Science and Technology
Heterodox Socialism: Michael Brie, Jean-Numa Ducange, Kieran Durkin
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAuthor Jean-Numa Ducange, and editors Michael Brie and Kieran Durkin present on editions they have put together on Jules Guesde, Rosa Luxemburg and Raya Dunayevskaya.
Interpretation Machines: Contradictions of “Artificial Intelligence” in 21st Century Capitalism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWhat are capitalist concerns getting into in the embrace of so-called artificial intelligence? What is capital getting the world into? In approaching these questions, it may be useful to set aside the term "artificial intelligence" in favour of "interpretation machines."
Socialists on Social Media Platforms and Imagine Platform Socialism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWhile digital platforms are enabling socialists to communicate in ways that were not possible in the pre-digital world of mass media, they are supplements to – not substitutes for – building democratic and sustainable socialist organizations and militant working-class movements.
A People’s Guide to Capitalism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsDespite the efforts of mainstream commentators to convince us otherwise, many are asking questions about why the capitalist system has produced such vast inequality and wanton disregard for its own environmental destruction. This book offers answers to exactly these questions on their own terms: in the form of a radical economic theory. The 14-week class which begins in early January will feature a close reading and discussion of the entire book with explication and references to additional materials related to this study.
A New Digital Taylorism? with Matt Cole, Hugo Radice, Charles Umney
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsIn his analysis of the workplace, Marx concludes that “Large-scale industry possesses in the machine system an entirely objective organization of production, which confronts the worker as a pre-existing material condition of production:”, and defines this condition as the real subsumption of labor. A hundred years later, his analysis informed modern socialist studies of labor and the struggle for workplace.
Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1, Special 4 week
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsStarting this Saturday there will be a new four-week session on Saturday evenings from 6 to 8 pm covering Chapter One of Volume One of Karl Marx's Capital. All are welcome to attend. Register here on The MEP site.
M.A.D. Lit 101: American Fiction and the Cold War
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA reading and discussion of three substantive novels that explain the context of anti-communism as it raged in the years immediately following World War II, has continued throughout the decades since then, and remains strong throughout American culture and popular consciousness today.
Capital, Volume 1, Part 2
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsSession 2 will complete the analysis of Part I: Commodities and Money, starting with Chapter 2: The Process of Exchange followed by the historical development of the money form in the circulation of commodities. This in turn leads to the Transformation of Money into Capital, positioning the reader to analyze the specific social relations of capitalist production (wage labor and owners of capital) in relation to the forces of production, the means of production.
From Neoliberal Fashion to New Ways of Clothing with Jerónimo Montero Bressán
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe way clothes are produced, traded and sold today around the world reflects many of the problems today’s capitalism poses to the working classes, with deleterious consequences for the environment as well. Global supply chains, in which non-finished goods flow back and forth around the world so that brands and retailers can increase their profits, dominate the landscape of this industry.
Shifting Gears with Sean Sweeney and John Treat
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsSean and John will take a global look at road transport to envision urban transport systems that are organized on a “public goods” basis. They argue that the incursions of private corporations such as Uber and Lyft could be repelled, at least partially, by improved access to high quality public transport. At the same time, given the car-dependent development of peri-urban and rural areas, and the likely expansion of urban space in the coming decades (especially in the Global South), advocates of public transport will want to explore how “occupying the platforms” through public car-sharing schemes might meet these needs as part of municipal or communally owned fleets.
Engels and the Dialectics of Nature
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis class will journey into quantum physics and 21st-century cosmology as background for a study of dialectics in natural science and philosophy. Readings include Engels’ Dialectics of Nature and excerpts from other philosophers and scientists writing since Engels.
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg: Session 2—Debating Revolutionary Nationalism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAlyssa Adamson, Drucilla Cornell, and Pater Hudis will critically revisit debates over the potential revolutionary value of nationalism through exploring different stages of the Global Southern reception of Rosa’s thoroughgoing internationalism.
Reinventing the Welfare State with Ursula Huws (Pluto FireWorks Series)
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsIn “Reinventing the Welfare State: Digital Platforms and Public Policies” Ursula Huws proposes a welfare state infused with social justice and equality, including a redistributive UBI (Universal Basic Income), decommodification of platforms and also universal workers' rights. With positivity and rigour, she outlines a ‘digital welfare state’ for the 21st century, which would involve a repurposing of online platform technologies under public control to modernize and expand public services, and improve accessibility.
Start Early, Stay Late: Planning for Care in Old Age
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsCovid-19 has exposed too many weaknesses in the neoliberal capitalist system to count, especially when it comes to the most vulnerable. For 10 years our international, interdisciplinary research team has been documenting the profound weaknesses in nursing home care within Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the US. The lines between for-profit and not have become increasingly blurred by various neoliberal strategies. One of these involves non-profit and state-owned homes contracting out services to for-profit firms as – in denial of the literature on the determinants of health – services such as food, housekeeping, and laundry have been defined out of care and dismissed as ancillary. This contracting out has not only undermined teamwork, but has also resulted in poor food, inadequate cleaning, and limited laundry – all of which threaten health.
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg, Session 3—Revolutionary Subjects
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis panel explores what it means to act as a revolutionary subject through analysis of Walter Rodney’s ambivalence about Rosa’s criticisms of revolutionary Russia, critical consideration of Rosa’s writings on slave resistance, indispensability for contemporary progressive politics in South Africa, and turn to the other-than-human world to counteract the political violence of incarceration.