Radical Philosophy
Chair: D’Arcy Pocklington
Meetings: Fortnightly (Thursdays) at People’s Co-op Bookstore (1391 Commercial Drive)
Starting: January 26th, 2023
What do we mean when we use terms like oppression, intersectionality, or social justice? Through readings, videos, and discussion, group participants will explore key concepts developed by Karl Marx and other materialist thinkers from the Marxist, anarchist, black power and feminist traditions. These analytical tools can help participants develop a more precise and coherent account of what is going on in the world.
This group started as a Karl Marx group and try to stay true to Marx’s spirit in mocking those who treat his writings like religious scripture. His collaborator Friedrich Engels compared him to Charles Darwin. Marx’s theory of evolution in human society is similar to Darwin’s theory of evolution in biology. But Marx’s contribution is not limited to just one theory. He produced an extraordinary body of work. Marx cared less about whether his conclusions were palatable and more about whether they were true. He explained that he sought nothing less than to conduct a relentless critique of all that exists.
This group treats between one and three essays per week that are available free online and follow a unified theme. Sometimes the essays are contemporary, sometimes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries No prior knowledge is necessary and this reading group is meant to be introductory.
This group starts with its 2022 membership. If you would like to join, click to e-mail us here.
Confrontations with Authoritarianism: Prison Literature, Biographies, Scholarship
Chair: Avneet Johal
Meetings: Fortnightly (Tuesdays), each location TBA
Starting: January 31st, 2023
After three years online, our flagship reading group, chaired by Avneet Johal, will finally be moving back indoors and working out of a series of pubs in the Vancouver area. Now entering our eighth season of gatherings, we have decided to revisit some old material but with a new approach.
Every day that goes by in our rapidly changing world is one that reminds us of what a poor job we did in choosing books and generating prescient discussion in 2021 when we were supposed to be discussing authoritarianism and political repression. Perhaps because it was because “objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” In any case, we will be coming back at authoritarianism and its relations a bit differently.
Henceforth, the reading we assign is going to be older, more accessible, easier to find and less academic. We hope to provide more free online copies of texts we cover and return to providing greater notice for our next book.
Front and centre in our online readings on authoritarianism is Milan Kundera, the Cold War Czech novelist and political activist, first inside then outside the Communist Party. We will be starting with the first chapter of his Book of Laughter and Forgetting, followed by The Joke, his 1968 composition that is said to have kicked off the “Prague Spring.” If we make good time, we will conclude with his Life Is Elsewhere but may not get to it with our packed schedule.
We will then look at one of the earliest pieces of anti-authoritarian prison literature, Boethius’s On the Consolation of Philosophy, written in the sixth-century Roman Empire. We will then read parts of the first and second volumes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago on his time in Stalin’s labour camp system.
We then broaden our optic to think about how it is that a regime can attain the hegemony of Stalin’s USSR; and we will turn to the first of Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, which offers key Marxist insights into totalitarian ideologies and practices of social control.
Finally, we will look at one piece of academic scholarship if time permits, Henry Roussou’s The Vichy Syndrome, which uses insights from psychology to understand the problem of “forgetting” with which Kundera presented us at the start of the course.
There are two groups doing this set of readings together, meeting fortnightly on alternate Tuesdays. One group is an in-person pub group based in Vancouver that meets at 7:00pm. The other meets online and serves our members in the Eastern to Pacific time zones, at 9:30pm Eastern Time, 6:30 Pacific. If you would like to join, click to e-mail us here.
Gender Critical Discussion Group
Chair: Stuart Parker
Meetings: Monthly, each location TBA
Starting: Monday, February 6th
This year, Los Altos Institute is not so much starting a gender critical discussion group as inviting all of its members to participate in a pre-existing group that has been hard at work assisting our members in dealing with the personal, professional and political consequences of holding unorthodox views in our society’s current debates about sex and gender.
Because the consequences of dissent can be so dire and severe these days, it is important that there exist places that can provide support to dissidents they might otherwise not receive. The maintenance and support of such a community remains our primary goal in holding these meetings; while many intelligent and erudite sentiments have originated in our meetings, the first priority is to provide basic conversational safety to members of our community.
By “conversational safety,” we mean that there is no special vocabulary in which members are required to speak nor are there words they are required to use or refrain from using. It is our belief that trust and respect are virtues rooted in honesty.
There is currently an in-person group that meets the first Monday of the month at 7:00pm at the private residences of members in Greater Vancouver. Due to popular interest, we are now organizing a monthly online meeting for members elsewhere in Anglo America. If you would like to join either group, click to e-mail us here.
