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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20250828T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20250828T210000
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UID:10008354-1756407600-1756414800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Summer in France in the Shade of Noir
DESCRIPTION:The MEP Literature Group continues its tradition of easy summer reading focusing on the noir genre. Our two selections are both set in France and both deal with corruption in high places by right-wing politicians and corporations who manipulate inept investigators of low social standing and morals. \n\nCommand Performance\, by Jean Echenoz; translated by Mark Polizzotti (New York Review Books\, 2020).  A hapless unemployed flight attendant thinks he can solve his financial problems by becoming a private detective\, but he ends up in the employ of a fractious right-wing political party. Things do not go well.  Be prepared to discuss the entire book at our first session on August 6.\nCreation Lake\, by Rachel Kushner (Scribners\, 2024). Sadie Smith once worked as a government undercover operative within an environmental rights group. She got fired for entrapment and went to work in corporate espionage. Her summer assignment in France is to provoke an incident by an environmental rights group that will justify government action. Will Sadie’s honey trap tactics succeed? (August 13\, 20\, 24)\n\n\nConvened by Jacqueline Cantwell and the MEP Literature Group. Jacqueline became involved with the MEP’s Literature Group because of her love of Victor Serge’s novels. Participating in an MEP reading group led by Serge translator Richard Greeman eight years ago\, Jacqueline found a community of readers eager to be challenged by the ambitions of international writers devoted to the creative potential of political fiction. Since the death of Michael Lardner\, who hosted and organized the Literature Group for so many years\, Jacqueline has taken the lead in furthering the group’s goals of exploring international fiction and encouraging thoughtful conversation.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/shade-of-noir/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:_Seasons,Anti-capitalist Literature,Classes/Events,featured,France,Literary Studies,Literature,Multi-session Classes,Noir Fiction,Reading Group,Summer 25
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/noir-collage.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="MEP Literature Group":MAILTO:info@marxedproject.org
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20250701T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20250701T203000
DTSTAMP:20250926T163514Z
CREATED:20250624T143442Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250926T163514Z
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SUMMARY:Book Talk: Brian Kwoba on Hubert Harrison
DESCRIPTION:A video of this July 1\, 2025\, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel. \nBrian 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 study group on the Historical Roots of American Fascism. \nThe following excerpt from the Introduction to Kwoba’s book gives a taste of his new approach: \n“In the face of the superexploitation of working people by the likes of John D. Rockefeller\, Andrew Carnegie\, and J. P. Morgan—the capitalist robber barons of the Gilded Age—Harrison crystallized a secular Black revolutionary Socialist politics. In so doing\, he theorized the role of anti-Black racial oppression in preventing the emancipation of the working class from the wage slavery of industrial capitalism. \nIn contrast to the Eurocentric mass media and education systems\, Harrison’s spellbinding street-corner speaking\, commitment to grassroots empowerment\, fearless journalism\, and encyclopedic knowledge allowed him to crystallize a new and revolutionary model—what some called the “Outdoor University”—for free urban Black emancipatory education. It stood in stark contrast to both the industrial education symbolized by Booker T. and Margaret Murray Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and the “higher” elite education of the colleges and universities that were inaccessible to the masses of Black people. Perched atop a sidewalk stepladder at 135th Street and Seventh Avenue and addressing audiences large enough to block traffic\, Harrison spoke on subject matter ranging across such topics as African American art and popular culture\, sociology\, scientific racism\, English literature\, evolutionary biology\, theological criticism\, African history\, macroeconomics\, and global geopolitics. A. Philip Randolph aptly described this model of education as “one of the great intellectual forums in America.” \nIn the face of rampant racism in white society and President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to take the United States of America into World War I\, Harrison helped crystallize Harlem’s political “New Negro” movement. Calling for voting rights