Caribbean Studies
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg, Session 3—Revolutionary Subjects
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis panel explores what it means to act as a revolutionary subject through analysis of Walter Rodney’s ambivalence about Rosa’s criticisms of revolutionary Russia, critical consideration of Rosa’s writings on slave resistance, indispensability for contemporary progressive politics in South Africa, and turn to the other-than-human world to counteract the political violence of incarceration.
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg: The Mass Strike Past and Present
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe speakers in this fourth session reposition Rosa Luxemburg's analysis in the contexts of the United States Civil War, the Arab Spring, and the twenty-first century migrations northward through the American hemisphere.
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg: Reconsidering Primitive Accumulation
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis session will be devoted to engaging with Rosa’s pivotal reworking of the concept of primitive accumulation, with attention to historical and contemporary South Africa, medieval European race-making and its legacies, and contemporary commodification of women’s reproductive labor.
Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (a close reading group)
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsEmpire's Endgame maps the complex relations between empire, racist culture, political economy, and the practices of a security-oriented state seeking legitimacy in times of unbearable economic uncertainty. While the book's story unfolds in Britain, its lessons and warnings may well apply to the United States and many other crisis-ridden imperialist polities.
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg: Unfinished Conversations with Revolutionary Women
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe remaining five sessions of this seminar series explore some of her signal contributions—her argument that imperialism and primitive accumulation are endemic to capitalism; her prescient attention to racist super-exploitation in southern Africa; her insistence that socialism had to be created in and through the widest form of participatory democracy, including the mass strike; her reflections, with attention to the other-than-human world and incarceration, on transformative subjectivities—through putting them in conversation with Global Southern thinkers past and present.
Organizing Insurgency: Workers’ Movements in the Global South
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsLooking at contemporary case studies in India, the Philippines and South Africa, this book affirms the significance of political and economic representation to the struggles of workers against deepening levels of poverty and inequality that oppress the majority of people on the planet. Immanuel Ness shows that workers are eager to mobilize to improve their conditions, and can achieve lasting gains if they have sustenance and support from political organizations.
Towards a Revolution in Labor History: White Supremacism and Bourgeois Social Control
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWhy is the US working class unorganized and suffering to a far greater extent than in other advanced capitalist societies?
Capitalism and the Sea
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWhile sea beds are drilled for their fossil fuels and minerals, and coastlines developed for real estate and leisure, the oceans continue to absorb the toxic discharges of carbon civilization – warming, expanding, and acidifying the blue water part of the planet in ways that will bring unpredictable but irreversible consequences for the rest of the biosphere.
Pluto Wildcat Series: Final 2 sessions—Augmented Exploitation and Wobblies of the World
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThese books uncover the radical militancy which characterises international workers struggles, both contemporary and historical. Looking at diverse topics including proletarianisation and class formation, mass production, gender, affective and reproductive labour, syndicalism and independent unions, and labour and Leftist social and political movements, it is the most comprehensive exploration into workers’ organisation being developed today. All books from the series are available at the MEP on-line book store.
Pluto Wildcat Series: Final 2 sessions—Augmented Exploitation and Wobblies of the World
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThese books uncover the radical militancy which characterises international workers struggles, both contemporary and historical. Looking at diverse topics including proletarianisation and class formation, mass production, gender, affective and reproductive labour, syndicalism and independent unions, and labour and Leftist social and political movements, it is the most comprehensive exploration into workers’ organisation being developed today. All books from the series are available at the MEP on-line book store.
The Invention of the White Race
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsTheodore W. Allen spent 30 years researching the primary sources and writing The Invention of the White Race (2 volumes), which provides a historical materialist analysis of racial oppression and the white identity which emerged as a principal form of social control over rebellious laboring class of European and Africans in the pattern setting colonies of Virginia and Maryland in the late 17th early 18th century.
50 Years of Anti-Imperialist Writing: Galeano, Rodney, and Ghosh
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA reading group to celebrate and reflect on two classic works of anti-imperialist writing first published fifty years ago but with an ongoing worldwide impact: Eduardo Galeano’s OPEN VEINS OF LATIN AMERICA (1971) and Walter Rodney’s HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA (1972). Extending our scope to Asia and bringing matters up to the present day, we will conclude by reading Amitav Ghosh’s just-published THE NUTMEG’S CURSE: PARABLES FOR A PLANET IN CRISIS.
Six Month Pass through November 30, 2022
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWe are now offering a six month pass for the prices of the previous 4 month passes. If you are paying for yourself and any additional person, you are now able to have two people attend all events, classes or film showings (post-pandemic) that The MEP offers.
The Fallout of War: Metonyms of Militarism
Video available on YouTubeVideo available at https://youtu.be/h0dYxI2zDoY
In the second 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.
Imperialism: The Long View and the Big Picture
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsIn eight weekly sessions guided by Dan La Botz, we will look at imperialism in the long view, from the ancient world to today. We will examine the experience of imperialism and the theoretical justifications for it, as well as anti-imperialist movements and their arguments. We will look at imperialism as economic phenomenon, as political strategy, as cultural experience, and as psychological affect. We will discuss imperialism and gender and imperialism and the environment.