quotes/problematics/connections or other material to provide structure and direction as needed.
Rationale: Why should a tenant union study these three texts, which together say very little directly about tenancy or housing? Because of what these texts are and do. In each of these books we encounter a dedicated revolutionary detailing the endlessly complex web of dynamics, relations and histories that compose the landscape into which each was, as a revolutionary, intervening! We, as tenant organizers in Brooklyn Eviction Defense, encounter a deeply complex, contradicting landscape with each building we walk into, not to mention the block, neighborhood and borough. It is our responsibility–particularly as socialist tenant organizers–to hone our methods of analysis and to understand how the terrains we operate in are situated both in terms of contemporary dynamics of accumulation and their historical development.