Calendar
Welcome curious threads!
Only 8 seats open for this course!
Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88083342274
In The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, Carlos L. Garrido provides a comprehensive development of his concept of the purity fetish, tracing the outlook to the Eleatic school of Ancient Greek philosophy, and showing how it has appeared in 20th century Western Marxism and in contemporary U.S. socialism. In every form the purity fetish takes in Western Marxism’s politics, Garrido argues that one finds not only the failure to obtain truth, but also the inability to create a revolutionary movement. Garrido asserts that today the critique (and overcoming) of the purity fetish is an indispensable task in the fight for the development of subjective conditions for revolution.
Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy teacher at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Director at the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis, and author of various books including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (Forthcoming 2024).
October 8th, 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm Via Zoom: please see the access info below
Green Sundays are a series of free public programs & discussions on topics “du jour” sponsored by the Green Party of Alameda County and held on the 2nd Sunday of each month. The monthly business meeting of the County Council of the Green Party follows at 7:00 pm, after a 30-minute break. Council meetings are open to anyone who is interested.
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88083342274
Meeting ID: 880 8334 2274
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+1 669 900 9128 US (San Jose)
Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/k39IUnw59
Our hometown CA *Bay Area premiere*! FINDING THE MONEY will be featured as the Closing Night Film of the Green Film Festival of San Francisco.
A major event Co-Presented by DocLands, Berkeley Film Foundation, and Filmmakers Collaborative SF.
Filmmakers in attendance for reception.
Can a new economic theory revolutionize our ability to tackle the climate crisis?
An underdog group of economists is on a mission to instigate a paradigm shift, by flipping our understanding of the national debt — and the nature of money — upside down.
With a ‘debt ceiling’ debate and threat of default taking over headlines for the past six months in the US, many people find themselves asking – what is the national debt anyways? And why would the issuer of the US dollar ever need to borrow US dollars in the first place? With the enormous challenges of climate change and humanely caring for people on the horizon, the biggest obstacle presented is usually the question: ‘But how will we pay for it?” and “Where will we find the money?” According to Stephanie Kelton, face of the new economic theory known as “Modern Monetary Theory” or MMT, those aren’t the right questions to be asking a currency issuing nation. She asserts ‘Finding the money’ to pay for public priorities is never actually the problem — but real constraints are — namely real resources, labor, and inflation.
MMT bursts into the mainstream media, with journalists asking, “Have we been thinking about how the government spends money, all wrong?”
Top economists and politicians from across the political spectrum condemn the theory as “voodoo economics”, “crazy” and “a crackpot theory”. FINDING THE MONEY traces the conflict all the way back to the story we tell about money, injecting new hope and empowering democracies to tackle the biggest challenges of the 21st century and build the world we can envision.
Co-presented by the Berkeley Film Foundation, Doclands, and The Film Collaborative
Our live series, Berkeleyside Idea Makers, returns Oct. 19 with a powerful conversation with influential leaders who are driving change for equity.
In 2001, Dalit activism and caste discrimination in the U.S. were thrust into the spotlight when a Berkeley landlord was convicted of sex trafficking young Dalit women from India. Over two decades later, Assembly Bill 403 — prohibiting caste discrimination in California — is making its way through the legislative process.
Join us for a captivating conversation that delves deep into the core of this important bill while examining how caste continues to impact people living in the South Asian diaspora and how the ongoing fight to eradicate caste apartheid intertwines with other civil rights movements in the U.S.
Berkeleyside’s Supriya Yelimeli will guide this dynamic discussion with journalist Sonia Paul, state Senator Aisha Wahab and Equality Labs founder Thenmozhi Soundararajan to understand the contemporary context of caste, Dalit activism and civil rights in America.
This event will take place at the David Brower Center. Doors open at 6 p.m. and the program will start promptly at 6:30 p.m. Berkeleyside would like to thank Red Oak Realty and Kaiser Permanente for their generous sponsorship support of Idea Makers.
Prepare to be enlightened, engaged and inspired.
