The World Transformed 2018

22nd - 25th September
Liverpool

Reading groups

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Deconstructing Neoliberalism: An Easy Morning Reading Group
Organised by Jeremy Gilbert. 9:00-10:00 in Baltic Creative Shed on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday

Neoliberalism isn’t just an economic programme. It’s a whole world-view, that has very particular ideas about how we should live. Over three days, we’ll look at one reading per session, covering the ways in which neoliberal ideology tries to turn us into competitive entrepreneurs in every aspect of our lives; how it tries to convince us that the social elite deserve their privilege; and how it even co-opts the language of feminism.

Sunday: Stuart Hall and Alan O’Shea, ‘Common-Sense Neoliberalism’
Monday: Jo Littler, ‘Meritocracy: the great delusion that ingrains inequality’
Tuesday: Catherine Rottenberg, ‘How neoliberalism colonised feminism – and what you can do about it’

Eco-Corbynism Reading Group
Organised by New Socialist. 11:00-12:30 in Black-E Gallery on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday

What would the convergence of the labour movement and the ecology movements that Raymond Williams called for in 1984 look like today and what are the blockages that need to be overcome? How can we ground contemporary eco-socialism in anti-imperialist, anti-racist and feminist as well as class struggles? We will explore these questions through reading texts from Williams, Mies, Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel and Andreas Malm.

Sunday: Raymond Williams, Ecology and the Labour Movement
Raymond Williams, “Ecology and the Labour Movement”, talk available here
Raymond Williams, “Socialism and Ecology” in Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism
Monday: Eco-Feminism
Maria Mies, “The Dialectics of ‘Progress and Retrogression’” and “Subordination of Women, Nature and Colonies: The underground of capitalist patriarchy or civilized society”, first two parts of Chapter 3 of Patriarchy and Capital Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, available here
Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, “Why We Wrote this Book Together”, Introduction to Ecofeminism
Sheena Wilson, “Energy Imaginaries: Feminist and Decolonial Futures” in Materialism and The Critique of Energy, available here
Tuesday: Contemporary Eco-Marxism
John Bellamy Foster, “The Long Ecological Revolution” in Monthly Review available here
Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, “How the chicken nugget became the true symbol of our era” from the Guardian, available here
Andrew Key, “Eco-Socialism or Eco-Barbarism” in New Socialist, available here

Reading Group on Anti-Semitism
9:00-10:00 in Black-E Meeting Room on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday

The left needs to understand antisemitism much better in order to fight it better. This reading group will explore the history of antisemitism and discuss how and why it continues to pollute societies today - we will read texts that help us think more carefully about the problem of antisemitism and texts that fail to grapple with the problem so that we can discuss what's wrong with them. The World Transformed doesn't endorse everything in these texts, but we will use them to show how the left sometimes fails to take antisemitism seriously, as well as the limits of some of the thinking about antisemitism today. The reading group will allow us to pause for thought, something we strongly believe is a vital part of a truly progressive politics.

Core reading

Jews for Economic Justice (2017) Understanding Antisemitism: an offering to our movement, JFREJ: New York. View PDF

Sunday: Antisemitism Ever After

Rodinson, Maxime (1983) ‘A Bit of Clarity at the Outset’ in Cult, ghetto, and state: the persistence of the Jewish question, Saqi Books.
and
(1983) ‘Introduction to Leon, Abram A Materialist Interpretation of the Jewish Question’ in Rodinson, Maxime Cult, ghetto, and state: the persistence of the Jewish question, Saqi Books.

View extracts

Monday: The Only Jewish Story

Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1991). Mapping the margins: Identity politics, intersectionality, and violence against women. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241-1299. View PDF

Rosenblum, April (2007) The Past Didn't Go Anywhere: Making Resistance to Antisemitism Part of All of Our Movements. View PDF

Tuesday: Solidarity Forever

Baldwin, James (1967) Negroes are anti-Semitic because they're anti-White. New York Times Magazine, 9, 112-22. View PDF

Meer, Nasar, & Noorani, Tehseen (2008). A sociological comparison of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain. The Sociological Review, 56(2), 195- 219. View PDF