topic : Education
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Wednesday 29 August 2018 at 19:00

BookMarx Capital Reading Group

We meet the first Wednesday, third and fourth Wednesday of the month (every Wednesday except the second of the month). The first Wednesday of the month and the fourth are in the Stirchley Community Church, and the third Wednesday is just opposite in Stirchley Baths. Everyone welcome! (The edition of Capital we use is

Aims of the reading group

We want to take our ideas and discussions back to our workplaces and political organisations. In line with our chosen theme, we will be focusing on the diversity of experiences that affect us as workers - whether we are waged or unwaged. Similarly, we hope to find favourable voices in our trade unions, and if not, we hope to empower ourselves to put forward a radical perspective wherever we can. You can also expect members of Plan C to think about ways of moving towards a transnational social strike with considerable British participation (http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/call-for-a-tra…).

We hope that the reading group will be an intellectual starting point and a potential catapult towards transnational coordinated action. Yet we do not pretend or claim to know what the social strike is or should be. Thus, the validity of the proposed reading group is precisely that of discussing the basics of workers' power and leverage so that we may analyse together what this might look like in our own contemporary contexts. In the meantime, here are some useful starting points:

Participation

In order to resist the emergence of internal hierarchies and to evenly distribute new skills that we may end up developing in the process, we have taken a suggestion from our comrades at Critisticuffs to structure workshops/reading group meetings in the following way:

  • One person reads out a paragraph
  • People ask questions if they think that they have not understood a certain word, concept, turn of phrase, etc.
  • A volunteer makes a statement about the content of the paragraph in their own words in an attempt to level the terms of the discussion.
  • The paragraph is discussed substantially. The particular form this discussion will take, however, will be allowed to emerge with time as people begin to get a hold of what the text means to them