Climate Change
Capitalism and Robbery: The Planetary Mine
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYWe will consider how capitalism is rooted in robbery—of the earth, of the water, air, and soil of communities, of the livelihoods of working people. Such theft is becoming more massive in scale and more technologically sophisticated, but is also evoking new forms of popular resistance.
Covid-19 Capitalism: Big Farms Make Big Flu
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsRob Wallace’s book is an indispensable handbook to the inevitable pandemics stemming from agribusiness. Monthly Review is making it available at a big discount until April 17. We at the MEP are hosting an online reading and discussion group to share the comprehensive research and writing that is contained in Wallace’s book. We will cover all seven sections, plus the two-part update being published in Monthly Review’s next two issues.
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’.
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.
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.
Health Care, Technology, and Socialized Medicine with Pratyush and Pritha Chandra
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsFor the ecological crisis to become a ground to rethink structural transformation, it is not enough to locate it in the wreckage that capitalism accumulates. It must be understood as constitutive to capitalist social relations, having an intimate connection to the robbery of labor. It is in this sense that the particularization of these crises in the form of pathogens and impending diseases becomes crucial. This helps us to understand the ecological rift as central to everyday life and struggle in capitalism, and also to imagine a transformational class politics.
Socialist Register 2021: Life After the Pandemic with Christoph Hermann
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWhile debt is essential in a profit-driven economy, it is pointless in a needs-based economy. When the goal is that everybody receives what she/he needs, there is no need to go into debt. In this presentation Christoph will present some ideas for a needs-based economy.
Capitalism and the Sea
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWhile sea beds are drilled for their fossil fuels and minerals, and coastlines developed for real estate and leisure, the oceans continue to absorb the toxic discharges of carbon civilization – warming, expanding, and acidifying the blue water part of the planet in ways that will bring unpredictable but irreversible consequences for the rest of the biosphere.
Darko Suvin: Communism, Poetry, Comradeship—a celebratory reading and discussion
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsDarko Suvin will appear on the eve of his 91st birthday via an international video conference presented by The Marxist Education Project, in celebration of a life of communism, poetry, comradeship and all that goes into a life well-known for commitment to all of this and more. Readings and discussion: A selection of poems from Darko’s more than 40 years of writing poetry along with sharing memoirs of many more years of vigorous engagement while active in the multiple forms of struggle for communism from continents the world over that Darko has called home, will all be part of this mid-summer celebration a life of comradeship.
Catastrophe and Systemic Change: Learning from the Grenfell Tower Fire and Other Disasters
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAuthor Gill Kernick will present her powerful analysis of the Grenfell disaster and its aftermath. The recent fire of a tower block is a sharp reminder that many residential structures will fail—witness the Miami collapse and the recent apartment collapses In Milano, Italy.
Ecosocialism in the Shadow of Covid
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWe will read and discuss three books: The Corona Crash (Verso), by Grace Blakeley, details how the pandemic is ushering in a new era in which the corporate economy collapses into the arms of the state, and behemoths like Amazon and Netflix balloon in profit and power. White Skin, Black Fuel (Verso), by Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, takes a comprehensive look at how extreme-right currents are responding to ecological crises with with authoritarian and xenophobic proposals while remaining ardent supporters of fossil capital – black fuels to support white supremacy. And A People’s Green New Deal (Pluto), by Max Ajl, engages critically with various Green New Deal proposals and sketches out a radical alternative committed to degrowth, anti-imperialism and agro-ecology.