Seminar Archive:
POPULAR CULTURES AND ANTIFASCIST CARE with David Winters
DARKEST LA: FILM NOIR, GREED AND CORPORATE GRAFT IN LALA LAND with Denis Broe
THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN CAPITALIST UNIVERSITIES with Peter Bratsis
IS POSSIBILITY HIGHER THAN ACTUALITY? with Michael Pelias
SARTRE WITH MARX with Michael Pelias
HOMO DATUM: THE EMERGING CONTOURS OF NEW SUBJECTIVITIES
WARS AND CAPITAL: A CLOSE READING OF OUR CONTEMPORARY SITUATION with Michael Pelias
Technology, Technics, and Time: Where are “We”? with Michael Peilas
Donald Trump: The Most American President in History? with Peter Bratsis
The Subversive Weber: Two Seminars on Max Weber's Teaching with Carlos Frade
Slackers, Sabotage, and Syndicalism: Irish Soul and American Labor with Kristen Lawler
Overcoming Servitude? Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus with Michael Pelias
Plato for Revolutionaries: Justice and Power, Then and Now with Michael Pelias
Bernard Stiegler: Critical Interventions with Michael Pelias
On Methods of Inquiry: From Aristotle to Evald Ilyenkov with Arto Artinian
The Presocratics and their Contemporary Relevance with Bruno Gulli
German Idealism and its Aftermath: Philosophical and Poetic Reactions with Michael Pelias
Marxism after Marx with Stanley Aronowitz
What Does it Mean to be Left? with Stanley Aronowitz
Freud and Philosophy: Overcoming the Self and its Aporias with Michael Pelias
The Age of Anxiety Co-taught by Peter Bratsis and Michael Pelias
The Frankfurt School and the Paradoxical Idea of Progress with Stanley Aronowitz
Marx, Marxism and Philosophy Today with Michael Pelias
Democracy and Marxism with Peter Bratsis
Time after Time: A contemporary reading of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” with Michael Pelias
Introduction to Dialectics and Dialectical Thinking with Stanley Aronowitz
Under the Spell of Sympathy: Forging Concepts for a Radical Society with José Eisenberg
The Institute for the Radical Imagination presents:
Facilitator: David Winters (adjunct lecturer in Journalism and Media Studies; M.Phil in Communication and Media Studies, MA in Liberal Studies).
Schedule: Six-week class, beginning November 3rd at 7:30 p.m. (Eastern daylight time) and continuing until December 8th.
Location: Via Zoom
Reading: Bratich, J. (2022). On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death. Common Notions Press.
Cost: $100 for all six sessions
Popular Cultures and Antifascist Care
Facilitator: David Winters (adjunct lecturer in Journalism and Media Studies; M.Phil in Communication and Media Studies, MA in Liberal Studies).
Schedule: Six-week class, beginning November 3rd at 7:30 p.m. (Eastern daylight time) and continuing until December 8th.
Location: Via Zoom
Reading: Bratich, J. (2022). On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death. Common Notions Press.
Cost: $100 for all six sessions
This 6-week discussion group centers on Jack Bratich’s On Microfascism (2022), examining how everyday practices of fascist restoration, renewal and elimination permeate institutions, technologies, and social relations. We’ll explore Bratich’s compositional analysis of power, affect, and desire, and the production of subjectivity within the misogyny and eliminationism of microfascist cultures. Each week, we’ll tackle key themes, from the intersection of microfascism and neoliberalism to the role of digital technologies in both reinforcing and combatting control. Through critical dialogue, we’ll also consider strategies for (micro-)antifascist struggle, emphasizing the importance of decentralized organizing, media technique, and compositional culture. Ultimately, the group aims to nourish and develop our radical imagination as the capacity to envision and enact alternatives to microfascist trends entangled with our everyday lives. This is a space for students, activists, and organizers to deepen their understanding, share insights, and work toward the composition of antifascist care.
