Join Mike Taber, David McNally, Anne McShane, & Tom Alter for a discussion about the Second International’s strengths, weaknesses, & legacy. This event took place on October 26, 2023. At its height, the Second (Socialist) International (1889-1914) represented the majority of organized workers in the world, with the stated revolutionary aim of overthrowing capitalism. Several of Its major campaigns and initiatives—such as the eight-hour day, May Day, and International Women’s Day—remain today as testaments to its lasting influence. To mark the release of Reform, Revolution, and Opportunism—a collection of debates at congresses of the Second International—join editor Mike Taber, along with David McNally, Anne McShane, and Tom Alter, for a discussion about the Second International’s strengths, weaknesses, contradictions, and legacy. The speakers will draw out the relevance of socialist debates from more than a century ago on topics that remain deeply contested: militarism and war, immigration, colonialism and imperialism, women’s rights, and socialist participation in government. ———————————— Get a copy of Reform, Revolution, Opportunism: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/... ———————————— Speakers: Mike Taber has edited and prepared a number of books related to the history of revolutionary and working-class movements—from collections of documents of the Communist International under Lenin to works by James P. Cannon, Leon Trotsky, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Maurice Bishop, and Nelson Mandela. David McNally is the Cullen Distinguished Professor of History and Business at the University of Houston and director of the Center for the Study of Capitalism. McNally is the author of seven books and has won a number of awards, including the Paul Sweezy Award from the American Sociological Associaton for his book Global Slump and the Deutscher Memorial Award for Monsters of the Market. Anne McShane is a Marxist, a historian of the early Soviet women's movement and a human rights lawyer, specialising in representing asylum seekers. She has a long history of involvement in both the British and the Irish working class and leftwing movements. She contributes regular articles to the Weekly Worker, the journal of the British based CPGB and occasional pieces for Jacobin. She writes on Irish politics and the historical struggle to connect women's liberation with the socialist project. She is currently writing on the work of the Women's Department of the CPSU (Zhenotdel) in Soviet Central Asia, having completed a PhD on this subject in 2019 at Glasgow University. She is based in Cork, Ireland. Tom Alter is an assistant professor of history at Texas State University, where he specializes in labor and working-class history. He is the author of Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas and has been involved in labor and social justice movement activism for nearly 30 years. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/4uhw8mFmKNk Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join us for a livestream from Haymarket House: the first of a four-part public discussion series focused on Chicago’s left political landscape and movement! This event took place on October 25, 2023. We’re kicking off our Chicago Conversations series with a discussion about building & wielding left political power. Chicago’s robust left social movements have re-shaped what’s possible in our city – making way for big progressive wins like expanded housing protections, wage increases, expanding public mental health infrastructure, and taking racist surveillance tools away from the police department. At the same time as there are openings for real progressive change, the city is also facing many challenges, like the migrant crisis, continued police violence and housing shortages. Now with a mayor supported by Chicago’s labor and racial justice movements and a more progressive City Council than ever before, what does it look like for movements outside of City Hall to press for transformative change? How should social movements like the movement for Black lives, like the climate justice movement, like the labor movement, like the movement for migrant justice continue to engage in elections? How do we relate to leftists and progressives in government? How do we respond to the many immediate crises the city is facing now and also build more lasting change moving forward? And what does it mean to have “political power” in a system that has so systematically excluded those at the margins and upheld the status quo? We’ll be joined by Kennedy Bartley (United Working Families), Jung Yoon (Grassroots Collaborative & the People’s Unity Platform), and Jeanette Taylor (Alderwoman of Chicago’s 20th Ward). These conversations will be moderated by Asha Ransby-Sporn. There will be a roundtable discussion with the speakers followed by some time for audience Q and A. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/c_PfbMvOma0 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join Barbara Smith,Tamika Middleton, Haley Pessin and Jaimee A. Swift as they discuss historical & contemporary issues Black feminists face. This event took place on October 18, 2023. To celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology Barbara Smith, Tamika Middleton, Haley Pessin, and Jaimee A. Swift will discuss the historical impact of Home Girls and contemporary issues that Black feminist activists face today. Home Girls, 40th Anniversary Edition published by Rutgers University Press, is available at Bookshop.org. Speakers: Tamika Middleton is Managing Director of Women's March. She is an organizer, doula, writer, and unschooling mama who is passionate about and active in struggles that affect Black women’s lives. Tamika has organized for abolition, reproductive justice, and for domestic workers’ rights. She is a consultant with Winds of Change