Hi Cleve and everyone,

i'll ask around among my sydney friends for their favourite marxist/ rad readings to add to the list... this project has a lot of potential- reading groups are great for political development.

(Tell you who needs marxist reading groups? activists in the US!! i was so surprised when i went to a conference in august, a massive activist group was defining 'working class' as 'lower income'-- no mention of relation to production at all! I think this is a conflation of the term 'working class' with 'poor'. What was so innovative about Marx's categories was that they described RELATIONS- that is the dynamic, functional role of groups within a whole, which enabled a strategic analysis of their potentiality (rather than the deficiency of being poor in the case of wc) wc people have a specific kind of creative power and leverage to withold their labour.

anyway- we have had many obscure discussions about the composition of the modern working class back at home- maybe they will happen here as well... xo A.

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Some people in the group GRASP (GrassRoots Association for Student Power) were interested in getting together to discuss radical theory, and ideas relating to social change. These discussions happen here and there, often after meetings, at parties, bars, etc. This has been good, but there is usually little chance to build on the ad hoc dialogue and develop it further. So this blog is intended to be a place for that, as well as a way to involve those who are interested, but are not in Montreal. Also, there are plans to have reading groups at the QPIRG library, and this could be used for that as well.

The name of the blog is a fragment of a well known quote from Marx, which reads in full: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." I recently learned in a sociological theory class that this quote alone is the last theses of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach. I don't mean for it to necessarily imply any particular focus on Marx or marxism in the blog, though obviously his work is very important (perhaps essential, depending on your take) to a critical understanding of our world. Mainly, I see the quote as a good reminder of what matters when we're engaging with theory.