Race and Class
A People’s Guide to Capitalism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsDespite the efforts of mainstream commentators to convince us otherwise, many are asking questions about why the capitalist system has produced such vast inequality and wanton disregard for its own environmental destruction. This book offers answers to exactly these questions on their own terms: in the form of a radical economic theory. The 14-week class which begins in early January will feature a close reading and discussion of the entire book with explication and references to additional materials related to this study.
Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1, Special 4 week
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsStarting this Saturday there will be a new four-week session on Saturday evenings from 6 to 8 pm covering Chapter One of Volume One of Karl Marx's Capital. All are welcome to attend. Register here on The MEP site.
Empire’s Endgame with Gargi Bhattacharyya and co-authors including Adam Elliott-Cooper, Sita Balani and others
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsEngaging with Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall movements, “Empire's Endgame: Racism and The British State” offers an original perspective on race, media, the state and criminalization, and a political vision that includes — rather than expels — in the face of crisis.
Empire’s Endgame: Pluto FireWorks series book + talk special
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBringing to the fore broad political and economic contexts, the authors trace ways in which empire’s legacies have been reshaped by global capitalism, the digital environment and instability in the nation-state. Engaging with Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall movements, Empire's Endgame offers an original perspective on race, media, the state and criminalisation, and a political vision that includes — rather than expels — in the face of crisis.
Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality. A discussion of Volume 2 with Jeff B. Perry
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsIn this second volume of his acclaimed biography, Jeffrey B. Perry traces the final decade of Harrison’s life, from 1918 to 1927. Perry details Harrison’s literary and political activities, foregrounding his efforts against white supremacy and for racial consciousness and unity in struggles for equality and radical social change. The book explores Harrison’s role in the militant New Negro Movement and the International Colored Unity League.
M.A.D. Lit 101: American Fiction and the Cold War
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA reading and discussion of three substantive novels that explain the context of anti-communism as it raged in the years immediately following World War II, has continued throughout the decades since then, and remains strong throughout American culture and popular consciousness today.
The Last Years of Karl Marx: A new reading group
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWith The Last Years of Karl Marx, Marcello Musto claims a renewed relevance for the late work of Marx, highlighting unpublished or previously neglected writings, many of which remain unavailable in English. Readers are invited to reconsider Marx’s critique of European colonialism, his ideas on non-Western societies, and his theories on the possibility of revolution in non-capitalist countries. From Marx’s late manuscripts, notebooks, and letters emerge an author markedly different from the one represented by many of his contemporary critics and followers alike.
Marx and Emancipatory Political Theory
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis panel will conside George Comninel’s “Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx”, “Marxism versus Liberalism” by August Nimtz and “Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism” by Igor Shoikhedbrod
Blood and Money
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe birth and development of capitalism since its origins in the fifteenth century is entirely bound up with the subordination of racialized peoples. Even before capitalism arose – in a process Marx termed the “so-called primitive accumulation” – money and markets were implicated in the rise and fall of states and empires that conquered and enslaved vast numbers of human bodies. This group will address these histories and their persisting consequences. We will read and discuss David McNally’s Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire and Jairus Banaji’s The History of Commercial Capitalism among other works.
Introducing Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg with Drucilla Cornell and Jane Gordon
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsRosa Luxemburg offered reflections that can usefully be taken up and reworked by writers facing continuous and new challenges to undo relations of exploitation through radical economic and social transformation Luxemburg touches on all aspects of what constitutes revolution in her work; the authors of this volume show us that, by creolizing Luxemburg, we can open up new understanding of the complexities of revolution.
Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly with Editor Peter Cole
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsIn the early twentieth century, when many US unions disgracefully excluded black and Asian workers, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) warmly welcomed people of color, in keeping with their emphasis on class solidarity and their bold motto: “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All!” Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a ... Read more
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg: Session 2—Debating Revolutionary Nationalism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAlyssa Adamson, Drucilla Cornell, and Pater Hudis will critically revisit debates over the potential revolutionary value of nationalism through exploring different stages of the Global Southern reception of Rosa’s thoroughgoing internationalism.
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg, Session 3—Revolutionary Subjects
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis panel explores what it means to act as a revolutionary subject through analysis of Walter Rodney’s ambivalence about Rosa’s criticisms of revolutionary Russia, critical consideration of Rosa’s writings on slave resistance, indispensability for contemporary progressive politics in South Africa, and turn to the other-than-human world to counteract the political violence of incarceration.
Socialist Register 2021: Life After the Pandemic with Christoph Hermann
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWhile debt is essential in a profit-driven economy, it is pointless in a needs-based economy. When the goal is that everybody receives what she/he needs, there is no need to go into debt. In this presentation Christoph will present some ideas for a needs-based economy.
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg: Reconsidering Primitive Accumulation
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis session will be devoted to engaging with Rosa’s pivotal reworking of the concept of primitive accumulation, with attention to historical and contemporary South Africa, medieval European race-making and its legacies, and contemporary commodification of women’s reproductive labor.