To register for the seminar, please follow this link:
The Institute for the Radical Imagination presents:
Co-sponsored by:
Institute for the Radical Imagination
Marxist Education Project
LA Progressive
Facilitator: Dennis Broe
Schedule: Six-week class, 7-8:30 (Eastern daylight time) , beginning May 2, 9, 16, 23, June 6, 13
Location: On zoom with location being sent out to all who register
Cost: $100 for all six sessions
A Five-Session Reading Group with Novelist and Scholar Dennis Broe
Co-sponsored by:
Institute for the Radical Imagination
Marxist Education Project
LA Progressive
Facilitator: Dennis Broe
Schedule: Six-week class, 7-8:30 (Eastern daylight time) , beginning May 2, 9, 16, 23, June 6, 13
Location: On zoom with location being sent out to all who register
Cost: $100 for all six sessions
Orson Welles once called Los Angeles “a bright, guilty place,” and that is as true today as it was in the 1940s when Welles coined this description. Dennis Broe leads a group reading of his five Los Angeles novels set in the film-noir period of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The contradictions we will unearth in that postwar period, the period of crime films that visually documented this seedy reality, have never been resolved, only continually papered over, and so they resound today. We will look at five industries and moments in this period with a view toward explaining how the postwar period set the tone for what was to follow, leading to the present era of a vast income disparity and frequent “natural,” though totally avoidable, disasters.
The novels – Left of Eden, A Hello to Arms, The Precinct with the Golden Arm, The House That Buff Built, and The Dark Ages – are detailed in this syllabus. They are available from various online booksellers.
Dennis Broe is a professor, journalist, and novelist whose books include: Film Noir, American Workers and Postwar Hollywood, Class, Crime and International Film Noir: Globalizing America’s Dark Art, and Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception. He has taught at The Sorbonne and is the Parisian correspondent for Arts Express on The Pacifica Network. Dennis also writes for LA Progressive, People’s World, Crime Time, Culture Matters, the British daily Morning Star, and Monthly Review Online. His series of five novels is continuing with his latest, Pornocopia, about the corporate takeover of Las Vegas and the porn industry. Dennis has also just launched a new podcast, Culture and Barbarism, with Toby Miller.
Week 1 – Friday, May 2:
Left of Eden
This session will focus on the beginning of the Cold War and its intrusion into Hollywood at the moment of the breakup of the studio system, which had been so prosperous over the previous two decades. We’ll explore the echoes of the Cold War ethos in today’s foreign policy.
Week 2 – Friday, May 9:
A Hello To Arms
This week will examine the renewal of the arms industry after the war, during what was nominally a time of peace, and how that impacted the African-American community as wartime opportunities vanished. We will discuss the current state of relations in the African-American community and the US “defense” industry, a behemoth that today is utterly out of control.
Week 3 – Friday, May 16:
The Precinct With The Golden Arm
We will look at the LAPD and its changing modes of surveillance, particularly of the Mexican-American community in this period, with Boyle Heights starting to dominate. This novel also addresses Big Pharma and its relation to drugs in these communities. The session will examine the origin of street drugs, surveillance by what Mike Davis calls “the space police,” and the continued struggle and resistance within the city’s Latinx population.
Week 4 – Friday, May 23:
The House That Buff Built
This week’s discussion will focus on the LA real estate industry, the design and spatial allocation of the city and its sprawling suburbs, and the history of racial discrimination in housing. We will especially look at the exploitation of the Chinese population in both LA and San Francisco and the role of the LA Times and its owners, The Chandlers, in shaping the city.
Week 5 – Friday, June 2:
The Dark Ages
This session will address the second and more destructive devastation caused by McCarthyism, particularly HUAC’s impact on Hollywood. We’ll explore the history of unions in the entertainment industry and the city as a whole, positing that union activity in the industry brought HUAC to Hollywood. We will then examine the broader history of unions in Los Angeles, both in the past and today.
Bonus Week 6 – Friday, June 9:
Pornocopia
In this bonus session, we will delve into corporate America’s penetration into the mob industries of porn in LA and gambling in Las Vegas.
To register for the seminar, please follow this link:
The Class Struggle in Capitalist Universities: From Knowledge Factories to (Life-Long) Learning Camps
The Institute for the Radical Imagination presents:
The Class Struggle in Capitalist Universities: From Knowledge Factories to (Life-Long) Learning Camps
Facilitator: Peter Bratsis (CUNY Graduate Center and BMCC)
Schedule: Six-week class, beginning Tuesday evenings, April 1st, 6:30–8:30 p.m.
