Join us for a unique opportunity to speak with a leading figure of the Belgium left, the general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Belgium, Peter Mertens about his newly published book, Mutiny: How Our World is Tilting from 1804 Books.
📆Thursday, December 5
🕡6:30 PM
📍The People’s Forum, 320 W 37th St
“A lot of people in the North are angry. Their ability to be wealthy-ish in their own community is gone, and they’re finding it hard to make sense of that. People in the South are also finding it hard to make sense of why they’re paid so little for the coffee, the wheat, and the maize that they grow. Yet somewhere in the middle, somebody is making an awful lot of money. Peter Mertens brings together the two ends in solidarity and points out that the real issue is the profits that have been made by faceless, distant global corporations that have their headquarters in tax havens. And at the end of it, he does the most important thing. Two very important things, two words: hope and inspiration, as to how we empower ourselves to go forward.”
-JEREMY CORBYN, lifelong activist, London
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Peter Mertens (1969) is the General Secretary of the PVDA-PTB, the Workers’ Party of Belgium. He served as party chairman from 2008 to 2021 and emerged as the architect of the party’s renewal to become a Marxist party of the 21st century.
He is a member of the Chamber of Representatives since 2019 and a Municipal Councillor in Antwerp, Belgium’s second-largest city, since 2013.
He is a member of the Chamber of Representatives since 2019 and a Municipal Councillor in Antwerp, Belgium’s second-largest city, since 2013.
Holding a degree in sociology, Peter is the author of several political bestsellers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he wrote ‘They Have Forgotten Us: The Working Class, Care and the Looming Crisis’ (1804 Books, 2021). The book topped the non-fiction charts and was translated into French, German, Spanish, English, and Romanian.
This year, he published ‘Mutiny. How Our World Is Tilting’. It has been translated into French, English (1804 Books, 2024), Spanish and German, with upcoming editions in Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish.