Consulting, and a founding member of the Metro Atlanta Mutual Aid (MAMA) Fund and JustGeorgia. She serves as a Community Advisory Board member of Critical Resistance, a Leadership Team member of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective and an advisory board member of Cypress Fund x The Grove. Haley Pessin is a socialist activist living in Queens, New York and is a member of the Tempest Collective. They co-edited the book Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century: Documents of Hope published by Seven Stories Press. Jaimee A. Swift (she/her) is the executive director and founder of Black Women Radicals, a Black feminist advocacy organization dedicated to uplifting and centering Black women and gender expansive people's radical activism in Africa and in the African Diaspora. She is also the creator and founder of The School for Black Feminist Politics (SBFP), the Black feminist political education arm of Black Women Radicals. The mission of the SBFP is to empower Black feminisms in Black Politics by expanding the field from transnational, intersectional, and multidisciplinary perspectives. She is the co-author, with Joseph R. Fitzgerald, of the forthcoming biography of Black feminist icon, Barbara Smith. Barbara Smith is an independent scholar and was co-founder and publisher of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. She has been writer in residence and taught at numerous colleges and universities for over twenty-five years. The author of many books, articles, and essays, including The Truth That Never Hurts ———————————— This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, and Rutgers University Press. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/oAg8nCQV83A Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join us for the live stream of a conversation with Syrian writer & former political prisoner Yassin al-Haj Saleh moderated by Wendy Pearlman & Danny Postel. Broadcasting from Haymarket House. This event took place on October 17, 2023. Join us for the livestream of a conversation with Yassin al-Haj Saleh, the leading intellectual voice of the Syrian uprising and one of the key thinkers in the Arab world today, during his first visit ever to the U.S. Among al-Haj Saleh’s nine books is The Impossible Revolution (Haymarket Books, 2017), which makes sense of both the nature of authoritarian domination in Syria and the historic popular struggle to topple it. Moderated by Wendy Pearlman, author of We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled: Voices from Syria and Danny Postel, co-editor of The Syria Dilemma and The People Reloaded, this dialogue will explore the origins and trajectory of the Syrian uprising, the internal and external forces that thwarted it, what comes next in the quest of emancipatory change, what lessons the Syrian experience might have for other struggles, and what lessons other struggles might have for Syria. This public event is co-sponsored by Northwestern University’s Middle East and North African Studies Program, New Lines Magazine, and Haymarket Books. Speakers: Yassin al-Haj Saleh is the leading intellectual voice of the Syrian uprising and one of the key thinkers in the Arab world today. Born in the city of Raqqa in 1961, he was arrested in 1980 in Aleppo for his membership in a left-wing political organization and spent 16 years in prison. His wife, Samira al-Khalil, was abducted by an armed Islamist group in 2013. He is the author of nine books, including The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (2017) and The Atrocious and its Representation (English edition forthcoming). One of the founders of the bilingual Arabic-English platform Aljumhuriya.net, he writes for a variety of international publications and is a Contributing Writer for New Lines Magazine. He is now based in Berlin. Wendy Pearlman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she also holds the Crown Professorship of Middle East Studies and is currently director of the Middle East and North Africa Studies program. She is the author of Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada (2003); Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (2011); We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (2017); Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States that Host Nonstate Actors (with Boaz Atzili, 2018); and Muzoon: A Syrian Refugee Speaks Out (with Muzoon Almellehan, 2023). Her sixth book, The Home I Worked To Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora, is forthcoming from Liveright Books in 2024. Danny Postel is Politics Editor of New Lines Magazine, an award-winning global affairs publication which the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard says has “built a home for long-form international reporting.” He is the author of Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran (2006) and co-editor of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future (2010), The Syria Dilemma (2013), and Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (2017). His current book-in-progress, “Critical Solidarity,” explores the legacies of the late international relations theorist, Middle East scholar and internationalist Fred Halliday. This event is co-sponsored by Northwestern University’s Middle East and North African Studies Program, New Lines Magazine, and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/qfmjwRD_ho4 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join Clément Petitjean and Alex Han in conversation about the new book Occupation Organizer. This event took place on April 30, 2023. How can activists seize on this moment of unrest to build durable, effective organizations for change? Join Clément Petitjean and Alex Han for a history and critique of the community organizing tradition and the fight to build collective power. The rise of the professional organizer has seen community organizing