Point of View Speaker Series:

Challenging Perspectives on Current Issues
Winter-Spring 2012

NOTE LOCATION: Our lectures are held at the Sol Collective, 2574 21st Street, Sacramento, CA (1 blk south of Broadway)
7:00pm–9:00pm

Book cover, love and struggle
Book Cover:
"Love and Struggle"

Thursday, January 26

Occupying Radical History: the lessons of the Weather Underground for today's activists. This presentation by Terry Bisson and Donna Willmott, is based on Love and Struggle, the just published memoir of David Gilbert (currently serving a life sentence for his activities with the Weather Underground and Black Liberation Army).

An award winning SF author and biographer of Mumia Abu Jamal, Terry Bisson is also the editor of Love and Struggle.

Donna Willmott is a long-time anti-imperialist activist. She was part of the WUO, and later spent 10 years as part of a clandestine anti-imperialist network. She was in prison in the mid-nineties for her activities in support of the Puerto Rican independence movement, and has done work in support of political prisoners and prisoners’ rights since her release.

Thursday, February 16

Foreclosure Sign

Empty Homes and Homeless People. This presentation by Richard Becker focuses on the current U.S. housing crisis to demonstrate the "criminal absurdity" of the capitalist system. In 2010, there were more than 18.7 million vacant housing units in the country, while millions are homeless, or living doubled-up in overcrowded conditions.

Richard Becker is Western Regional Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition and is with the Party for Socialism and Liberation. For more on Becker's analysis of the housing crisis, see this article.

Thursday, March 29 (this is the FIFTH Thursday)

Sex, Race and Class— The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011. An evening with Selma James and Andaiye.

Selma James

In 1972 Selma James set out a new political perspective. Her starting point was the millions of unwaged women who, working in the home and on the land, were not seen as “workers” and their struggles viewed as outside of the class struggle. Based on her political training in the Johnson-Forest Tendency, founded by her late husband C.L.R. James, on movement experience South and North, and on a respectful study of Marx, she redefined the working class to include sectors previously dismissed as “marginal,” coining the word "unwaged" to describe the caring work women do.

Andaiye is co-founder and international coordinator of Red Thread in Guyana, which brings low-income women together despite often violent racial divides, and campaigns for a living income for the poorest women and their families; protection and justice for women and children in voilent situations; and the political visibility and voice of grassroots women. In 2007 she and Selma toured the US together to much acclaim.

Sex, Race and Class, the newly published selection of Selma James's writings, traces the development of this perspective in the course of building an international campaigning network. The book will be available for sale at this event. More...

Thursday, April 19

West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California.

West of Eden cover

Iain Boal will present, with illustrations, the "West of Eden"
project, a seven year joint research effort by the Institute of International Studies, Berkeley and the Mendocino Institute - using ethnography, oral histories, memoirs and archival collections - aiming to describe and to understand the origins, trajectory and legacies of the extraordinary burst of communal energies in the San Francisco Bay Area and its hinterland during the 60s and 70s. The fruits of the research will be published in March 2012 as West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California, inaugurating the Retort imprint of PM Press.

Iain A. Boal is an Irish social historian of science, technics and the commons associated with the Retort group. He is co-editor (with Janferie Stone, Michael Watts and Cal Winslow) of West of Eden (PM Press: Oakland, 2012), and author of The Green Machine (Notting Hill Editions: London, 2012), a concise history of the bicycle in planetary perspective. He is co-director (with Pauline van Mounik Broekman, Anthony Davies and Howard Slater) of the MayDay Rooms, a syndicalist 'archiving from below' project. He is affiliated with UC Berkeley and Birkbeck, University of London. In 2005/6 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in Science and Technology.

Thursday, May 17

Capitalism and the Internet. Join us for a discussion of "The Internet's Unholy Marriage to Capitalism," a panel discussion of the issues raised in the Monthly Review article of the same name. We'll discuss Lauderdale's Paradox, privatization of the Internet, its current status and conditions imposed upon writers, with an esteemed panel of journalists:

Dan Bacher, a writer for Alternet, and a long-time activist with deep ties to the environmental and Native American communities.
Dan Gougherty, a blogger since 2002, operator of ElkGroveNews.net since 2005. Gougherty has 20 years of editorial and advertising experinece in print media.
Rebecca Rosen Lum, who was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in beat reporting at the Contra Costa Times. Lum chairs the Pacific Media Workers Guild's freelance unit.

Read the article.

Additional readings:

The Marxist School of Sacramento