Money
After Wampum, the Evolution of Money in Colonial America
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA TALK WITH PETER FAY We will travel back in time to colonial New England and New York to closely examine Marx’s views on money at the periphery of the British empire. Scarcity of British currency forced many commodities toward the role of “universal equivalent”: Indian corn, tobacco, pieces of eight. But it was colonial thirst for luxury commodities like beaver pelts that finally drove an explosive growth in the one money-commodity facilitating that trade: wampum.
Beyond Money: A Postcapitalist Strategy with Anitra Nelson
On-Line via Zoom New York, NYWhat might a world beyond the discipline and constraints of the market look and feel like? How would it operate to meet our basic needs? Moving from production for trade (for the market) to production on demand, activist scholar Anitra Nelson advocates a community mode of production and calls on us to ‘occupy the world’. Come along to hear about and engage in this lively intervention in current debates on postcapitalist futures.
Marx’s Grundrisse: Notebook VII
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAn ongoing group conducting a page-by-page reading of Karl Marx's Grundrisse, a work that can be seen as a veritable "laboratory" in which we can observe Marx in the very process of unfolding his dialectical investigation of the movement of capitalist social and economic forms. In 2023 we will be working our way through Notebook VII, the final part of the book that includes the widely discussed "Fragment on Machines."
Reading Marx’s Capital, Volume I
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsClose reading and discussion of Marx's magnum opus with Lisa Maya Knauer and other facilitators from the MEP's Capital Studies Group.
Marx’s Grundrisse: Notebook VII
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAn ongoing group conducting a page-by-page reading of Karl Marx's Grundrisse, a work that can be seen as a veritable "laboratory" in which we can observe Marx in the very process of unfolding his dialectical investigation of the movement of capitalist social and economic forms. In 2023 we will be working our way through Notebook VII, the final part of the book that includes the widely discussed "Fragment on Machines."
The Circulation of Capital: Reading Volume II of Marx’s Capital
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA weekly study group covering Marx's Capital, Volume II, The Process of Circulation of Capital. In this volume, 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.