October 2019
Capital, Volume 2, Second Sessions
After solving the form that the production of wealth takes within a society where generalized commodity production prevails under the domination of capital —including the commodification of the capacities of the human subject and materials and powers of nature, the two sources of wealth, Marx takes on the next big question. How the hell can reproduction of society as a whole take place when there is no conscious social planning that insures that all needs are met and in the necessary proportions such that a continuous reproduction of the conditions of life can take place and reproduce the capitalist relations of production? By looking at capitalist social reproduction from this viewpoint, in Volume II we discover the solution to this problem while new internal contradictions and instabilities at a societal level inherent to this mode of production are explained.
Find out more »Melancholia Africana
...Etoke explores how diasporic Africans reconcile that which has been destroyed with what is newly introduced, framing this inherent tension as the character of Africana historical becoming. On October 30th, Etoke will read from and speak about her newly translated work while Lewis R. Gordon, who authored its new foreword, and Souleymane Bachir Diagne will address the continued relevance of its searching diagnoses.
Find out more »November 2019
The State and Strategies for Socialism
Stephen Maher and Rafael Khachaturian’s essay Socialist Strategy and the Democratic Capitalist State examines the the state in its liberal-democratic form, arguing that we should move beyond both vanguardist and social democratic models toward a view of the state as a contradictory site of class and social struggles. Paul Christoher Gray’s article on Socialist Project is taken from his recently published From the Streets to the State: Changing the World by Taking Power, where he takes on the limitations of dual power and extra-parliamentarism and the flaws inherent in the electoralist approaches and where there can be some reconciliation of the best aspects of these tendencies.
Find out more »Earth in Crisis: Staying With the Trouble
This reading group will consider how climate activists and critical thinkers can maintain equilibrium and avoid despair by “staying with the trouble” —Donna Haraway’s phrase for living through planetary chaos and struggling alongside our fellow human and nonhuman beings.
Find out more »Psychology for Activists
How do we integrate our understandings of how society changes and how individuals and small groups change? How do we recognize when the things getting in the way of our political effectiveness are not just the obvious obstacles but unprocessed past hurt from our own lives? How do racism, anti-Blackness, cis-hetero-patriarchy seep into our individual psychodynamics and group dynamics even as we are trying to overthrow these forms of oppression?
Find out more »4 Month Pass: now through March 31, 2020
For a one-time sliding scale fee of $150, $200, or $250 attend any and all classes and events of The Marxist Education Project. For $50 more ($200, $250 or $300) bring a guest as often as you would like to the classes, films and events between now and February 20, 2020.
Find out more »The Stuart Hall Project
Akomfrah carefully constructs archival sequences of rare forgotten and long since seen historical material together with Hall’s extensive broadcasts and personal archives, taking the audience on a kaleidoscopic journey through the ideas and personal story of Stuart Hall.
Find out more »December 2019
The People’s Uprising in Chile
Taking to the streets by the millions and withstanding brutal police assaults, the working people of Chile have beaten back austerity measures and forced the right-wing Piñera regime to accede to a new constitution to replace the restrictive one imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship.
Find out more »Capital: A Review of Volumes 1 and 2
In review of Volumes One and Two of Capital and in preparation for our study of Volume 3 we will have a 4 week intersession reading from Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho’s Karl Marx’s Capital. These sessions are suggested as a good review for those who would like to join in for the coming sessions of our close reading of Volume 3 which will begin on January 18. Of course, anyone interested in a review of Capital and/or would simply like to read and discuss the Fine and Saad-Filho book are encouraged to attend as well.
Find out more »Unearthing The Grundrisse
The Grundrisse is arguably a bridge that represents a unity between the early, “humanist” writings and the economics that dominated the rest of Karl Marx’s life. It thus provides both a unique introduction to his economic work and a deeper understanding of his notion of individual and social liberation.
Find out more »Foundations of American Bourgeois White Male Supremacy
In The Invention of the White Race Volumes I & II, Theodore W. Allen offers a historical materialist analysis of racial slavery; a system put in place in the decades following the second phase of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 when an army of European and African chattel bond laborers burnt Jamestown to the ground and temporarily drove Governor Berkeley into exile across the Chesapeake Bay. In a conscious response to labor solidarity the plantation bourgeoisie enacted a series of laws and practices in the late 17th and early 18th century which first put in place the system of white racial privileges which enabled the imposition of racial slavery and “white” male supremacy.
Find out more »Crises and Uprisings in Latin America Today
Join us for a closer look at the political and economic background to dramatic recent events in Latin America, where a tremendous struggle is taking place between popular movements opposed to neoliberalism and authoritarianism, and capitalist elites determined to defend their profits and privileges.
Find out more »Antiquity Now: 3 Robert Graves Novels
To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man’s embers
And a live flame will start.
Let his forgotten griefs be now,
And now his withered hopes;
Subdue your pen to his handwriting
Until it prove as natural
To sign his name as yours…
—To Bring the Dead to Life, Robert Graves
Capital, Volume 2, Third Sessions
Join us as we journey through this movement from the imaginary concrete to the abstract concrete to the real concrete. Come and challenge your way of thinking and understanding the world as it appears to you and begin to identify some of what needs to be overcome and done to bring about a better world. In Volume 2 we further our ability to de-fetishize the machinations that appear on the surface of society and their real relationship to the production of wealth and the circulation of that wealth throughout all the competing capitalist interests and the various branches of capital, and the different strata of the proletariat —prices, wages, interests, rents, dividends, rates of profit, fictitious capital—while revealing the necessity of tendential contradictions that result in episodic crisis of the system leading to periodic booms and busts!
Find out more »Spectatorship and Embodied Expression
“ritical art is a type of art that sets out to build awareness of the mechanisms of domination to turn the spectator into a conscious agent of world transformation,” writes philosopher Jacques Rancière in Aesthetics and its Discontents (2004). When as dance artists we decide to work critically with and through the body, and at the same time enter the contested field of the history of psychiatric diagnosis, our aim is to initiate spectator’s transformation. The intention is to make him/her into an active observer of the world outside a given theatrical event. For this to occur, the spectator is asked to remain attentive during a relatively short time of a theatrical event.
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