This ‘Anti-Imperialist Summer School’ will consist of a series of teach-ins, held over the course of 6 weeks in May and June, which will provide a crash course in the shape and functioning of contemporary global imperialism.

The weekly sessions will take place Sundays from 4-6pm and run for approximately 90 minutes. All sessions will be hybrid—when you RSVP, scroll down on the confirmation page to get the Zoom link under “Instructions From Your Host”

In the first session of MDC DSA’s Beyond the Bombs: Anti-Imperialist Summer School teach-in series, we will lay the foundation for the series by introducing participants to the basic principles of key Marxist theories of imperialism, beginning with Lenin’s theory of imperialism and encompassing subsequent developments such as neocolonialism, dependency theory, and world-systems analysis. In this session, we will complicate liberal narratives that present imperialism as a bygone historical phenomenon, or as the mere projection of geopolitical power by a country beyond its borders, and will instead present a more holistic and structural analysis of imperialism as a system of global political economy—what Lenin called “the highest stage of capitalism”—characterized by the extractive flow of wealth, value, and resources from the Global South to the Global North.