Talk: The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx
Author and activist Sharon Smith will be coming to Umass to give a talk on "The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx." Sharon writes regularly for Socialist Worker and is author of "Women and Socialism and Subterranean Fire, A History of Working Class Radicalism in the United States.
Every so often—usually after a period of economic instability and crisis that has given way to stabilization and growth—some talking-head comes along and declares that Marxism is dead and capitalism is the final form of human fulfillment. A variety of arguments are put forward as evidence: that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels predicted that capitalism would collapse, and it hasn’t; that the fall of the Berlin Wall exposed the failure of Marxism; that class struggle can’t survive in a world of cable television, the Internet and SUVs. Yet every generation—whether it be the workers in the great union struggles of the 1930s, student radicals in the 1960s or millions who struggled to overthrow apartheid or who joined the Solidarity movement in Stalinist Poland—have rediscovered the “buried” ideas of Marxism as a way to understand the world around them. Again and again, the ideas of Karl Marx have gained a mass audience as people have fought to change their world into a more just and equitable one. Join us for a discussion of Marx’s legacy and how these ideas can provide a way to understand the challenges of our generation. Because the goal is not simply to understand the world, but to change it.
