Political Economy
Events
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Through the Lens of Spectacle: Panel 2, Witness
Recording available on YouTube“The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep,” Guy Debord declared in The Society of the Spectacle (1967): it is “a permanent opium war.” A half-century later, the specter of the spectacle continues to haunt Marxist cultural studies. In two linked panels, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture proposes to track “the worldwide division of spectacular tasks” from lens manufacture to retail logistics, stadiums to camptowns, polar expeditions to spring festivals, as well as revolutionary specters in novels and borders, assassinations and squares.
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‘Fake Work’ with Leigh Claire La Berge
FeaturedRecording available on YouTubeA video of this September 24, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel. Using the most banal of office settings - corporate documentation - in the most extraordinary of circumstances - a looming Y2K apocalypse, Leigh Claire La Berge's newly published Fake Work offers not only a unique experience of alienated labor, but ... Read more
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Karl Marx in America with Andrew Hartman
FeaturedRecording available on YouTubeA video of this October 26, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel. Historian Andrew Hartman introduces his new book, 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 ... Read more
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Capitalism and the Politics of Nature with Alyssa Battistoni
Recording available on YouTubeRescheduled to November 16 / In her new book 'Free Gifts,' Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to place value on nature. But the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn’t be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven’t been. Recovering and reinterpreting classical economists' idea of "free gifts of nature," Battistoni builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking.
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Reading Marx’s Capital, Volume III
A 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: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsHave 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, 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: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAn 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: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsJoin 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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Roundtable on Venezuela, Oil, and Global Politics
Recording available on YouTubeA video of this January 21, 2026, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel. A conversation among leading left critics of the Trump administration's attack on Venezuelan sovereignty and its attempt to seize that nation's oil wealth. Matt Huber challenges interpretations of these events as simply another case of "blood for oil." Steve Maher ... Read more
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Marxist Psychology: Vygotsky’s Cultural-Historical Theory
FeaturedOnline: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA 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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Extraction: A Book Talk with Author Thea Riofrancos
FeaturedOnline: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThea Riofrancos, author of 'Extractions,' unpacks the challenges of "green capitalism" through the lens of lithium, a so-called "critical mineral" essential for its role in decarbonizing one of the most polluting sectors: transportation.
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Social Reproduction Theory with Lisa Maya Knauer
FeaturedOnline: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsKarl 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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Adam Smith and ‘The Wealth of Nations’ Book 2
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsRead and discuss the works of Adam Smith in this ongoing study group. The group is currently reading Book 2 of Smith's 'The Wealth of Nations', which takes up the nature and functioning of capital.
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