Science and Technology
For a Sustainable Future: The Centrality of Public Goods
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWe should use every means we can to raise people’s understanding that they are 1) the only basis of real security; 2) should be accessible to all as a right, like universal health care, and hence no one should be excluded by the alleged rights of private property; and 3) are foundational to the most rational way to organize society. Nancy’s presentation will consider some examples of strategies that fit this approach.
What Should Socialism Mean in the 21st Century?
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsFraser contends that socialism must do more than transform the economy. Over and above that desideratum, it must also transform the economy’s relation to its background conditions, especially non-human nature, the unwaged work of social reproduction, and political power. In a nutshell, a socialism for the 21st century must be ecological, feminist, anti-racist, and democratic.
Beyond Market Dystopia: 2 Events Special Price
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe speakers each wrote an essay in the current Socialist Register of 2020: Beyond Market Dystopia. A number of the essays interrogate central dimensions of how we live and how we might live in terms of educating our children, housing and urbanism, accommodation of refugees and the displaced, and (to lean on that all too common phrase) the competitive time pressures for ‘work-life balance’.
Socialist Register 2020: Beyond Market Dystopia
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsFrom the editors Greg Albo and Leo Panitch: By challenging our contributors to address what are the actual and possible ways of living in this century, we saw this as way of probing how to get beyond the deep contradictions of neoliberal capitalism. We did not want contributors to conceive their remit as future-oriented per se, but rather to see their mandate as locating utopic visions and struggles for alternate ways of living in the dystopic present.
China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAs the world hurtles towards environmental oblivion, China is leading the charge. The nation's CO2 emissions are more than twice those of the US with a GDP just two-thirds as large. China leads the world in renewable energy yet it is building new coal-fired power plants faster than renewables. Richard contends that nothing short of drastic shutdowns and the scaling back of polluting industries, especially in China and the US, will suffice to slash greenhouse gas emissions enough to prevent climate catastrophe.
21st Century Communists of the Commons and Contemporary Proudhonism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe sum of what the 21st Century Proudhonists put forth as innovation, is instead prey to a series of misunderstandings – of the concept of the commons itself, of contemporary capitalism whose dynamics forms the backdrop of their project and key economic and political ideas of Marx whose authority they seek to attach to their project.
Marx Dead and Alive: Reading Capital in Precarious Times
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsIn Marx, Dead and Alive—a book that begins and ends beside Marx’s recently violated London graveside—Merrifield makes a spirited case for a critical thinker who can still offer people a route toward personal and social authenticity.
The Origins of Geopolitical Economy in Marx’s Remarks on Carey and Bastiat
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsIn recent years, geopolitical economy has become a term for the properly historical-materialist analysis of international affairs that can successfully comprehend the evolution of the capitalist world order down to the contemporary age of multi-polarity by placing the nation-state as centrally in the analysis of capitalism as class. This interpretation is embedded in Karl Marx’s thinking, though not fully developed there. Perhaps its clearest expression can be found in his fragmentary comments on the “Yankee” mercantilist economist, Henry Carey, in the final pages of the “Grundrisse”.
3 Event Pass: 5th Edition
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAn exceptional offer for four events at prices where you can consider bringing along a friend—all brought together by the Capital Studies Group.
Opening presentation: A People’s Guide to Capitalism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsHadas Their will present on her new book which has been desribed as “a lively, accessible, and timely guide to capitalism for those who want to understand and dismantle the world of the 1%”.
Marx Dead and Alive: two more sessions
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis photo is from one of the many days Marx signed in to the reading room at the British Library. Andy Merrifield visited for a moving presentation on Friday, November 27. Now, we of The MEP Capital Studies Group are presenting a six week reading and discussion series with a thorough reading of the book. This is the first of three series we are presenting with Authors, Reading Groups and books. The prices are now reduced—the group will complete on February 1. Feel free to join to the wide-ranging discussion.
Marina Sitrin on Pandemic Solidarity with Colectiva Sembrar
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsPandemic Solidarity collects first-hand experiences of people creating their own narratives of solidarity and mutual aid in the time of the global crisis of COVID-19. In times of crisis institutions of power are laid bare and people turn to one another. Underneath the media’s narrative of selfish individualism and runs on supermarkets, we find an opposing story of community and self-sacrifice.
Socialist Register 2021: Ursula Huws on Reaping the Whirlwind
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsGreg Albo and Steve Maher will introduce Socialist Register 2021—Beyond Digital Capitalism followed by Ursula Huws presenting on her essay, “Reaping the Whirlwind: Digitization, Restructuring, and Moblization in the Covid Crisis”
Anitra Nelson and Vincent Liegey: Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAs a sense of urgency pervades global environmentalism and the Left, the degrowth movement has burst into the mainstream. As growth driven climate catastrophe looms, degrowth is a political response based on changing how we live, countering persistent growth with a demand to slow down with a reorientation around provision of basic needs for all.
The Time of Our Lives with Bryan Palmer
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAt the current historical conjuncture, time has become the challenge for socialists to address, not only because it defines what does and does not constitute the working day, but because it is increasingly obvious that time and its organization defines life itself. Will time continue to be compressed into capital’s needs, or will it be reimagined as liberation, struggled through and over in ways that enhance the project of human emancipation?