Upcoming events

London Anarchist Bookfair 2017

Critisticuffs are doing two meetings and a stall at the upcoming London Anarchist Bookfair 2017:

Gentrification at 12pm in room F8
Religion at 2pm in room LF6

Looking forward to the discussion with you.

Saturday 28 October 2017
12pm

Gentrification: Does latte art drive up rents?

The term “gentrification” is used to describe a process whereby first artists, then higher income people displace poor people from certain areas. Some activists take this description for its explanation and accordingly organise protests against real estate agents. In this workshop we want to explain why the process in which gentrification happens is not the cause of it. We will instead explain it by looking at the economics of housing, how rent prices are determined, and how and why zoning policies try to influence them.

Saturday 28 October 2017
2pm

Religion

The critique of religion seems easy: believing in an invisible man in the sky seems silly and far removed from modern day rationality. Yet, religion is doing just fine in this rational day and age. In this workshop, our critique of religion starts from asking what religious people mean when they say “God”, i.e. how they view the world and themselves. We want to discuss where their wrong and authoritarian views agree and disagree with the views of many of their atheist critics.

Texts

Critiquing Corbyn: capitalism isn’t about sharing

There was much hype over Jeremy Corbyn’s successful campaign to lead the Labour Party. What has been largely absent from the debate is an evaluation of Corbyn’s economic ideas and assumptions. In The Economy in 2020, Corbyn set out what his economic policies will be, if he becomes Prime Minister. A lot can be learned from this about how he understands the economy and the State.

Austerity & Debt interview

Organise! interviewed Critisticuffs about Austerity and Debt.

One Nation

With the One Nation campaign Labour is making its case to rule over us. In the campaign quote Ed Miliband sees that wages are so low, unemployment is so high and inequality so extreme that he fears for the unity of British society. He recognises the problems with poverty that those he addresses are facing and thus asks everyone to stick together as a nation to overcome these and any odds. At the same time, though, he touches on everything we need to know in order to come to a rather different conclusion.

A Companion to David Harvey's Companion to Marx' Capital, Chapter 1

David Harvey is the dominant commentator on Capital in English and many Capital reading groups use his video lectures or his book – A Companion to Marx' Capital – to guide them. Capital can be a daunting book and David Harvey's commentaries have encouraged many to pick it up and work through it. This, in principle, is a valuable project as much can be learned about the world we are forced to live in from that old book.

Yet, those who read A Companion to guide them through Capital in order to learn about the capitalist mode of production will be disappointed: it neither gives an adequate account of what Marx said nor of the capitalist mode of production.