as a site of contestation. Chicago, where Alinsky first developed his model of the “professional radical”, is home to vast networks of community-based organizations that bring together multitudes in the fight for collective liberation—led by those who do the work as part of the community, rather than standing apart from it. With Brandon Johnson set to usher in a new era of progressive politics in Chicago, the time is now to learn from the successes, failures, and contradictions of the past. Get Occupation Organizer from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/... Speakers: Clément Petitjean is an associate professor of American studies at the Université Panthéon Sorbonne in Paris. He holds a PhD in sociology. His writing has appeared in academic journals and popular outlets like Jacobin, Contretemps, and Le Monde diplomatique. Alex Han is Executive Director of In These Times. He has organized with unions, in the community, and in progressive politics for two decades. In addition to serving as Midwest Political Director for Bernie 2020, he’s worked to amplify the power of community and labor organizations at Bargaining for the Common Good, served as a Vice President of SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana for over a decade, and helped to found United Working Families, an independent political organization in Illinois that has elected dozens of working-class leaders to city, state and federal office. Most recently he was executive editor of Convergence Magazine. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/6xfpDOcW1i0 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join Dean Spade & organizers from Atlanta as they discuss how to protect our communities against recent threats to mutual aid & solidarity efforts. This event took place on August 17, 2023. In the last year, we’ve seen attempts to criminalize mutual aid become more common as an authoritarian tactic. The recent attacks on mutual aid organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund brought into full view how charging, surveillance, and targeted criminalization are an ongoing strategy to shut down political movements and community organizing. In this session, we'll be reviewing how media, right-wing movements, and even supposed allies have often latched onto incorrect and spurious claims about non-profit finances, community organizing structures, and basic accounting practices in attempts to stop the solidarity of mutual aid. Join organizer Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next), along with Kamau Franklin of Community Movement Builders, Zohra Ahmed from the University of GA School of Law, plus organizers from the National Bail Fund Network and the Yellowhammer Fund, to discuss the threats organizers are facing and how we protect each other and social justice organizing. This event is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books and Community Justice Exchange. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/M3qvIHdZ73E Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

The past few years have brought a huge resurgence in labor organizing across the U.S.—efforts which, from Chris Smalls’ founding of the Amazon Labor Union to Cecily Myart-Cruz’s work as president of United Teachers Los Angeles, have been driven in large part by members of the Black working class. In award-winning historian Blair LM Kelley’s BLACK FOLK, she shows conclusively that this legacy of Black labor organizing stretches back to before Emancipation. Highlighting the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers whose established networks of resistance are still alive today, her narrative treats Black workers not just as laborers or activists, but as people whose daily experiences mattered in their own right. This event took place on July 27, 2023. Kelley demonstrates that the church yards, factory floors, railcars, and postal sorting facilities where Black people worked were sites of possibility, and, as she suggests, Amazon package processing centers, supermarkets, and nursing homes could be the same today. BLACK FOLK is thus not just an epic of American history writ large—it’s a vision, too, of our possible future. For this virtual launch event, Kelley will be joined by Robin D.G. Kelley. Get a copy of BLACK FOLK: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/978163149... Blair LM Kelley is the director of the Center for the Study of the American South and codirector of the Southern Futures initiative at the University of North Carolina. Her first book, Right to Ride, won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize, and she received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to support her writing of Black Folk. She lives in Durham, North Carolina. Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement. Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBv1CGteQLc Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Robin D.G. Kelley for a conversation about perspectives for fighting back against racism today. This event took place on July 19, 2023. Since its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it. Most recently, legislatures across the country have moved to ban Black Studies from curricula, while the right mobilizes outrage against librarians and educators. These attacks come in the context of a backlash against the popular 2020 uprising against racism and police violence, and are being amplified in the halls of power from Congress to the Supreme Court. Join Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Robin D.G. Kelley, co-editors with Colin Kaepernick of the new book Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies, for a wide-ranging conversation about perspectives for fighting back against racism today, from the classroom to the streets. Speakers: Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press. Race for Profit