Woodbine

For this week's podcast episode Benj and israa' from The Peoples Want join Malek and Matt to discuss the network's new book Revolutions of Our Times: An Internationalist Manifesto. https://www.patreon.com/posts/48-revolutions-159661840

We discuss the global uprisings since the Arab Spring leading to new understanding of revolution and internationalism. We talk about the figure of the exile, migrant, refugee, and diaspora translating new conceptions of the local and neighboring - values and ideology - and whether a shared orientation towards revolt can produce new subjective categories of solidarity. We end by hearing a history of The Peoples Want network, its emergence in the Syrian Canteen outside Paris, and the series of international gatherings they've organized since 2019.

READINGS:
--Mujawara: Weaving a Revolutionary Neighbouring Beyond Borders (published May 2026): https://thepeopleswant.org/en/mujawara/mujawara-weaving-a-revolutionary-neighbouring-beyond-borders
--Revolutions of Our Times: An Internationalist Manifesto: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2732-revolutions-of-our-times

Benjamin is a member of the Limousine Mountain Syndicate in Tarnac, France, which is part of The Peoples Want network.

israa' is a Q***r Egyptian Muslim anarchist, co-founder of From the Periphery Media Collective, and an activist scholar working to build a world where many words fit. They are a member of The Peoples Want network.

The Peoples Want is a network comprised of collectives, organisations, places and individuals from across the world working together to build an internationalist practice suited to our times. We share a committment to internationalism from below, focusing on people and movements rather than states. An internationalism that promotes solidarity and mutual aid between those in struggle, at times of crisis or uprising.

Please join the Woodbine Research Group on Sunday June 7th as we present our Roundtable on AI Melancholy. Doors at 6:30pm, event at 7pm.

Following our previous collective inquiries into both Municipal Socialism and Civil War, this month's facilitated discussion will explore the tech economy's uneven distribution of gains from its recent boom; AI's implementation in ongoing military fronts, including the genocide in Gaza; as well as the social relations AI presupposes and strives to produce. We'll try to respond to recent texts on AI from authors ranging from NYC Comptroller Mark Levine and Pope Leo XIV, to Bernie Sanders and Peter Thiel.

Members of the Woodbine Research Group will open up the event with a series of short presentations, followed by an open discussion. We hope to help formulate a cultural, ethical, and strategic orientation to the changing technological reality. How and where is power held and deployed today? What continuities and fissures with previous forms of governance can we identify? If the technological infrastructures and imaginaries emerging from Silicon Valley have an ever expanding grasp on our material conditions, what forms of organization are required to contend with these new mechanisms of control? What are the stakes, possibilities, and limits of a Neo-Luddism in 2026?

For Part Two of our conversation with Jeremy Gilbert, we discuss his research on hegemony and the evolution of acid communism. We talk about the turn towards consciousness raising and the need for a Deleuzo-Gramscian synthesis. https://www.patreon.com/posts/47-jeremy-on-2-159132790

READINGS:
--"Why is Keir Starmer so unpopular?" - Jeremy Gilbert, 2025: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2025/12/why-is-keir-starmer-so-unpopular
--"Techno-feudalism or Platform Capitalism? Conceptualising the Digital Society" - Jeremy Gilbert, 2024: https://uel-repository.worktribe.com/OutputFile/450392
--"My Friend Mark" - Jeremy Gilbert, 2017:https://jeremygilbertwriting.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/my-friend-mark40.pdf

Jeremy Gilbert is an academic, writer, podcaster, activist and DJ based in London, and the current editor of the journal New Formations. His books include Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (Pluto, 2014), Twenty-First Century Socialism (Polity, 2020) and (with Alex Williams) Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (Verso, 2022).

Please join us on Thursday for a discussion with Alyssa Battistoni on her new book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. Doors at 6pm, event at 6:30pm.

From the publisher: "Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn’t be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven’t been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism - and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism’s relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism’s own core dynamics in a new light."

