Reading Lenin with Corporations (2011)

Project Reading Lenin for Corporations started as a reading seminar with corporate employees that took place in 2008 at Gallery P.S. 122 in NYC. The seminar brought together artists, writers and businessmen to discuss the intersections of politics, economics and Lenin’s theory (particularly, Lenin’s book Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism).

In 2011 Fiks, Kopenkina and Lerman produced the video comprised of interviews with Wall Street businessmen and economists in the moment when the movement Occupy Wall Street shook the city and corroborated corporate executives’ ‘peace of mind’. The interviews were conducted around Zuccotti Park in financial district as well as financial offices. The interviewees discuss Lenin’s book against the backdrop of continuous collapse of economy, global rise of unemployment and states’ austerity measures.

Art in America review of This is the Political Economy, Stupid at the Austrian Cultural Center