Political Economy
Theodore Allen’s ‘The Kernel and Meaning’: A Strategic Critique of U.S. Labor History
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBefore Theodore W. Allen turned to his magnum opus, The Invention of the White Race, he drafted an essay "The Kernel and Meaning: A Contribution to a Proletarian Critique of U.S. Historiography." In it, he assessed how the industrial bourgeoisie successfully overturned plantation capital's rule while assuring its own ascendancy over the proletariat. Allen reviewed six commonly held explanations as to why, despite favorable objective conditions, the U.S. left and workers movements failed to establish socialism or even a permanent working-class party. Participants in this group will read and discuss the original, 160-page typescript of Allen's unpublished essay.
Commons, Commoning, Communism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBefore the advent of capitalism, much of humanity produced their immediate livelihoods on lands and with tools to which they either had rights of use or held as individual property. All that came to a violent end with what Marx preferred to call the "original expropriation" (often misleadingly termed "primitive accumulation"). This reading group will explore the historical roots and persistence of such crimes and the resistance they evoke by reading together Ian Angus's recently published The War Against the Commons, Peter Linebaugh's Stop Thief! and related texts.
Commons, Commoning, Communism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBefore the advent of capitalism, much of humanity produced their immediate livelihoods on lands and with tools to which they either had rights of use or held as individual property. All that came to a violent end with what Marx preferred to call the "original expropriation" (often misleadingly termed "primitive accumulation"). This reading group will explore the historical roots and persistence of such crimes and the resistance they evoke by reading together Ian Angus's recently published The War Against the Commons, Peter Linebaugh's Stop Thief! and related texts.
The Spectre Still Haunting: Introducing the Revolutionary Politics of Marx and Engels
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAn introductory reading group for those just getting acquainted with Marxist ideas, based on Marx and Engels' elegant and rousing classic The Manifesto of the Communist Party. We will be guided by China Miéville's thoughtful, provocative meditations on the Manifesto, A Spectre Haunting.
Reading Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWe continue to study selected passages from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. We delve into key themes and concepts related to civil society and state: politics and the arts, racism, class and gender, religion, linguistics, and other methods of analysis, critical theory, mass media, and cinema, hegemony, and subaltern studies, as well as the role of intellectuals and activists in discovering new methods and languages to be transformative.
Blood and Fire: The Violent Origins of Capitalism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsJoin the MEP's Capital Study Group in a four-week study of the concluding section of volume I of Marx's Capital, which discloses the widespread violence and dispossession - in both Europe and colonized areas - that accompanied the emergence of capitalism.
The Fall and Rise of American Finance
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesIn-person event at The People's Forum in NYC featuring Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno, authors of 'The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to Blackrock.' They insist that financialization has not implied the hollowing out of the "real" economy, the decline of capitalism, or the retreat of the state. Rather, it has served to intensify competitive discipline to maximize profits and the exploitation of labor occurred with the support of an increasingly authoritarian state.
Marx for Cats with Leigh Claire La Berge
Video available on YouTube“All history is the history of cat struggle.” In "Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary," our guest speaker Leigh Clare La Berge follows feline footprints through Western economic history to reveal an animality at the heart of Marxism. By asking what humans and animals owe each other in a moment of ecological crisis, La Berge joins current debates about the need for and possibility of eco-socialism.
Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society
Video available on YouTubeA video of this March 26, 2024, event is available on the MEP's YouTube channel. Michael Heinrich presents his biography-in-progress of Karl Marx, which has already gained glowing reviews from Marxist scholars the world over. In the first volume published in English by Monthly Review Press, Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society, Heinrich ... Read more
Animals, Capitalism, Marxism: A Conversation
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsDinesh Joseph Wadiwel and Alex Blanchette explore the potential and limits of Marxist theory for addressing the roles and fates of nonhuman animals, as well as ways to connect anticapitalist struggles to animal liberation and environmental justice. Wadiwel is the author of Animals and Capital and Blanchette is the author of Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm.
David McNally: Marx and Colonialism
Video available on YouTubeDavid McNally joins our 10th anniversary celebration of the MEP with a keynote talk on "Marx and Colonialism: The End of Capital and the Beginning of a Journey."
Marxism and Planetary Crises: New Works, New Debates
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe MEP's Ecosocialist Study Group resumes consideration of capitalism's catastrophic impact on the Earth's climate and other critical systems, and ecosocialist strategies to challenge it. In eight weekly sessions beginning April 24, we will address important new work in ecological Marxism and environmental justice.
Marxism and Planetary Crises: New Works, New Debates
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe MEP's Ecosocialist Study Group resumes consideration of capitalism's catastrophic impact on the Earth's climate and other critical systems, and ecosocialist strategies to challenge it. In eight weekly sessions beginning April 24, we will address important new work in ecological Marxism and environmental justice.
Studies in Marx’s Capital
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsFollowing up on the MEP's long-running study group on Karl Marx's Grundrisse, we have been reading closely and discussing Marx's Theories of Surplus Value and related works. At present we are reading David Harvey's The Limits to Capital.
Reading Marx’s Capital Volume I
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsParticipants in this class are closely reading and discussing Volume I of Karl Marx’s 'Capital, A Critique of Political Economy.' The next 10-week series starts August 10 with Chapter 16, 'Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value.'