Multi-session Classes
Events
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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.
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Hegel for Radicals: The Philosophy of Right
Online Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupThe MEP’s recurring series Hegel for Radicals continues ten sessions on Hegel’s 'Philosophy of Right', a treatise on the meaning of freedom and the kind of institutions that are required for its realization. Our study is inspired by the insight of Andy Blunden, in his recent book, 'The Capital-Logic Debate', that the key to understanding Marx’s dialectical method in his investigation of Capital lies in understanding the method Hegel employed in the Philosophy of Right.
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Reading Science Fiction and Speculative Literature Politically – Spring 2026 Edition
FeaturedOnline Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupAlternate Mondays, next on June 15, 5-6:30 pm ET MEP's alternative literature group begins a new series of novels, short fiction and non-fiction. Speculative fiction, reborn from traditional science fiction, and also known by its alter ego "visionary fiction" and other identities, including horror, more than ever offers space for exploration of class, race, gender, ... Read more
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Topics in Strategic Studies – Spring 2026 Series
FeaturedOnline Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupWe are currently reading 'The Choice of Civil War' by Pierre Dardot et al. Alberto Toscano calls this work "a trenchant and provocative study of the symbolic, legal and material violence that has been deployed over the past half-century to secure the rule of capital across the planet. The Choice of Civil War breaks with antiseptic images of neoliberalism as the production of docile subjects or the marketization of everyday life, revealing it as the theory and practice of class warfare."
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The Aesthetics of Resistance: Art and Fascism in the 1930s
Online Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupJoin ongoing weekly sessions of the MEP Literature Group as we read together The Aesthetics of Resistance, the masterwork of German author Peter Weiss. This trilogy of historical novels opens in 1937 and details the interactions of the narrator and his peers and family with historical figures of the European left engaged in the fight ... Read more
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Adam Smith and ‘The Wealth of Nations’ Book 2
Online Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupRead and discuss the works of Adam Smith in this ongoing study group. The group is currently reading Book 3 of Smith's 'The Wealth of Nations'.
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Antonio Gramsci Studies: 2026 Series
Online Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupThe ongoing 2026 Gramsci Study Sessions meet on Sundays at 11 am ET. We are reading and exploring 'Selections from the Prison Notebooks', 'Selections from Cultural Writings', 'Selections from Political Writings', and Gramsci’s writings on international politics, as they relate to contemporary issues and conflicts.
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A People’s Guide to Capitalism
FeaturedOnline Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupSummer introductory sessions on the political economy of capitalism: In ten weekly sessions starting June 8, we will read and discuss Hadas Thier's A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics. This work offers a lively, accessible, and timely guide for those who want to understand, dismantle, and replace the world of the 1%.
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