“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” -William Morris William Morris was an artist, textile designer, craftsman, poet, novelist, and pioneering socialist. His fiction helped establish fantasy as a genre, his artistic endeavours were an enormous contribution to the British “Arts and Crafts Movement”,…
Category: Public Lecture
Matter, Myth, & Memory
“Change is freedom, change is life. It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don’t make changes, don’t risk disapproval, don’t upset your syndics. It’s always easiest to let yourself be governed. There’s a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like…
WSS Public Lecture: “Capitalist Realism” – Is there no alternative?
“Emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.” Mark Fisher (2009) WSS would like to invite you all to our first public event of…
CSS Public Lecture: What Happened to Labour? Gramsci, Postmodernism, and the Neoliberal Turn
“The common-sense notion that ‘There is a time and place for everything’ gets carried into a set of prescriptions which replicate the social order by assigning social meanings to spaces and times.” -David Harvey, The Condition of Post Modernity For our first public lecture of 2022 we welcome Quentin Findlay to present on the rise…
CSS On Tour – William Morris: Poet, Craftsman, Socialist
“We are living in a epoch where there is combat between commercialism, or the system of reckless waste, and communism, or the system of neighbourly common sense.” -William Morris, 1895. “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” -William Morris For our first event outside…
CSS Public Lecture: Contemporary Socialism in the United States
“Wherever capitalism appears, in pursuit of its mission of exploitation, there will Socialism, fertilized by misery, watered by tears, and vitalized by agitation be also found, unfurling its class-struggle banner and proclaiming its mission of emancipation.” -Eugene V. Debs, The American Movement, 1898. ——————————————————- Politics in the United States today can be difficult to untangle….
CSS Public Lecture: The Limits of Education under Capitalism
“This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils,…
An Epoch of Unrest // WSS Public Lecture on the Legacy of William Morris
Getting off the ground during these times has proved to be a challenge. Still, with such phenomenal support and solidarity from many members and non-members alike, it was only a matter of asking when, rather than if, we would have our Inaugural event. To that, we would like to extend an invitation to all to…
CSS Book Launch & Public Lecture: The Unrest of 2011, One Decade On.
In 2011 a wave of revolution began in Tunisia and then spread across North Africa and the Middle East. In Southern Europe the “indignados” or “indigent ones” camped out in public squares in a round the clock protest against economic inequality. This mode of protest spread to the centre of financial capitalism with Occupy Wall…
CSS Public Lecture – Solitude or Solidarity: Marxism and Postcolonial Theory
“The day we can’t get our hands on the ballot boxes before the vote is counted we’re done for,’ Trueba argued. ‘The Marxists haven’t won by popular vote anywhere in the world,’ his confreres replied. ‘At the very least it takes a revolution, and that kind of thing doesn’t happen in this country.’ ‘Until it…