Location: In-person only at The People’s Forum
Cost: $100 for all six sessions | $20 per class
The Class Struggle in Capitalist Universities: From Knowledge Factories to (Life-Long) Learning Camps
Facilitator: Peter Bratsis (CUNY Graduate Center and BMCC)
Schedule: Six-week class, beginning Tuesday evenings, April 1st, 6:30–8:30 p.m.
Location: In-person only at The People’s Forum
Cost: $100 for all six sessions | $20 per class
Readings:
Thorstein Veblen, Clyde Barrow, Stanley Aronowitz, Neil Smith, Bernard Stiegler, Maurizio Lazzarato, and others
Over a century ago, universities—and the broader quest for higher learning—were fundamentally transformed by their reconstitution under industrial norms. These knowledge factories, standardized and placed in service of dominant economic interests, became a legitimizing force that helped sustain the myth of meritocracy in the United States. Simultaneously, they functioned as publicly subsidized sites of skilled labor production, research, and technological development.
More recently, universities have expanded beyond their traditional ideological and economic functions to become sites of wealth extraction, facilitating an ever-growing class of professional-administrative nomads. No longer merely serving capitalist interests, universities have become surplus-producing enterprises, generating a bloated administrative class that mirrors the short-term calculations and nomadic sensibilities of financialized capitalism.
Through readings from Thorstein Veblen, Clyde Barrow, Stanley Aronowitz, Neil Smith, Bernard Stiegler, Maurizio Lazzarato, and others, this study group will critically examine the fate of the capitalist university and the challenges faced by academic labor today. Our discussions will focus on developing strategies to counter the damage inflicted on higher education, reasserting the agency of academic labor, and restoring the dignity of students.
To register for the seminar, please follow this link:
Is Possibility Higher than Actuality? Towards a Community of Care or Philosophy and the Pirates, Part I
The Institute for the Radical Imagination presents:
Is Possibility Higher than Actuality? Towards a Community of Care or Philosophy and the Pirates, Part I
Facilitator: Michael Pelias (LIU Brooklyn, Philosophy and Humanities; Brooklyn College, Political Science)
Schedule: Six-session seminar, Monday evenings, March 31st – May 5th, 6:30 p.m.
Location: LIU Brooklyn (B, Q, and R trains to DeKalb; 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 to Nevins; D, N to Pacific Terminal)
Virtual Option: Available for participants outside of the city or abroad
Cost: $100 for all six sessions | $20 per class
Is Possibility Higher than Actuality? Towards a Community of Care or Philosophy and the Pirates, Part I
Facilitator: Michael Pelias (LIU Brooklyn, Philosophy and Humanities; Brooklyn College, Political Science)
Schedule: Six-session seminar, Monday evenings, March 31st – May 5th, 6:30 p.m.
Location: LIU Brooklyn (B, Q, and R trains to DeKalb; 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 to Nevins; D, N to Pacific Terminal)
Virtual Option: Available for participants outside of the city or abroad
Cost: $100 for all six sessions | $20 per class
Through a careful reading of Bernard Stiegler, this seminar will explore the possibilities of revolutionary care and its connection to what is now called pirate care. Our discussions will critically redefine care in an era marked by extreme capitalist neglect and systemic waste.
This investigation will also analyze the epistemic-juridical-medical hegemony that shapes our daily lives—subjecting bodies to constant regimes of “health,” enforcing the normalization of productivity, and perpetuating the surveillance of the self.
We will ask:
Is philosophical discourse, particularly its Hegelian invocation of the wisdom of the Sage, essential for constructing a culture of revolutionary care?
What existing structures can we build upon to resist and redefine care beyond capitalist constraints?
Readings will include sections on care (Sorge) from Heidegger’s Being and Time, Eva Kittay on interdependency, and contemporary works on care work and pirate care.
Part II of this course will begin in late September and continue for another six weeks, concluding in mid-November 2025.
To register for the seminar, please follow this link: