DRPRG.8 – Postcapitalism: A Guide to our Future by Paul Mason
Date: Wednesday 21 October
Time: 7.30pm
Venue: Studio 180, 180 Lambeth Road, London (if you can’t make it in person you are very welcome to join us by Skype – drop us a message here with your skype name and we’ll call you when the group starts)
How can theatre makers and other artists working with performance articulate a radical politics in their work? Given contemporary capitalism’s seemingly limitless ability to assimilate supposedly radical or dissident stances, statements, cultures and actions, is it possible for artistic work to escape its clutches? To speak and work outside of or against it? To carve out breaches or cracks in the dominant social and economic order, even as we are made subject to and defined by it?
How does politics live, work and move in our work?
The Daedalus Radical Performance Reading Group is for anyone interested in trying to grapple with these and related questions. We will meet every couple of months and discuss a chosen radical text from the worlds of performance or politics, in particular trying to figure out how it might help us as people who make, enjoy or relate to theatre and performing arts. We will try to get beyond the empty pieties and platitudes that too often define the discourse around political art forms. We will see how, by coming together and sharing our responses to these works, by talking, listening and debating, we might enrich and deepen our own understandings.
Probably we will also have a drink…
We will be reading Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism. If you do not have time to read the whole book, then feel free to read his essay “The End of Capitalism Has Begun” – published in the Guardian here: http://
THE BLURB
Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone continual change – economic cycles that lurch from boom to bust – and has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, Paul Mason wonders whether today we are on the brink of a change so big, so profound, that this time capitalism itself, the immensely complex system by which entire societies function, has reached its limits and is changing into something wholly new.
At the heart of this change is information technology: a revolution that, as Mason shows, has the potential to reshape utterly our familiar notions of work, production and value; and to destroy an economy based on markets and private ownership – in fact, he contends, it is already doing so. Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swathes of economic life are changing.. Goods and services that no longer respond to the dictates of neoliberalism are appearing, from parallel currencies and time banks, to cooperatives and self-managed online spaces. Vast numbers of people are changing their behaviour, discovering new forms of ownership, lending and doing business that are distinct from, and contrary to, the current system of state-backed corporate capitalism.
In this groundbreaking book Mason shows how, from the ashes of the recent financial crisis, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable global economy. Moving beyond capitalism, he shows, is no longer a utopian dream. This is the first time in human history in which, equipped with an understanding of what is happening around us, we can predict and shape, rather than simply react to, seismic change.
Hardback on special offer in Guardian Bookshop: https://
Also, if you’re London based you may be able to find it in one of these independent bookshops:
Bookmarks http://
Calder Bookshop http://calderbookshop.com/
Freedom Press Bookshop http://
In addition – if you want a hard copy – our friend Katia works in a bookshop and may be able to get you a discounted copy – give us a shout if you’d like us to see if we can organise it…
