Socialist Beasts: The Animal Bloc

* Tickets for the zoom webinar have sold out, but you can watch the YouTube livestream here *

The COVID-19 crisis has brought political nature into full view. In this roundtable, Fahim Amir (Being & Swine), Troy Vettese (Half-Earth Socialism), and Stephen F. Eisenman (The Cry of Nature) speak with Jules Gleeson (Transgender Marxism, forthcoming) about the nature of capitalism and capitalist natures, and pivotal role animals play in revolutionary social change.

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Fahim Amir is a Viennese philosopher and author. He has taught at various universities and art academies in Europe and Latin America. His research explores the thresholds of natures, cultures and urbanism; art and utopia; and colonial historicity and modernism. His book Being & Swine is avaliable from Between the Lines books.

“Amir reveals a world where animals are seen with different eyes—not the consumer gaze, laced with pity, indifference, and violence, but as equal resisting agents in the struggle. A promise of a future where pigs, and those of fur, fin, feather, and feelers, resist the machine of capitalist oppression. Fanciful? No. This beautiful book is a sorely needed reminder that human speciesism has cancelled other animals from the resistance, when they resisted all along.”

—SUE COE, artist and author of Dead Meat

Troy Vettese is an environmental historian and currently a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University. His book, Half-Earth Socialism, co-authored with Drew Pendergrass, will be published by Verso in the spring of 2022.

Stephen F. Eisenman is a professor at Northwestern University and author of ten books including The Abu Ghraib Effect (Reaktion, 2007), The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights (Reaktion, 2015) and with Sue Coe, Zooicide – Seeing Cruelty, Demanding Abolition (AK Press: 2018) His chapbook (with Coe), American Fascism Now, (2020) was published by Rotland Press. He is co-founder and Director of Art and Strategy at Anthropocene Alliance.

Jules Gleeson is a historian, comedian, cat-admirer and Londoner, based in Vienna. Her work has focused on gender history, intersex liberation, and Byzantine masculinities.

Jules has been performed at queer and communist cultural events and conferences in several countries. Her writing has been published in outlets including Invert Journal, Homintern, Pinko, Viewpoint Mag, Tribune, and TSQ. She co-edited the forthcoming anthology 'Transgender Marxism' (May 2021), and is writing a book on sexual indeterminacy.

Jules tweets @socialrepro and can be supported on patron https://www.patreon.com/QueerComm