Political Economy
Reading Mike Davis: Between Catastrophe and Revolution
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA 10-week series of readings to commemorate, celebrate, and learn from the ecological/Marxist works of Mike Davis (1946-2022).
Mutant Ecologies in the Age of Genomic Capital
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsIn their new book Mutant Ecologies: Manufacturing Life in the Age of Genomic Capital, Erica Borg and Amedeo Policante assess recent developments in genomic science, genome editing and the biotech industry, presenting a critical cartography of the shifting landscapes of capital accumulation conjured by such innovations. Discussants: Ariel Salleh and Stuart Newman.
The Political Writings of Marx and Engels: Part II, Surveys From Exile
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis group is reading and discussing original texts by Marx and Engels about their theory of class struggles as the motive force of human social evolution and the modern working class as the political antagonist of the capitalist system. The primary text is the anthology 'Karl Marx: The Political Writings,' recently published by Verso. In this part 2, we will be reading the "Surveys From Exile" section, which begins with "The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850" and takes us through Marx's articles on the Civil War in the United States.
Reading Marx’s Capital, Volume I
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsClose reading and discussion of Marx's magnum opus with Lisa Maya Knauer and other facilitators from the MEP's Capital Studies Group.
Towards a Revolution in Labor History
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA reading of Theodore W. Allen's unpublished manuscript, "Towards a Revolution in Labor History," convened with Sean Ahern. According to Allen, "the original sin of 'white' labor historiography lies in the misbegotten concept that excludes the Black bond-laborers from the 'working class.'”
Peru: Crisis and Uprising
Video available on YouTubeA deepgoing political crisis is shaking Peru, with massive protests by working people in the countryside and cities, fierce repression by the armed forces and police, and desperate efforts to restore order by a widely hated right-wing Congress. Peruvian left activist and sociologist Nicolás Lynch reports on and analyzes these dramatic events direct from Lima. Video available at https://youtu.be/Go_iAP7gTII
Utopia and Modernity in China: Contradictions in Transition
Video available on YouTubeEditors David Margolies and Qing Cao examine the contradictions inherent in China's attempt to achieve "socialism with Chinese characteristics" by promoting home-grown capitalism. Their book attempts to deconstruct the realities of this system in practice, focusing on the internal tensions between traditional Chinese values, neoliberal capitalism, and the CCP's vision of a transition to socialism in the 21st century.
Video available on YouTube at https://youtu.be/IMWTb07tBuk
Animals at Work Under Capitalism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA discussion and reading group on the central role of human and nonhuman animal labor in the capitalist economy, both historically and today. What are the anthropocentric premises underlying mainstream understandings of labor in Marxist theory? How might we expand our thinking to include the multiple forms of nonhuman labor necessary for capitalism? What kinds of labor do nonhuman animals provide in production, and on what cultural, ideological and economic bases is work divided among people, nonhuman animals and machines?
Reading Marx’s Capital, Volume I (second series)
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsSecond series in our close reading and discussion of Marx's magnum opus, with Lisa Maya Knauer and other facilitators from the MEP's Capital Studies Group. This series covers parts 3 and 4 of Capital I, on the production of absolute and relative surplus-value.
The New Power Elite: C. Wright Mills Revisited
POSTPONED - to be rescheduledDue to circumstances beyond our control, this event is postponed. Contact info@marxedproject.org to be notified of the new date when rescheduled.
Heather Gautney, author of 'The New Power Elite,' offers a contemporary companion to C. Wright Mills's work through a fresh critique for the new millennium. She takes up the problems that Mills addressed and echoes his outrage over the injustices and ruin brought by today's elites.
Reading Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWe continue to study selected passages from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. We delve into key themes and concepts related to civil society and state: politics and the arts, racism, class and gender, religion, linguistics, and other methods of analysis, critical theory, mass media, and cinema, hegemony, and subaltern studies, as well as the role of intellectuals and activists in discovering new methods and languages to be transformative.
Political Writings of Marx and Engels III
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsDiscussion of texts by Marx and Engels on India, China, and European colonialism; essays on the Civil War in the United States; documents related to the International Workingmen's Association; Marx's classic The Civil War in France and related essays; polemics against Bakunin; and Marx's correspondence about the rise of the workers' political party in Germany, including his Critique of the Gotha Program.
Reading Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA close reading over 10 weeks of W.E.B. Du Bois's classic work, Black Reconstruction, with Sean Ahern. The book provides a basis for a much overdue revolution in US labor history. As Du Bois so eloquently and bluntly put in in 1935: “The South, after the war, presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see again for many decades. Yet, the labor movement, with but few exceptions, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction, the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.”
The Fallout of War: Chronologies of Conflict
Video available on YouTubeIn the first of two linked sessions, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture presents their collective research on a keyword of contemporary cultural studies - war - and investigates its many valences as lived reality and as metaphor. Taking account of war as constitutive of the present, the working group explores war's myriad meanings.
Reading Marx in the Anthropocene
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAn eight-week reading group centered on Kohei Saito's newly published Marx in the Anthropocene: Toward the Idea of Degrowth Communism, with some side glances at some of Saito's critics and at further elaborations of the notion of "degrowth communism."