Haymarket Books Live

How should abolitionists respond to the coronavirus pandemic? Join Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Naomi Murakawa for an urgent discussion of abolition and the pandemic. How can we achieve urgently needed decarceration for the millions of people caged in jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers? Abolitionism doesn’t just say no to police, prisons, border control, and the current punishment system. It requires persistent organizing for what we need, organizing that’s already present in the efforts people cobble together to achieve access to schools, health care and housing, art and meaningful work, and freedom from violence and want. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY Graduate Center. A co-founder of California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, she is author of the prize-winning book Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Her forthcoming Haymarket Books title, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition, is the inaugural book in the new Abolitionist Papers book series, edited by Naomi Murakawa. Naomi Murakawa is an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She studies the reproduction of racial inequality in 20th and 21st century American politics, with specialization in crime policy and the carceral state. She is the author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/hf3f5i9vJNM Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join us for the launch of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, a landmark literary collection of essays, poems, and prose that are a testament to the profound political power of defying shame. Haymarket Books convenes a panel of contributors from this powerful volume for a conversation on the personal-political fight for abortion rights. With reading and discussions by: Annie Finch, poet and editor of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion Soniah Kamal, author of Unmarriageable Desiree Cooper, writer and producer of the short film "The Choice" Alexis Quinlan, poet and educator Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/V-tfKGuxbj0 Buy books from Haymarket: haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join Naomi Klein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Astra Taylor, and Hari Kondabolu for a discussion of what comes next after Bernie. The current crisis is laying bare the extreme injustices and inequalities of our economic and social system. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/6Gi5qGHRJ9c Buy books from Haymarket: haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks We are in a battle of visions for how we’re going to respond to this crisis. We will either be catapulted backward to an even more brutal winner-takes-all system — or this will be a wake-up call. Ideas that were dismissed as too radical just a week ago are starting to seem like the only reasonable path to get out of this crisis and prevent future ones. We need to use every tool that we have that allows us to hear each other’s voices, to read each other’s words, to see each other’s faces, even if it’s just on screens, to stay organized and stay connected. We have to create spaces where we’re able to deliberate and strategize about what it means to protect our neighbors, our rights, and our planet. We have to have the confidence to say this is the moment when we change everything. Sponsored by Haymarket Books, The Leap, Debt Collective, and Democratic Socialists of America Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/6Gi5qGHRJ9c Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

An online teach-in with renowned activist-scholar Mike Davis, author of numerous books, including The Monster at Our Door, In Praise of Barbarians, and the forthcoming Set the Night on Fire. Fifteen years ago, in his prescient book, The Monster At Our Door, Mike Davis warned that a viral catastrophe was being cooked up in the toxic vat built by the combined dangers of global capitalist production, ecological devastation, and the intentional, politically motivated neglect of public services the world over. As coronavirus continues to spread, largely unabated, we are witnessing both profound acts of solidarity among working people, and the grotesque depths to which the ruling class is willing to sink for the sake of maintaining their profits. And these are only the early days of what will likely become a medical Katrina. The pandemic has shown that capitalist globalization is biologically unsustainable in the absence of a truly international public health infrastructure, and we can say for sure that such an infrastructure will never exist until peoples’ movements break the power of Big Pharma and for-profit health care. Doing so will demand an independent socialist design for human survival well beyond even a Second New Deal. In this virtual teach-in, Mike Davis will offer his appraisal of the crisis so far, discuss the urgent need for international solidarity to end this (and future) pandemics, and take questions from our digital audience. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/xOp9G5hoQnM