Race and Class
Events
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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.
Free – $80 -
Blood and Fire: The Violent Origins of Capitalism
FeaturedOnline: 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.
Free – $30 -
Oppression and Resistance in New Chinese and Chinese-American Science Fiction
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 Participants in this group will read and discuss the original, 160-page typescript of Allen's unpublished essay.
Free – $80 -
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Late Fascism: a Conversation With Alberto Toscano
Recording available on YouTubeIn 'Late Fascism' Alberto Toscano asks, how should we name, map and respond to the present state of affairs where the forces of authoritarianism and reaction seem to have the upper hand? Drawing especially on Black radical and anticolonial theories of fascism, Toscano makes clear the limits of associating fascism primarily with the kinds of political violence experienced in past European regimes. He argues that we should see fascism as a changing process, a threat anchored in racial and colonial capitalism, which continues to evolve in the present day.
Free – $12.00 -
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David McNally: Marx and Colonialism
Recording 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."
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Book Talk: Liberating Abortion
FeaturedRecording available on YouTubeRegina Mahone presents Liberating Abortion, a galvanizing history recentering people of color to put forth a timely argument that we must liberate abortion for all. Mahone and co-author Renee Bracey Sherman illustrate the long racist history that brought us to this moment, uncover the hidden figures who laid the foundations that activists and storytellers are building on today, and explain how abortion has been and remains essential to the health of our communities.
Free – $5.00 -
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LA Is Burning with Dennis Broe
Recording available on YouTubeDennis Broe examines the history of LA wildfires to shed light on the ingrained power, the structural class and racial imbalances, and the wanton devastation of a city organized not for its people but for its elites.
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‘The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads’ with author Kevin Anderson
Recording available on YouTubeKevin Anderson presents his newly published book, 'The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads,' based on systematic analysis of Karl Marx’s "Ethnological Notebooks" and related Marx texts from his final years, 1869-1883.
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60 Years Since the April Revolution in Santo Domingo
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsJoin us on May 3 for a panel to commemorate the 6oth anniversary of the April Revolution in Santo Domingo and discuss its political implications, the role of working-class Afro-Dominicans, women, LGBTQ people, Haitian internationalist fighters, socialists, writers and artists as well as the worldwide international solidarity movement that ensued in the face of imperialist onslaught.
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Darkest Los Angeles
Institute for the Radical Imagination NY, United StatesDennis Broe leads a group reading of his five Los Angeles novels set in the film-noir period of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The contradictions we will unearth in that postwar period, the period of crime films that visually documented this seedy reality, have never been resolved, only continually papered over, and so they resound today.
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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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Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism
Recording available on YouTubeA video of this November 8, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel. Brian Kwoba's recently published Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism introduces the working-class journalist, activist, and educator Hubert Henry Harrison (1883-1927), who generated an array of visionary solutions to the systemic injustices of his day. After blazing a trail ... Read more
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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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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