The dates below are Mondays, discussions start at 7pm. All are welcome: email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com to register your interest, request printed copies of the texts, and find out details of the central London venue.

At each meeting comrades will give lead-offs on each text, followed by a general discussion. It may not be possible to properly study some of the longer texts within the given time-frame, and all are welcome to come along no matter how much of the reading material they have studied. Further details on which chapters are most relevant will follow shortly, as well as questions to focus your reading.

January 19th: The idea of Self-organisation and Communism from below

• Karl Marx – The Civil War in France – Engels’ 1891 introduction and Chapter Five
• William Paul – Communism and Society
• Mihailo Markovic – socialism and self-management, Praxis
• Marx, Communist Manifesto

February 9th: Communism and labour in the era of the structural crisis of capital

• Andrew Kliman – The New Forms of Appearance of State-Capitalism
• Istvan Meszaros – Beyond Capital, chapter 18 sections 5-8
• We had also earlier suggested that participants look at Paul Mattick Jnr – Marxism Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie, chapter – Marxism Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow but decided that all this will be too much reading for most people.

March 2nd: Roots and causes of the left’s fragmentation and the sectarianisation of history

• False historical paradigms
• Ante Ciliga, Trotsky and State Capitalism
• The Malaise on the Left

March 23rd: Capital, Alienation and Commodity Fetishism

• Marx – 1844 Manuscripts – Alienated Labour
• Marx – Das Kapital – The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof
• Marx – Das Kapital – The Labour Process or the Production of Use-Values
• we will also be discussing Meszaros – Marx’s Theory of Alienation

April 13th: Workers’ Self-Government v State-socialism

• William Paul – The State: Its Origins and Function, Chapter 11
• Marx – Critique of the Gotha Programme
• Hal Draper – The Two Souls of Socialism

May 4th: Parliamentary Socialism

• William Paul – Communism and Society
• Modernisation as Domination in the Chilean and British Left – Sara C Motta & David J Bailey, Capital and Class, Summer 2007.

May 25th: Conceptualizing Communist society

• William Morris – News from Nowhere
• Edward Bellamy – Looking Backward 2000-1887

June 15th: International working-class organisation

• Kim Moody – Global capital and Economic nationalism
• Loren Goldner- Transnationals after Seattle

July 13th: Communist organisation today

• a section of Hal Draper’s Anatomy of the Micro-sect – (click here to read in full)
• Building a revolutionary socialist left today – Solidarity USA (click here to read in full)