Gender
Latest Past Events
The Aesthetics of Resistance: Art and Fascism in the 1930s
Online Event - Zoom MeetingJoin 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 ... Read more
Social Reproduction Theory with Lisa Maya Knauer.
Online Event - Zoom MeetingKarl 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.
AI versus Labor: Luddism and Beyond
Online Event - Zoom Meeting8 weekly sessions starting Oct 1. Is Artificial Intelligence (AI, sic) really the dire threat to the future of humanity as even some of its proponents claim, or is it a more mundane and familiar threat to working people who face loss of their livelihoods and/or further speed-up and alienation? The entire history of industrial capitalism is punctuated by recurring waves of automation to reduce labor costs and turnover time, each time provoking strong resistance by the affected workforce. This reading group will probe the history both of AI and computer technology specifically and of working-class resistance to capitalist automation in general.