Annual socialist conference in Wellington, 1st-3rd of June at Newtown Community and Cultural Centre (corner Rintoul & Columbo streets.)

Facebook event here.

Friday 
5.30 registration

6 – 8pm: Class struggle today (Aotearoa/NZ)
Mike Kay – Port-workers’ struggle, meat industry lockouts and industrial conditions
Jared Phillips – Neo-liberalism and class composition
Sue Bradford – Unemployed and beneficiary fightback
1 hour discussion

10pm
Fundraising gig: Bodega
Kittentank, Big Rick, Man/Woman

Saturday
9.30am registration

10 – 11am
Revolutionary organising in current conditions: combat propaganda group
Mike Kay
40 minute discussion

11am – 12pm: Safer spaces on the left
Kassie Hartendorp
40 minute discussion

12-1pm
Lunch

1-2.30 pm: Eco-socialism in Australasia
Grant Brookes, Eco-Socialist Network Aotearoa
Ben Peterson, Socialist Alliance (Australia)
Ian Anderson, Workers Party
30 minute discussion

2.30- 3:30pm: Socialist electoral work
Anthony Main, Socialist Party of Australia
40 minute discussion

3:30-4:30pm: The fight against casualisation
Heleyni Pratley – organising casualised workplaces
20 minute discussion

4:30-6pm: Against the capitalist education system
Joel Cosgrove, Workers Party
Jai Bentley-Payne, Auckland student activist
Rowan MacArthur, International Socialist Organisation
30 minute discussion

Sunday 

9.30am registration

10-11:30am
The world situation: imperialism
Paul Hopkinson – Imperialism and Palestine
Byron Clark – New Zealand’s imperialist role
30 minute discussion

11:30am-12:30pm
The world situation: Europe and the global financial crisis
Mike Treen
40 minute discussion

12:30-1:30pm lunch

1:30-3pm: Tino rangatiratanga
Scott Hamilton – Pre-capitalist societies and Marxism
Annette Sykes – The politics of the Brown Table
30 minutes discussion

3-4pm: Queer liberation and socialism
James Froch
40 minute discussion

4-6pm: Left perspectives
Derwin Smith, International Socialist Organisation
Rebecca Broad, Workers Party
Ben Peterson, Socialist Alliance (Australia)
Anthony Main, Socialist Party of Australia
1 hour discussion

6pm
Close and thanks

4:30pm Saturday, June 2nd
Newtown Community and Cultural Centre

10pm Friday June 1st
Bodega, Wellington

Socialism 2012: a weekend of radical ideas and discussion
June 1st-3rd (Queen’s Birthday Weekend)
Newtown Community Centre, Wellington

Schedule below:

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“[Zizek uses] a dizzying array of wildly entertaining and often quite maddening rhetorical strategies are deployed in order to beguile, browbeat, dumbfound, dazzle, confuse, mislead, overwhelm, and generally subdue the reader into acceptance.” Edward R. O’Neill

Slavoj Zizek is one of the worlds most well-known and controversial philosophers.
As a Marxist theoretical thinker, he refuses to be easily labelled and categorised.
And yet Zizek is full of contradictions. He can be infuriatingly vague, suddenly putting his complex subject into a relatively simple and easily understandable phrase, often chucking in some pop cultural example to make his point and explain himself. Few people label themselves as Zizekians, due in part to the constant zig-zagging of his political framework. Yet he has a huge following, matched maybe, only by Noam Chomsky.
Come along for a discussion of Zizek’s ideas, the place of Zizek in radical social change and the myriad of discussions that stem from him.

5-7pm Monday
SU219, Student Union Building, Victoria University