David Kubrin, magus of the New Left, will be in conversation with historian Iain Boal on the occasion of the recent publication of Kubrin’s Marxism & Witchcraft, a Marxist theory of the apocalypse and an ecological critique of Marxism in relation to the fight against white supremacy.

BIOS:

David Kubrin is a writer, educator, community organiser, artist and dancer. He helps in the running of the Mission Arts & Performance Project (MAPP), a radically democratic arts platform in San Francisco’s Mission District, where he lives. In 1969 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his research into Isaac Newton’s metaphysics and alchemy; Marxism & Witchcraft, the fruit of that fellowship, grew from his realisation that in the convoluted development of that metaphysics lay the arcane source of today’s devastating ecological crises. 

Iain Auchinleck Boal is an Irish social historian of science, technics and medicine. He is director of the Stokesby Institute of Geohistory and Material Arts (SIGMA), and editor of the Retort imprint of PM Press. With Janferie Stone, Michael Watts & Cal Winslow he co-edited West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California (PM Press). A Guggenheim fellowship supported his researches into the history of human-powered vehicles in planetary perspective. 

“A majestic, innovative, and thoroughly engrossing analysis of the root causes of today’s ecological crises. Kubrin argues that Marxism, by omiting the significance of the world’s spiritual, animistic past(embedded in the term “witchcraft”), inherently supports the advance of capitalism. Only through new ways of seeing the world, and by transcending capitalist and Marxist views of nature alike, can we recover from the ecological destruction wrought by industrial polution, toxic contamination, and biotechnological alterations of living beings. Anyone interested in the history and future of life on earth will want to read and engage with this pioneering work”-Carolyn Merchant