historical materialism
Events
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Reading Marx’s Capital, Volume III
Reading GroupA weekly study group covering Marx's Capital, Volume III, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. This work integrates and completes Marx's analysis, enabling us to understand and make sense of how the phenomena we see occurring on the surface of society are related to the underlying system of capitalism.
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Slavery and Capitalism: A Book Talk by David McNally
Recording available on YouTubeA video of this November 29, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel. A book talk by David McNally on Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History. McNally injects new life into Karl Marx’s writings on enslavement and labor, presenting a new, systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery—using colonial ... Read more
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Marx’s Capital, Volume I – A Short Course on Capitalist Production
Online Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupHave you always wanted to study Marx’s Capital, Vol 1, and hesitated because of the time commitment to read the entire volume from start to finish? Join us for a 12-week study group covering key sections of the book.
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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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Hegel, Marx, and Capital
Recording available on YouTubeAndy Blunden presents insights from two new books on Marx's use of Hegel's Logic in the writing of Capital.
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Reading ‘Karl Marx in America’
Online Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupAn eight-week study of Andrew Hartman's recently published Karl Marx in America. To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of ... Read more
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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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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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Approaching the Limit: Panel 1, Thresholds
FeaturedOnline Event - Zoom MeetingSpecial EventIn two linked panels, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture explores the limits and limitations of our world—sensory, spatial, temporal, social, cultural, political. I their geographical and methodological variety, our papers collectively map out the terrai of this keyword, and seek to determine the bounds, so to speak, of studying, theorizing and making culture at the limit.
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Approaching the Limit: Panel 2, Extremities
FeaturedOnline Event - Zoom MeetingSpecial EventIn two linked panels, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture explores the limits and limitations of our world—sensory, spatial, temporal, social, cultural, political. I their geographical and methodological variety, our papers collectively map out the terrain of this keyword, and seek to determine the bounds, so to speak, of studying, theorizing and making culture at the limit. This second panel questions the socio-spatial manifestations of the limit and its political and property avatars: the border the boundary, and the zone.
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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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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.