SUGGESTED READINGS:
--"How to Understand Nature From a Marxist Perspective" - Alyssa Battistoni & Hugo de Camps Mora, 2026: https://jacobin.com/2026/02/nature-capitalism-marxism-ecology-freedom
--"Situating Freedom" - Alyssa Battistoni, 2025: https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii153/articles/alyssa-battistoni-situating-freedom
--"Injury to Buildings and Vegetables" - Alyssa Battistoni, 2025: https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/injury-to-buildings-and-vegetables/
--"State, Capital, Nature: State Theory for the Capitalocene" - Alyssa Battistoni, 2023: https://tinyurl.com/mr3pyc2y

Alyssa Battistoni is a political theorist with research interests in environmental and climate politics, feminism, Marxist thought, political economy, and the history of political thought.

Join us next Saturday the 9th for the 53rd edition of Crush, our reading series of poetry, prose, and miscellaneous text hosted by Suzanne Goldenberg. Doors at 6:30, Reading at 7pm. 414 Broadway, 3rd Floor.

May 9th Readers: Leonora Donovan, Jodi Lin, James Loop, Andriniki Mattis

To find in language the textures of our lives and the sensibilities of our world. For the pleasures of the text, for the pleasures of the voice.

Leonora Donovan is a poet, sexual intermediary, and a member of the Creature Comfort Press editorial collective. You can find her work mostly in emails to her friends.

Jodi Lin identifies as a gender expansive poet, filmmaker and a person who hears voices. Taiwanese of the Seediq Tribe, they are currently based in Manhattan. Their writing practice is enriched by the certified peer recovery coaching and support they provide. The Tenderness of Glass is their debut collection from new words (press). The book was written as an offering of a new world to their ancestors.

James Loop is a writer from Central New York and the author of several chapbooks. His work has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Hot Pink, Hyperallergic, Lambda Literary, and Prelude. Audio/visual iterations of poems have been exhibited at Art-o-rama (Marseille), CRAC-Occitanie, Frieze London, and the Material Art Fair (Mexico City). For Belladonna* Collaborative, he’s curated readings at Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Public Library, Montez Press Radio, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn and works as the Publicity Director for World Poetry. Metronome is his first full-length poetry collection.

Andriniki Mattis is a poet and fiction writer. He is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and has received fellowships from Poets House and The Poetry Project. He received his M.A. in Creative Writing and Education from Goldsmiths University of London and a B.A. in Political and Poetic Resistance from Brooklyn College. His writing has appeared in wildness, Indiana Review, Montez Press, and elsewhere. He is the author of Quiet Fires, and the chaplet Living Between the Lines.

For this week's podcast episode Ziad Majed joins Malek and Matt to discuss the aftermath of October 7th in the Middle East. https://www.patreon.com/posts/45-ziad-majed-on-156927885

Ziad offers an analysis of the current ceasefires between Israel, Lebanon, Iran, and Gaza, and provides a long historical overview on the regional dynamics and ruptures that got us to this point. We end with a discussion about the gap between grassroots popular mobilization and geopolitical statecraft.

READINGS:
--"When war in the Middle East is told in the language of those who wage it" - Ziad Majed, 2026: https://vendredis-arabes.blogspot.com/2026/04/when-war-in-middle-east-is-told-in.html
--"Since the Second World War, there has never been such a concentration of ruins in one region of the world" - Ziad Majed, 2026: https://vendredis-arabes.blogspot.com/2026/04/ziad-majed-since-second-world-war-there.html

Dr. Ziad Majed is a university professor and researcher. After working with the Lebanese Red Cross, the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies in Beirut, and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in Stockholm, he joined the American University of Paris in 2010, where he has since taught Middle Eastern Studies and International Relations. Over the past three decades, Dr. Majed has published extensively on democratic transitions, political systems, elections, civil society, reform, and citizenship in Lebanon, Syria, and the wider Arab region, as well as on the Palestinian question. His recent books include Syrie, la révolution orpheline (Actes Sud, Paris, 2014); Iran and its Four Arab Fronts (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 2017); Dans la tête de Bachar Al-Assad (with Subhi Hadidi and Farouk Mardam-Bey, Actes Sud, Paris, 2018; 2nd ed., 2025); and Le Proche-Orient, miroir du monde (La Découverte, Paris, 2025).

This Sunday at 4pm the Woodbine Research Group will present our rescheduled Roundtable on Civil War.

