Classes/Events
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Darkest Los Angeles
Institute for the Radical Imagination NY, United StatesDennis 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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Through the Lens of Spectacle: Panel 1, Oversight
Recording available on YouTube“The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep,” Guy Debord declared in The Society of the Spectacle (1967): it is “a permanent opium war.” A half-century later, the specter of the spectacle continues to haunt Marxist cultural studies. In two linked panels, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture proposes to track “the worldwide division of spectacular tasks” from lens manufacture to retail logistics, stadiums to camptowns, polar expeditions to spring festivals, as well as revolutionary specters in novels and borders, assassinations and squares.
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Through the Lens of Spectacle: Panel 2, Witness
Recording available on YouTube“The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep,” Guy Debord declared in The Society of the Spectacle (1967): it is “a permanent opium war.” A half-century later, the specter of the spectacle continues to haunt Marxist cultural studies. In two linked panels, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture proposes to track “the worldwide division of spectacular tasks” from lens manufacture to retail logistics, stadiums to camptowns, polar expeditions to spring festivals, as well as revolutionary specters in novels and borders, assassinations and squares.
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FeaturedLiterary Echoes of Vietnam’s 1975 Victory
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWhile 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 ... Read more
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Trotsky in New York Walking Tour
Join Alex Steinberg and Daniel Lazare for a historical walking tour of Lower Manhattan as we explore some of the places where Leon Trotsky visited and worked during his nine week stay in New York in early 1917.
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Aristotle, Hegel, Marx: A Philosophical Dialogue
Recording available on YouTubeJoin us for a dialogue on philosophical themes featuring the authors of two forthcoming books. 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.'
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Featured Science and Visionary FictionReading Death of the Author by Nigeria’s Nnedi Okorafor
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants"To build a better future, we have to envision it first." Reading science fiction, discussing it together, and reading it politically, offers one tool for "envisioning" a future worth building. We continue our explorations of diverse points of view of social conflict and resolution, possible and imagined just worlds, here on Earth and perhaps afar.
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Book Talk: Brian Kwoba on Hubert Harrison
Recording available on YouTubeA 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 ... Read more
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Featured Science and Visionary FictionReading Science Fiction Politically: Severance by Ling Ma
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants"To build a better future, we have to envision it first." Reading science fiction, discussing it together, and reading it politically, offers one tool for "envisioning" a future worth building. We continue our explorations of diverse points of view of social conflict and resolution, possible and imagined just worlds, here on Earth and perhaps afar.
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Hegel for Radicals: The Phenomenology of Spirit
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsOver 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.
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FeaturedSummer in France in the Shade of Noir
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe MEP Literature Group continues its tradition of easy summer reading focusing on the noir genre. Our two selections - 'Command Performance' and 'Creation Lake' - 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.
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Featured‘Fake Work’ with Leigh Claire La Berge
Recording available on YouTubeA video of this September 24, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel. Using the most banal of office settings - corporate documentation - in the most extraordinary ... Read more
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Featured Science and Visionary FictionResisting Oppression: Reading Science Fiction Politically
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants"To build a better future, we have to envision it first." Reading science fiction, discussing it together, and reading it politically, offers one tool for "envisioning" a future worth building. We continue our explorations of diverse points of view of social conflict and resolution, possible and imagined just worlds, here on Earth and perhaps afar.
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The Politics of Collecting with Eunsong Kim
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsIn her new book, The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property, Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual ... Read more
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FeaturedKarl Marx in America with Andrew Hartman
Recording available on YouTubeA video of this October 26, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel. Historian Andrew Hartman introduces his new book, Karl Marx in America. To read Karl Marx ... Read more