Reading Group
Events
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Multispecies Marxism: Reading and Reflecting on Animals and Capital
FeaturedOnline Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupAn eight-session discussion and reading group on the central role of nonhuman animals in the capitalist economy, historically and today. We will be looking through a multispecies lens at key concepts of Marxism, such as 'value', 'primitive accumulation', 'species being', 'circulation', and 'resistance.'
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Reading Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks – Spring 2024
Online Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupIn this ongoing weekly reading group, we continue to read and learn from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. We explore key themes and concepts related to politics and civil society, including race, class and gender, religion, linguistic and other methods of analysis, critical theory, mass media, the arts and cinema, hegemony, and subaltern studies.
Free – $65.00 -
If We Burn: Mass Protest and Political Strategy for the 21st Century
FeaturedOnline Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupWhy has the worldwide wave of mass protest in the decade of the 2010s given way to such a strong tide of reaction? And even with that counter-trend, what accounts for what some have called the Marxist revival, a new trend of theorizing and strategizing on the left. Join us this winter to read and reflect on what went right in the last decade, what new organizing now reflects its legacy, and what remains unfulfilled.
Free – $85.00 -
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Palestine: Celebrating 75 Years of Literature
Online Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupRead Palestinian fiction, poetry, and related literature in weekly meetings with the MEP's Literature Group. The ongoing catastrophe in the Middle East breaks our hearts daily. As part of our mission to explore creative political resistance to oppression, we will read several novels and poems by Palestinian authors.
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AI versus Labor: Luddism and Beyond
Online Event - Zoom MeetingReading Group8 weekly sessions starting Oct 1. Is Artificial Intelligence (AI, sic) really the dire threat to the future of humanity as even some of its proponents claim, or is it a more mundane and familiar threat to working people who face loss of their livelihoods and/or further speed-up and alienation? The entire history of industrial capitalism is punctuated by recurring waves of automation to reduce labor costs and turnover time, each time provoking strong resistance by the affected workforce. This reading group will probe the history both of AI and computer technology specifically and of working-class resistance to capitalist automation in general.
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Hegel’s ‘Science of Logic’ – An Epilogue and a Prologue
Reading GroupHegel for Radicals concludes the current series with a nine-week course co-hosted by Alex Steinberg and Matthew Strauss. We are reading the Introduction and Preliminary Concepts from Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic, sometimes called “The Shorter Logic.” This material can stand alone as an Introduction to Hegel’s magnum opus, The Science of Logic. But for those who have already studied the Science of Logic with us this can serve as completion of the Circle of the dialectic.
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Marx Miniseries: The ‘Resultate’
FeaturedOnline Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupThe MEP's Capital Studies Group presents a miniseries on the chapter Marx omitted from published editions of Capital. Titled "Results of the Immediate Process of Production" and often referred to by the German 'Resultate', this long chapter can be read as a bridge between volumes 1 and 2 of Capital.
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‘Citizen Marx’ with author Bruno Leipold
Recording available on YouTubeReading GroupWhat better time than the present moment to revisit Karl Marx’s commitment to the democratic republic as a necessary (if not sufficient) step on the path to human freedom? Author Bruno Leipold presents his recently published 'Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx's Social and Political Thought.'
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Marx’s Capital Volume 1: A Short Course for Today
Online Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupHave you always wanted to study Marx’s Capital, Vol 1, and hesitated because of the time commitment to read the entire volume from start to finish? Join us for a 12-week study group covering key sections of the book.
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Karl Marx and Republicanism: Reading ‘Citizen Marx’
Online Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupWhat better time than the present moment to revisit Karl Marx’s commitment to the democratic republic as a necessary (if not sufficient) step on the path to human freedom? Over five weekly meetings we will read and discuss Bruno Leipold’s recently published Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx's Social and Political Thought.
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Darkest Los Angeles
Institute for the Radical Imagination NY, United StatesReading GroupDennis Broe leads a group reading of his five Los Angeles novels set in the film-noir period of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The contradictions we will unearth in that postwar period, the period of crime films that visually documented this seedy reality, have never been resolved, only continually papered over, and so they resound today.
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Book Talk: Brian Kwoba on Hubert Harrison
Recording available on YouTubeReading GroupA video of this July 1, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel. Brian Kwoba speaks on his newly published book Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism and Harrison's prominent role in the early Socialist Party, IWW, and Black radicalism during the 1910s and 20s. Brian's visit forms part of our current ... Read more
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Hegel for Radicals: The Phenomenology of Spirit
Online Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupOver 16 Saturdays, beginning March 8, we will read and discuss one of the most influential books of all time, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. This massive retelling of humanity defies traditional divisions between history, philosophy, comedy, and tragedy.