Multi-session Classes
Events
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Book Talk: Brian Kwoba on Hubert Harrison
Recording available on YouTubeReading GroupA 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 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 ... Read more
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Reading Science Fiction Politically: Severance by Ling Ma
Featured Science and Visionary FictionOnline Event - Zoom Meeting"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 Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupOver 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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Summer in France in the Shade of Noir
FeaturedOnline Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupThe 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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Resisting Oppression: Reading Science Fiction Politically
Featured Science and Visionary FictionOnline Event - Zoom Meeting"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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Reading Marx’s Capital, Volume III
Reading GroupA weekly study group covering Marx's Capital, Volume III, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. This work integrates and completes Marx's analysis, enabling us to understand and make sense of how the phenomena we see occurring on the surface of society are related to the underlying system of capitalism.
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Marx’s Capital, Volume I – A Short Course on Capitalist Production
Online Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupHave you always wanted to study Marx’s Capital, Vol 1, and hesitated because of the time commitment to read the entire volume from start to finish? Join us for a 12-week study group covering key sections of the book.
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Octavia Butler: ‘Positive Obsession’ and ‘Wild Seed’
Reading GroupAlternate Mondays, Next on December 8, 5-6:30 pm ET Watch for new selections coming soon, featuring Frankenstein and the Chicano Frankenstein. Join us for a new appreciation of Octavia Butler, beginning with Susana M. Morris’s pathbreaking new biography, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia Butler followed by Butler’s prophetic Wild Seed and other ... Read more
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Hegel’s Preface to the ‘Phenomenology’
(ends on December 13) This eight-session course with Alex Steinberg concludes our ongoing studies of Hegel's mysterious work, The Phenomenology of Spirit. We will do a close reading of the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, a work that can be read on its own and is considered the most succinct and comprehensive statement of ... Read more
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Animals and Capitalism: Metabolic Labor
FeaturedOnline Event - Zoom MeetingA five-session study group on nonhuman animals' relationship with capital as living, breathing, "commodified" beings. What differentiates nonhuman animals from non-living commodified objects is the way their metabolic and reproductive capacities are harnessed in production. In this study group, we will focus on how metabolic labor has been theorized in feminist studies and contemporary Marxist environmental and animal studies, with a specific focus on the particular function of nonhuman animals for capitalism.
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Slavery and Capitalism: A Reading Group
Online Event - Zoom MeetingJoin us for a nine-session reading group on David McNally's recently published Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History. McNally's book presents a systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery to support the provocative claim that enslaved labor in the plantation system is a form of capitalist commodity production. Weaving together history, ... Read more
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Marxist Psychology: Vygotsky’s Cultural-Historical Theory
FeaturedOnline Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupA six-week workshop with Carl Ratner, in which we will seek to solve the riddle Marx posed in his first thesis on Feuerbach: "in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such." Exploring a materialist theory of subjectivity which does know sensuous activity, we will see how historical materialism can be extended to reveal how it is compatible with psychology and how human psychology is itself a historical-materialist phenomenon.
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Immigration and Chicano/Latin American Liberation: Repression & Resistance
Online Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupTuesdays, 7-9 pm ET Join us for an overview study of the relationship between Mexican immigration and the United States: its colonial foundation, vibrant new communities, cyclical labor exploitation, and state-sanctioned repression, liberation struggles. The Chicano liberation movement emerged as a direct response to this, and its legacy is critical to understanding immigration struggles today ... Read more
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Social Reproduction Theory with Lisa Maya Knauer.
Online Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupKarl Marx only sketched the concept of social reproduction in very broad terms, but it was taken up and expanded upon by Marxist and radical feminists, starting in the 1970s and 1980s. They argued that women’s oppression under capitalism is linked to their role in social (as well as biological) reproduction. This reading group will look at one of the germinal texts of social reproduction theory: Lise Vogel’s groundbreaking 1983 work, Marxism and the Oppression of Women.
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Marx’s Capital, Vol. II – On the Circulation of Capital
Online Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupA ten-session study group covering Marx's Capital, Volume II, The Process of Circulation of Capital. 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.