for Black men and Black women\, federal antilynching legislation\, armed self-defense\, and an end to Jim Crow racial oppression\, Harrison’s Liberty League of Negro-Americans cohered a pan-African and people-centered movement for Black self-empowerment. By recruiting and training an unknown Jamaican immigrant by the name of Marcus Garvey\, Harrison’s Liberty League catalyzed the emergence of the largest international organization of Black people in modern history. \nHarrison spoke out about injustices taking place all over the globe. Standing against European colonialism and the predatory imperial powers of the world\, Harrison crystallized a new form of radical internationalism in his groundbreaking theorization of the “Colored International.” As a revolutionary political alliance of colonized peoples in the Islamic world\, India\, the Caribbean\, Latin America\, Africa\, Europe\, and Asia\, the Colored International he envisioned would smash the giant triplets of capitalism\, imperialism\, and white racial domination. \nIn a city where white people put a Congolese man named Ota Benga on display in the Bronx Zoo\, Harrison self-identified as an “untamed\, untamable African” and crystallized a model of African consciousness for the Black diaspora based on his deep study of African history\, culture\, and politics. \nAfter a childhood upbringing steeped in the Anglican Church\, Harrison broke with Christianity and religion more generally. He would later emerge as the most prominent Black freethinker of his generation. As against the conservative dogmas of the church\, Harrison crystallized—for a new generation—a Black agnosticism grounded in modern science\, empirical evidence\, and rational explanation over religious dogma. As a militant “truth seeker\,” he demanded the taxation of church properties\, an end to prayers in school and courtroom Bible oaths\, and a complete separation of church and state. \nIn the face of federal government censorship\, repression\, and criminalization of sexuality—and widespread policing of sexual morality by the church—Harrison crystallized a Black free love politics. In that respect\, he emerged among the earliest of Black voices advocating for legalizing access to contraception\, offering public-facing courses in sex education\, and explicitly advancing a conception of love based on variety and freedom from compulsory monogamy and the Puritanical sex-negativity of US culture and society. \nAs a result of crystallizing so many political breakthroughs\, Harrison developed a kaleidoscopic radicalism that connected multiple worlds of counter-hegemonic knowledge. As Kirnon put it\, “Harrison was the first Negro who boldly preached racialism and all forms of radicalism in New York. He preached them continuously and consistently. He was the first Negro whose radicalism was comprehensive enough to include racialism\, science\, politics\, sociology and education in a thorough-going\, scientific manner.”… \nScholars of a particular figure or organization are often ideologically partisan toward it and therefore less comfortable remembering—let alone actually engaging with—forceful internal critics like Harrison. As Harrison once observed\, “Even savants are prone to forget that they do most of their thinking with their desires\, beliefs\, prejudices and subconscious urges\, which they then proceed to rationalize.”23 This explains\, in part\, why those who are partial to one or another ideological framework that Harrison criticized have so often run from him—whether consciously or subconsciously—like a rich person avoiding a beggar. His legacy has been forbidden precisely because it forces us to rethink fundamentally what we think we know—about everything from poverty\, war\, and racism\, to love\, sex\, and religion. \nAnd this is precisely why it is so revealing to study Hubert Henry Harrison. \nOn the one hand\, the most relevant historiographies—of Black Marxism\, Black freethinkers\, Garveyism\, Black sexual liberation\, and the New Negro “Renaissance”—have either marginalized or omitted him entirely. On the other hand\, Harrison played a groundbreaking role in the crystallization of each of these formations. Therefore\, putting him back into the picture opens multiple highly revealing angles of vision on the conjunctures both within and between them. \nRecovering Harrison’s legacy requires us to: reexamine the history of Black people in relation to the Socialist and Communist Parties; recover a forgotten strand of Black class-conscious\, anti-imperialist\, “colored” internationalism; reframe the spatial and intellectual possibilities for Black liberatory education in light of Harlem’s “Outdoor University”; rethink the genealogy of the Black secular and freethinking traditions; reappraise the origins and pitfalls of the global Garvey movement; reinterrogate the mythology of the “Harlem Renaissance”; excavate an onyx crystalline layer in the historical geology of free love politics. In short\, to reimagine the horizons of the Black radical tradition.”
