Lecture

There has been a resurgence of the Left since the 2008 Great Recession. A class-based politics, dormant for so long, has finally returned to mainstream political discourse. But what is this Left? What are its goals, possibilities and limitations? How will it organize itself for the politics of the 21st century? This live interview with Jodi Dean will discuss her book trilogy that provokes us to rethink and even revisit the Left with a renewed vision of communism, a efficacy of the political party, and the ethics and spirit of comradeship.

The Call of The Sirirí: Birds, Humans, and Sound in Post-Agreement
Colombia

Via Zoom at 4pm: pitt.zoom.us/j/469033895

Ever since Deng Xiaoping effectively de-radicalized China in the 1980s, debates have swirled around which path China would follow. Would it democratize? Would it embrace capitalism? Would the Communist Party's rule be able to withstand globalization and the internet? One thing few seriously considered: Mao Zedong would make a political comeback. This live interview with Jude Blanchette will discuss the return of the populist enthusiasm for the Great Helmsman's policies, and what it means for the present and future of Chinese communism.

Shortages, bottlenecks, and over-centralization in the Soviet economy made the distribution of goods uneven, limited, and, to some extent, non-existent. But it would be a mistake to see the Soviet economy as only a planned, top-down system. Interwoven within it were shadow economies with illegal schemes that the innovative and corrupt exploited. What do these shadow economies say about Soviet everyday life, informal networks, and corruption, and how did their proliferation reflect and shape the realities of Soviet socialism?

Shortly after independence, Julius Nyerere, the first President of Tanzania, embarked on a socialist experiment: the ujamaa, the villagization initiative of 1967-1975. Ujamaa, or "familyhood" in Swahili, both invoked established socialist themes and departed from the existing global repertoire of development policy by seeking to reorganize the Tanzanian countryside into communal village to achieve national development.

Income inequality and what to do about it is a hot button political issue throughout our world. Much this disparity is the result of how the value of labor is calculated. How much is a worker's labor worth? How is it measured? Namely, how is it commodified? This live interview with Martha Lampland will discuss these questions from an unlikely place--socialist Hungary--to shed light on how economists in a society without a labor market nonetheless determined the value of labor and what this says about socialism and capitalism.

For more information, visit: https://calendar.pitt.edu/event/featured_scholar_lecture_by_dr_vanessa_v...

The Asian Studies Center, in close partnership with the Center
for Latin American Studies and the Graduate School for Public
and International Affairs, is pleased to announce the
appointment of Professor Enrique Dussel Peters as Global
Professor in the University Center for International Studies.

Socialism is often discussed as a singular, proper noun devoid of ideological, regional, political, or economic difference. Several types of socialism were operative in the twentieth century--from Soviet state socialism to Yugoslav worker self-management. What were some of the transnational movements of socialist experimentation and how, in the later decades of the twentieth century, intersect with, offer alternatives, and even shape neoliberalism?

For more information:

https://www.hispanic.pitt.edu/events