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Previously Read:
Confronting Climate Coloniality: Decolonizing Pathways for Climate Justice by Farhana Sultana
Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change by Tad DeLay
Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World by Jairus Victor Grove
Capitalism in the Web of Life by Jason W. Moore
How to Blow Up A Pipeline by Andreas Malm
Climate Change as Class War by Matt Huber

Climate change, global boiling, environmental disaster, dying forests, poisoned waters, collapsing ecosystems, ecocide, climate anxiety, climate depression, the deliberate and negligent destruction of our home planet. Humans are part of the environment yet we find ourselves in dominion of our world’s ecosystem by capitalists and not as curators of it. You feel it, we feel it.

This reading group of LBC seeks to discuss Capitalism and the forces it fuels to destroy the environment and the lives within it. Together we can challenge nihilism and doomerism by expanding our knowledge of our natural world, how it’s paying the price of the actions and decisions of the bourgeoisie, and what actions we can take as the working class in the face of the ongoing crisis.

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Previously Read:
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature by various authors
Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others by Sara Ahmed

Queerness as a concept has morphed from a general association of ‘otherness’ into what is contemporaneously bound by partitioned limits of gender/sexuality. While this certainly is important, this effectively pushes out other ‘otherizations’ outside of ‘queerness’ and segments them into their own, isolated conceptions. In practice, different axes of otherness affect and inform each other and the resultant class experience in ways that cannot be explained under just their constituents (independently or additively); what is required is a holistic perspective of their queerness in its entirety to examine how their class experience emerges and is mediated.

As an additional point, queerness as understood as just gender/sexuality is particularly susceptible to homo-nationalism under neoliberal capitalism’s ever-expanding crusade to appropriate: all that is anti-capitalist melts into capitalism. This then transforms even just conceptions of gender/sexuality (itself a partitioning of gender-sexuality) towards a white, colonial ontology (binarism, cissexism, transmisogyny, etc.) which erases indigenous/pre-colonial understandings and histories of gender-sexuality. A goal of this reading group is not to simply expand the notion of queerness outside of gender/sexuality but to let those other otherizations double-back and expand notions of gender-sexuality.

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Previously Read:
Book: Selections From the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci
Imperialism; the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladimir Lenin
Caliban and the Witch; Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici
Mute Compulsion by Søren Mau
The Mass Strike by Rosa Luxemburg
Capital Vol. 1 by Karl Marx (up to Part 4)
The Origins of the Family by Frederick Engels
Critique of the Gotha Programby Karl Marx
The Civil War in France by Karl Marx
Wage Labor and Capital / Value, Price, and Profitby Karl Marx
State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparteby Karl Marx
Socialism: Utopian and Scientificby Frederick Engels

Socialists grouping together and talking about ideas has a long tradition. Marx and Engels were immersed in the socialist intellectual milieu that extended across France, England and much of Europe. Rosa Luxemburg led socialist reading groups and classes in Germany and Poland in the early 19th century. Vladimir Lenin strongly believed that “We must make books accessible to the masses as soon as possible.”

There is precious little space in our society for political reflection and political development. Reading together provides us with the opportunity to do so on a collective basis, and reading foundational leftist theory is a way to provide us with ideas and tools from the long rich socialist tradition that better equip us to take on the struggles of today. By reading and discussing the seminal works of the socialist tradition together we can better forge links between history and the present and connect the sometimes disparate struggles we are engaged in. 

Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the other foundational authors we read in this group offer powerful theories of political economy. Despite the differences our historical distance from their time creates, understanding these writings gives us analytical tools that still resonate in our current world.

Although Marx wrote in another country, at another time and under different conditions affecting the struggling working class, we can still use Marx’s writings on economic and political theory to understand the specific practical problems of the ongoing struggle against the depredations of capitalism.

As Lenin wrote, “Three keys to success: read, read, read.”

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Previously Read:
Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lecan by Alenka Zupancic
All Thoughts are Equal: Laurelle and Nonhuman Philosophy, by John Ó Maoilearca.
Emancipation after Hegel by Todd McGowan
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Health Communism by Beatrice Adler
Ghosts of My Past by Mark Fisher
Burnout Society by Byung Chul-Han
Capitalism and Disability:Selected Writings by Marta Russell
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary
Lost Connections by Johann Hari
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher

This club aims to read, discuss and learn from books that apply critiques of capitalist society to how it creates, worsens, and perpetuates mental illness, addiction, and disability (MIAD), and how it creates a class character among the people with such conditions. Especially under US cultural norms and capitalism, these conditions are attributed to individualized causes, such as moral failings, dysfunctional interpersonal relationships, or a poorly understood disease model of the human brain’s neurochemistry. The readings should aim to understand the underclass/lumpen MIAD in terms of broader, external societal level issues manufactured by capitalism, globalization, propaganda technology, and imperialism, and trace how it connects to MIAD conditions. Within this scope is also critique of the profit motives driving the psychological, psychiatric, medical, and addiction treatment establishments, and exploration of methods of true liberation that addresses the internal and external causes of MIAD conditions.

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The Real Shit group is dedicated to shorter pieces – articles, long form essays, analyses, etc. – to discuss current affairs, political economy, theory, geopolitics, climate breakdown and action, among many other contemporary matters. Readings can be a single piece or multiple smaller, and related pieces.

History is moving rather quickly these days, we will get together and make sense of it!