More than a year into Trump's second administration, we have witnessed an increasingly normalized culture of political violence, alongside an ever-more dysfunctional party politics; we've seen militarized policing operations moving from city to city, while being asked to think about “culture wars” and the midterms. From George Floyd to Alex Pretti, Minneapolis has become a ground zero for a praxis combining mutual aid alongside brave street-level resistance to state violence. Here in New York City at times it can feel like we’re living in an alternate reality, where many are full of optimism and hope following the election of Mayor Mamdani, as we watch much of the rest of the country descend into chaos, panic, and fear. Globally we continue to see a rise in right-wing reaction, authoritarianism, and never-ending wars of domination.

Members of the Woodbine Research Group will open up the event with a series of short presentations, followed by an open discussion on all this and more. We hope to explore how and where to position ourselves to best leverage our collective power. In our recent conversation with Michael Hardt, he reminded us of Foucault's reversal of Clausewitz's famous line, "politics is a continuation of war by other means." How can we understand the wars we are presently living through? Where are the battle lines, and which are the sides? What does it mean that we are witnessing the criminalization of protest alongside a breakdown globally of shared liberal norms of governance and cooperation? If the latter was built precisely to neutralize unrest, conflict, and volatility, what can we expect from its potential unraveling? And wtf is this new tech economy we’re being led into?

For this week's podcast episode Amogh and Malek return to discuss Samuel P. Huntington's 1993 essay The Clash of Civilizations? - a follow-up to our recent Fukuyama episode, as well as Trump's threat to Iran that "a whole civilization will die tonight." https://www.patreon.com/posts/44-clash-of-by-155616031

We revisit the aftermath of the Cold War, and the nostalgia for a history guided by ideology. We talk about the revisionism of mobilizing "the West" in opposition to an imagined coherent Islamic world. Has civilizational thinking increased in the last 30 years, and if so, where, why, and how?

READINGS:
--"The Clash of Civilizations?" - Samuel P. Huntington, 1993: https://archive.is/3ZmOF
--"Samuel Huntington Is Getting His Revenge" - Nils Gilman, 2025: https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/21/samuel-huntington-fukuyama-clash-of-civilizations/
--"In Search of New Enemies" - Stephen Holmes, 1997: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n08/stephen-holmes/in-search-of-new-enemies

Samuel P. Huntington (1927-2008) was the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University, where he was also the director of the John M. Olin Institute for Stategic Studies and the chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He was the director of security planning for the National Security Council in the Carter administration, the founder and coeditor of Foreign Policy, and the president of the American Political Science Association.

Join us on Friday April 24th for a discussion with Kathi Weeks about her new book Abolitionist Archives, Feminist Futures. Doors at 6:30pm, event at 7pm. 414 Broadway, 3rd Floor.

From the publisher, "Abolition Archives, Feminist Futures takes up the work of three iconic feminist thinkers - Angela Davis, Shulamith Firestone, and Donna Haraway - to ask how each author’s vision of work, the family, and the carceral state can expand contemporary feminism’s ability to structurally analyze social problems. Kathi Weeks examines the archive of this unexpected collection of Marxist feminists whose works are united by their abolitionist approaches, arguing that feminism can gain a broader constituency by taking up anti-capitalist critique and praxis. Across the book’s chapters, Weeks recontextualizes well-known feminist texts in a new and original light, bringing their insight from the past into the present and future of abolitionist politics."

READINGS:
--"Periodizing the Archive" - Kathi Weeks, 2026: https://tinyurl.com/mr2suhfc
--"Abolitionist Feminism" - Kathi Weeks & Sarah Jaffe, 2026: https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/abolitionist-feminism/

Kathi Weeks is Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University and the author of The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwar Imaginaries (2011), as well as Constituting Feminist Subjects (1998).

On Friday at 7pm we will host the 52nd edition of Crush, our reading series of poetry, prose, and miscellaneous text hosted by Suzanne Goldenberg. Doors at 6:30.

Readers: Rider Alsop, Peter BD, Harron Walker, and Ariel Yelen.

To find in language the textures of our lives and the sensibilities of our world. For the pleasures of the text, for the pleasures of the voice.