Classes/Events
Chile’s 9/11: Fifty Years of Literary Resistance
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsReading group in progress, ending 2/8/24. September 2023 marked fifty years since the overthrow of Salvador Allende's socialist government on September 11, 1973. To honor the struggles and sufferings of the Chilean people, the MEP's Literature Group is reading Chilean writers active before, during, and since the Pinochet dictatorship.
The Fall and Rise of American Finance
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesIn-person event at The People's Forum in NYC featuring Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno, authors of 'The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to Blackrock.' They insist that financialization has not implied the hollowing out of the "real" economy, the decline of capitalism, or the retreat of the state. Rather, it has served to intensify competitive discipline to maximize profits and the exploitation of labor occurred with the support of an increasingly authoritarian state.
Marx for Cats with Leigh Claire La Berge
Video available on YouTube“All history is the history of cat struggle.” In "Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary," our guest speaker Leigh Clare La Berge follows feline footprints through Western economic history to reveal an animality at the heart of Marxism. By asking what humans and animals owe each other in a moment of ecological crisis, La Berge joins current debates about the need for and possibility of eco-socialism.
Late Fascism: a Conversation With Alberto Toscano
Video available on YouTubeIn 'Late Fascism' Alberto Toscano asks, how should we name, map and respond to the present state of affairs where the forces of authoritarianism and reaction seem to have the upper hand? Drawing especially on Black radical and anticolonial theories of fascism, Toscano makes clear the limits of associating fascism primarily with the kinds of political violence experienced in past European regimes. He argues that we should see fascism as a changing process, a threat anchored in racial and colonial capitalism, which continues to evolve in the present day.
Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society
Video available on YouTubeA video of this March 26, 2024, event is available on the MEP's YouTube channel. Michael Heinrich presents his biography-in-progress of Karl Marx, which has already gained glowing reviews from Marxist scholars the world over. In the first volume published in English by Monthly Review Press, Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society, Heinrich ... Read more
Palestine: Celebrating 75 Years of Literature
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsRead 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.
Reading Science Fiction Politically
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYThe Science and Visionary Fiction reading group reconvenes April 15 for a new Spring season. Watch this space for coming reading selections and use the website contact page for questions and suggestions. * * * Join us this winter to read five landmark, award-winning novels, and novellas using science fiction to shine a ... Read more
Hegel for Radicals: The Science of Logic II
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe MEP's recurring series Hegel for Radicals continues our reading of Hegel's magnum opus, The Science of Logic, Part II. Familiarity with this work greatly aids any reading of Marx's Capital. Alex Steinberg guides participants past the legendary obstacles to understanding this unsurpassed presentation of dialectics. Its depth and systematic structure is without parallel in any other of Hegel's works.
The Circulation of Capital: Reading Volume II of Marx’s Capital
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA weekly study group covering Marx's Capital, Volume II, The Process of Circulation of Capital. In this volume, Marx addresses the question: How can the reproduction of society as a whole take place, if there is no conscious social planning that ensures that all needs are met, in the necessary proportions, such that life can persist and the capitalist relations of production be sustained? We discover the answer, but we also learn of new contradictions and sources of crisis inherent to capitalist society.
Annual Pass
This pass entitles the purchaser to attend any or all Marxist Education Project classes and events during an entire year from the month of purchase. (For example, a pass purchased on January 7, 2023, will be valid until January 31, 2024.)
If We Burn: Mass Protest and Political Strategy for the 21st Century
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWhy 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.
Marxism and Planetary Crises: New Works, New Debates
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe MEP's Ecosocialist Study Group resumes consideration of capitalism's catastrophic impact on the Earth's climate and other critical systems, and ecosocialist strategies to challenge it. In eight weekly sessions beginning April 24, we will address important new work in ecological Marxism and environmental justice.
Classical Political Economy and Marx’s Critique: Theories of Surplus-Value
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsFollowing up on the MEP's long-running study group on Marx's Grundrisse, we are now engaged in a close reading of Marx's Theories of Surplus Value (sometimes referred to as Volume 4 of Capital), supplemented by chapters from I.I. Rubin's History of Economic Thought.
Reading Marx’s Capital Volume I
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsParticipants in this class are closely reading and discussing Volume I of Karl Marx’s 'Capital, A Critique of Political Economy.' The second 10-week series starts April 6 with Chapter 6, 'The Sale and Purchase of Labor Power.'
Reading Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks – Spring 2024
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsIn 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.