More about our guests:
Senator Aisha Wahab: Born in New York City, to Afghan refugees pursuing the American Dream, Aisha Wahab was placed in foster care when tragedy struck her family before she could tie her own shoes. Senator Wahab prioritizes policies that impact the lives of seniors, women, and children; addressing housing affordability, civic engagement, education, and economic inequality. She served as a Hayward Councilmember, Chair of the Alameda County Human Relations Commission, Women’s March organizer, and a non-profit Board Member for several Bay Area organizations. She was also selected as a member of the White House Roundtable of Afghan-American Leaders. She received her B.A. from San Jose State University and an MBA from CSU East Bay, and is currently California State Senator for District 10.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan is a Dalit American artist, theorist, and activist who works on the issues of race, caste and gender equity. She is the Executive Director of Equality Labs and the author of The Trauma of Caste. She is a co-founder of the Californians for Caste Equity Coalition which brought hundreds of organizations and thousands of Californians together to work on the historic bill SB403 to end caste discrimination.
Sonia Paul teaches audio storytelling at Solano State Prison with KALW’s Uncuffed, a training program and podcast based in California prisons. As an independent journalist, writer and producer, she specializes in investigating how power hierarchies and transnational issues impact state systems and individual and community identity. Her stories have published widely, in outlets like WIRED, Mother Jones, Harper’s, National Geographic, 70 Million and the BBC World Service. Sonia has received several grants and fellowships to support her work, including from the Periplus Writing Collective, AAJA, SAJA, International Women’s Media Foundation, Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Religion News Foundation, Fund for Investigative Journalism and Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. Previously based in Japan and India, Sonia is a Bay Area native. She lives in Oakland.
Supriya Yelimeli is a housing and homelessness reporter for Berkeleyside and joined the staff in May 2020 after contributing reporting since 2018 as a freelance writer. Yelimeli grew up in Fremont and has written for outlets across the Bay Area and Southern California, including as a breaking news reporter for Bay City News, and a contributor at Mission Local, NBC Los Angeles and the Pacific Coast Business Times. Yelimeli earned her undergraduate degree at UC Santa Barbara where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Nexus. She’s always reachable by Twitter and email for tips, criticism and all other feedback.
Berkeleyside thanks Red Oak Realty and Kaiser Permanente for their generous sponsorship support of Idea Makers.
Email strike.debt.bay.area@gmail.com a few days beforehand for the online invite.
For our October meeting we are reading Parts 5 and 6 of Jackson Rising Redux: Building the Future in the Present. (PM Press, Amazon)
Mississippi is the poorest state in the US, with the highest percentage of Black people and a history of vicious racial terror. Black resistance at a time of global health, economic, and climate crisis is the backdrop and context for the drama captured in this new and revised collection of essays. Cooperation Jackson, founded in 2014 in Mississippi’s capital to develop an economically uplifting democratic “solidarity economy,” is anchored by a network of worker-owned, self-managed cooperative enterprises. The organization developed in the context of the historic election of radical Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, lifetime human rights attorney. Subsequent to Lumumba’s passing less than one year after assuming office, the network developed projects both inside and outside of the formal political arena. In 2020, Cooperation Jackson became the center for national and international coalition efforts, bringing together progressive peoples from diverse trade union, youth, church, and cultural movements. This long-anticipated anthology details the foundations behind those successful campaigns. It unveils new and ongoing strategies and methods being pursued by the movement for grassroots-centered Black community control and self-determination, inspiring partnership and emulation across the globe.
Strike Debt Bay Area hosts this non-technical book group discussion monthly on new and radical economic thinking. Previous readings have included Doughnut Economics, Limits, Banking on the People, Capital and Its Discontents, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century, The Deficit Myth, Revenge Capitalism, the Edge of Chaos blog symposium , Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, The Optimist’s Telescope, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, Exploring Degrowth, The Origin of Wealth, Mine!, The Dawn of Everything A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Beyond Money, Less is More, Cannibal Capitalism, Debt, the First 5000 Years , Poverty, By America,, and End Times.