Reading Group
Multispecies Marxism: Reading and Reflecting on Animals and Capital
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAn eight-session discussion and reading group on the central role of nonhuman animals in the capitalist economy, historically and today. We will be looking through a multispecies lens at key concepts of Marxism, such as 'value', 'primitive accumulation', 'species being', 'circulation', and 'resistance.'
Reading Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks – Spring 2024
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsIn this ongoing weekly reading group, we continue to read and learn from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. We explore key themes and concepts related to politics and civil society, including race, class and gender, religion, linguistic and other methods of analysis, critical theory, mass media, the arts and cinema, hegemony, and subaltern studies.
If We Burn: Mass Protest and Political Strategy for the 21st Century
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWhy has the worldwide wave of mass protest in the decade of the 2010s given way to such a strong tide of reaction? And even with that counter-trend, what accounts for what some have called the Marxist revival, a new trend of theorizing and strategizing on the left. Join us this winter to read and reflect on what went right in the last decade, what new organizing now reflects its legacy, and what remains unfulfilled.
Palestine: Celebrating 75 Years of Literature
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsRead Palestinian fiction, poetry, and related literature in weekly meetings with the MEP's Literature Group. The ongoing catastrophe in the Middle East breaks our hearts daily. As part of our mission to explore creative political resistance to oppression, we will read several novels and poems by Palestinian authors.
AI versus Labor: Luddism and Beyond
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants8 weekly sessions starting Oct 1. Is Artificial Intelligence (AI, sic) really the dire threat to the future of humanity as even some of its proponents claim, or is it a more mundane and familiar threat to working people who face loss of their livelihoods and/or further speed-up and alienation? The entire history of industrial capitalism is punctuated by recurring waves of automation to reduce labor costs and turnover time, each time provoking strong resistance by the affected workforce. This reading group will probe the history both of AI and computer technology specifically and of working-class resistance to capitalist automation in general.
Hegel’s ‘Science of Logic’ – An Epilogue and a Prologue
Hegel for Radicals concludes the current series with a nine-week course co-hosted by Alex Steinberg and Matthew Strauss. We are reading the Introduction and Preliminary Concepts from Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic, sometimes called “The Shorter Logic.” This material can stand alone as an Introduction to Hegel’s magnum opus, The Science of Logic. But for those who have already studied the Science of Logic with us this can serve as completion of the Circle of the dialectic.
Marx Miniseries: The ‘Resultate’
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe MEP's Capital Studies Group presents a miniseries on the chapter Marx omitted from published editions of Capital. Titled "Results of the Immediate Process of Production" and often referred to by the German 'Resultate', this long chapter can be read as a bridge between volumes 1 and 2 of Capital.
‘Citizen Marx’ with author Bruno Leipold
Recording available on YouTubeWhat better time than the present moment to revisit Karl Marx’s commitment to the democratic republic as a necessary (if not sufficient) step on the path to human freedom? Author Bruno Leipold presents his recently published 'Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx's Social and Political Thought.'
Marx’s Capital Volume 1: A Short Course for Today
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.
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.
Adam Smith and ‘The Wealth of Nations’
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAdam Smith deals with such issues as the so-called labor-theory of value, the equalization of the rate of profit, and the determination of commodity prices in important ways that anticipate Marx or require the corrections Marx provides. So, in this group, we will dive headlong into Smith's opus, The Wealth of Nations.
Hegel for Radicals: The Phenomenology of Spirit
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsOver 16 Saturdays, beginning March 8, we will read and discuss one of the most influential books of all time, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. This massive retelling of humanity defies traditional divisions between history, philosophy, comedy, and tragedy.
Reading Marx’s Capital, Volume III
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA 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.
Historical Roots of American Fascism: Manisha Sinha – Rise and Fall
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsTake part in the Political Strategy Study Group’s sweeping look at the history and political significance of the major waves of struggle and counter-revolution in the United States. Our Winter-Spring study of Reconstruction focuses on W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and Manisha Sinha’s The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 We will use ... Read more
Karl Marx and Republicanism: Reading ‘Citizen Marx’
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWhat better time than the present moment to revisit Karl Marx’s commitment to the democratic republic as a necessary (if not sufficient) step on the path to human freedom? Over five weekly meetings we will read and discuss Bruno Leipold’s recently published Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx's Social and Political Thought.