was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020. She is a 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Her earlier book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/K6MLtFeZcak Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join trans theorists and activists for a discussion of how "Transgender Marxism” can explain the backlash and help guide the resistance. This event took place on July 16, 2023. The right has launched a systematic backlash against trans people. It has introduced hundreds of anti-trans bills in statehouses across the US, ramped up attacks on trans people around the world in courts and legal systems, and waged a campaign of escalating vigilante violence. Now is the time for analyzing why the right is focused on trans people as primary targets of class war from above. And now is the time for organized efforts at building broad solidarity with trans people to fight back. Join frontline trans theorists and activists for a discussion of how “Transgender Marxism” can explain the backlash and help guide the resistance. Speakers: Jules Gleeson is a writer, comedian and all-around communist menace. Her work has been featured in publications and live events worldwide. She was an editor of Transgender Marxism (2021) and is currently writing her own book on intersex liberation's origin story in the 1990s. Sandow “Sandy” Sinai is a writer, musician, teacher, and communist living in Brooklyn, New York. She loves the bass guitar, psychoanalysis, and the dialectic. Kade Doyle Griffiths is a writer and anthropologist teaching at Brooklyn College and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. He is an editor of Spectre Journal and has also written for The Nation,In These Times, and Historical Materialism. Chair: Vanessa Wills is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University. She specializes in moral, social, and political philosophy, nineteenth century German philosophy (especially Karl Marx), and the philosophy of race. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/yHjQvjOQoe4 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

In their latest collection of poems, Cave Canem Poetry Prize winner Brionne Janae dives into the deep, unsettled waters of intimate partner violence, queerness, grief, and survival. This event took place on July 6, 2023. “I’ve decided I can’t trust anyone who uses darkness as a metaphor for what they fear,” poet Brionne Janae writes in this stunning new collection, in which the speaker navigates past and present traumas and interrogates familial and artistic lineages, queer relationships, positions of power, and community. Because You Were Mine is an intimate look at love, loneliness, and what it costs to survive abuse at the hands of those meant to be “protectors.” In raw, confessional, image-heavy poems, Janae explores the aftershocks of the dangerous entanglement of love and possession in parent-child relationships. Through this difficult but necessary examination, the collection speaks on behalf of children who were left or harmed as a result of the failures of their parents, their states, and their gods. Survivors, queer folks, and readers of poetry will find recognition and solace in these hard-wrought poems—poems that honor survivorship, queer love, parent wounds, trauma, and the complexities of familial blood. Get Because You Were Mine from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/... Speakers: Brionne Janae is a poet and teaching artist living in Brooklyn. They are the author of Blessed are the Peacemakers (2021), which won the 2020 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, and After Jubilee (2017). Janae is the recipient of the St. Botoloph Emerging Artist award, a Hedgebrook Alum, a proud Cave Canem Fellow, and a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. Their poetry has been published in Best American Poetry (2022), Ploughshares, the American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, the Sun Magazine, jubilat, and Waxwing among others. Janae is the co-host of the podcast The Slave is Gone. Off the page they go by Breezy. Amber Flame is an interdisciplinary artist whose work garnered residencies with Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and more. Her first poetry collection, Ordinary Cruelty, was published through Write Bloody Press. Flame is a recipient of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture's CityArtist grant and served as Hugo House's 2017-2019 Writer-in-Residence for Poetry. Krysten Hill is the author of How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016), which received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her work has been featured in The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day Series, Poetry Magazine, PANK, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Winter Tangerine Review, and elsewhere. She is recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award, 2020 Mass Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship, and 2023 Vermont Studio Center Residency. JR Mahung is a Belizean-American poet from the South Side of Chicago and one half of the Poetry duo Black Plantains with Malcolm Friend. They teach, write, and study in Amherst, MA. JR is a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2017 Emerging Poet’s Incubator Fellow, and the 2018 Individual World Poetry Slam representative for the Boston Poetry Slam. Tweet them about rice and beans @jr_mahung. Cynthia Manick is the author of No Sweet Without Brine, editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry, winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry, and author of Blue Hallelujahs. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, MacDowell Colony, and Château de la Napoule among other foundations. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/oQzdrRc6y7k Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks