Saturday, January 30 @ 12:00 pm
Via Zoom
Register here at least 12 hours in advance!
Join the second meeting of PSL Indy’s Revolutionary Reading Group! In this class, we discuss revolutionary socialism and the path to real victory against the exploitation and oppression of capitalism and imperialism.
After nearly a century of pervasive anti-communism, anti-radicalism, and anti-progress politics, the fog of revolutionary politics is lifting.
It’s no longer taboo to describe oneself as a socialist; the term is spoken openly in the press; and even a major contender for the 2016 and 2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination described himself as a “democratic socialist.” Yet what exactly is socialism–is it a welfare state, is it social democracy, a boogeyman of big government usurping your “freedom,” or a revolutionary way of organizing society? And how can we achieve it here in the U.S.? Can it be done by working within the two-party system, trying to win local, state, and federal elections, or building a revolutionary Party?
We also look at the relationship between the violence of the oppressor and the violence of the oppressed who are merely resisting the violence of the oppressor. We will visit Frantz Fanon’s theory of violence and Ward Churchill’s critique of pacifism.
These are not just theoretical questions, but ones that bear immediately on the words and actions, and strategies and tactics of a reviving socialist movement in the U.S. In this class, we study the differences between social democracy, democratic socialism, and scientific socialism. By locating these different trends in theory, history, and the present, we uncover why scientific socialism is the only answer to the deepening crises of capitalism. We also examine what it takes to build a revolutionary movement for scientific socialism in the contemporary U.S. context.Readings (text and lots of audio) are available here.