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/kwoba_on_harrison/
LOCATION:Recording available on YouTube
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,featured,Multi-session Classes,Reading Group,Summer 25,Video Available
ORGANIZER;CN="Political Strategy Study Group":MAILTO:info@marxedproject.org
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20250629T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20250629T180000
DTSTAMP:20250926T163231Z
CREATED:20250528T145023Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250926T163231Z
UID:10008349-1751212800-1751220000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Aristotle\, Hegel\, Marx: A Philosophical Dialogue
DESCRIPTION:A video of this June 29\, 2025\, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel. \nJoin us for a dialogue on philosophical themes featuring two authors of forthcoming books from Stanford University Press. Michael Lazarus is the author of Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle\, Hegel and Marx\, and Jensen Suther is the author of True Materialism: Hegelian Marxism and the Modernist Struggle for Freedom.  Lazarus situates Marx within a shared tradition of ethical inquiry\, placing him in close dialogue with Aristotle and Hegel. His book traces the ethical and political dimensions of Marx’s work missed by Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre\, two of the most profound critics of modern politics and ethics. Ultimately\, the book claims that Marx’s value-form theory is both a continuation of Aristotelian and Hegelian themes and at the same time his most distinctive theoretical achievement. In True Materialism\, Suther engages with three titans of literary modernism—Franz Kafka\, Thomas Mann\, and Samuel Beckett—to pursue not only an account of Hegel’s materialism but also a new critique of capitalist modernity. Breaking with the received view of Marx’s relation to German Idealism\, the book argues that the materialist critique of capitalist production is inseparable from Hegel’s idea that the demand for freedom is a demand for mutual recognition. \nMichael Lazarus is a postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin University. \nJensen Suther received his PhD from Yale University and is currently a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/aristotle-hegel-marx/
LOCATION:Recording available on YouTube
CATEGORIES:Antiquity,communism,featured,Hegelianism,historical materialism,History,Marx,Marx and Hegel,Modernity,Philosophy,Philosophy of History,Science and Method,Seminars and Talks,Summer 25,Video Available
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/web-image.png
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20250626T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20250626T203000
DTSTAMP:20250620T134031Z
CREATED:20250530T133233Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250620T134031Z
UID:10008350-1750964400-1750969800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Literary Echoes of Vietnam's 1975 Victory
DESCRIPTION:While the bombs were falling\, only a stone wouldn’t be terrified. If the Americans noticed movement in the forest\, they would eliminate the forest. Who knows how much money was spent? American taxpayers’ money. If a cluster of napalm bombs were dropped\, the jungle would turn into a sea of fire. Can you imagine a sea of fire? –Bao Ninh \nJoin with the MEP Literature Group to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1975 fall of Saigon\, bringing an end to the Vietnam War. This month\, we will read two volumes by Bao Ninh–The Sorrow of War and Hà Nôi at Midnight.  \nBorn in October 1952\, Bao Ninh experienced the effects of US bombing while growing up and later joined the “Glorious 27th Youth Brigade” at the age of 17. Bao Ninh’s writing offers restrained\, poignant\, yet powerful accounts of the “sorrow of war\,” the losses and grief of a generation who fought to unify the country. \nConvened by Jacqueline Cantwell and the MEP Literature Reading Group. Jacqueline Cantwell became involved with the MEP’s Literature Group because of her love of Victor Serge’s  novels. Participating in an MEP reading group led by Serge translator Richard Greeman eight years ago\, Jacqueline found a community of readers eager to be challenged by the ambitions of international writers devoted to the creative potential of political fiction. Since the death of Michael Lardner\, who hosted and organized the Literature Group for so many years\, Jacqueline has taken the lead in furthering the group’s goals of exploring international fiction and encouraging thoughtful conversation. \n(Bao Ninh quote from Ken Burns’ series The Vietnam War)
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/fall_of_saigon/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,featured,Literary Studies,Summer 25,War
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/81ckXikZEyL._SY522_.jpg
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