Core Curriculum

On the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the Brecht Forum’s New York Marxist School, we organized a series of conversations dedicated to Arthur Felberbaum, the School’s founder. When we first opened our doors, we identified a core curriculum of key areas of study that could help to advance a Marxist culture and contribute to a new American movement. What follows are the introductions to these conversations drafted by Mary Boger, raising key questions to be addressed in each of the core areas
* Capital and Capitalism
* Science and Method
* The American Question: The Formation of Capitalism in the United States
* Culture: The Domain of Oppression & Liberation
* Revolution and Transition
In addition to the core areas, we also organized a discussion on Learning and Transforming Consciousness.

Learning & Transforming Consciousness

I. What We Mean by Learning

  1. Let's begin by addressing the most fundamental question: how is learning related to our peculiar way of surviving in nature and reproducing our social existence? How does our understanding of ourselves and what it means to be human relate to the emancipatory project and to our educational orientations and activities?
  2. We know that each of us becomes who we are through our socializing activities. Through these same activities we acquire the ideas we carry around in our heads about the nature of the...
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Capital & Capitalism

"In my opinion, this is the principle reason why one should study Marxism: namely, that if it is so…that you can actually at a certain moment, given certain conditions, make a difference between victory and defeat, and not only for the working class but really humanity, with the power of ideas, then shouldn't we check these ideas out?

That's the first premise of the educational approach that we take in this school. People should start by studying this important question of conscious politics, based upon a verifiable body of...

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The Development of Capitalism in the United States

This area addresses questions pertaining to the development of capitalism in the United States and the formation of the US working class. We are specifically interested in exploring issues relating to obstacles to class-consciousness and the manifold history of resistance to the variety of oppressions people experience. We are also interested in identifying the specific features of US development--cultural, political, ideological--within world development and how our roots as a colonial settler and slave society, the subsequent cycles of immigration, and the...

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Science & Method

"Our attention here is on the counterposition of idealism and materialism in sofar as the latter can explain the former expressed as Mysticism, Religion and Ideology (false consciousness which bolsters a class system of domination). Idealism is not seen as good or bad but as serving a function in social development, reaching its limits and being eroded at the level of ideas by science, and at the level of social practice by the revolutionary consequences of liberation, which require no blinders on reality but which flourish in the bathing light of clarity....

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Culture: The Domain of Oppression & Liberation

"The School for Marxist Education is being established…for the purposes of advancing Marxist culture…and conscious political practice."
Statement of Principles, Fall 1975

The cornerstone of the Brecht Forum and New York Marxist School's educational conception situates movement-building within a transformative cultural process within society at large. From the beginning, our conception was based on the idea that a fundamental task of the left is to create, within existing society: a counter-hegemonic culture of working people and their allies,...

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