February 2021
A New Digital Taylorism? with Matt Cole, Hugo Radice, Charles Umney
In his analysis of the workplace, Marx concludes that “Large-scale industry possesses in the machine system an entirely objective organization of production, which confronts the worker as a pre-existing material condition of production:”, and defines this condition as the real subsumption of labor. A hundred years later, his analysis informed modern socialist studies of labor and the struggle for workplace.
Find out more »Socialist Register 2021: Beyond Digital Capitalism (the entire series)
Beyond Digital Capitalism: New Ways of Living Continues on February 23, with 9 more sessions on Sundays or Tuesdays until May 2 There are tickets for each session for those who are unable to be present for this series. The series tickets provide entrance to the remaining 13 presentations with discussions. “In addressing how far digital technology has become integral to the capitalist market dystopia of the first decades the 21st century, we were deliberately seeking to counter so much…
Find out more »March 2021
M.A.D. Lit 101: American Fiction and the Cold War
A 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.
Find out more »Capital, Volume 1, Part 2
Session 2 will complete the analysis of Part I: Commodities and Money, starting with Chapter 2: The Process of Exchange followed by the historical development of the money form in the circulation of commodities. This in turn leads to the Transformation of Money into Capital, positioning the reader to analyze the specific social relations of capitalist production (wage labor and owners of capital) in relation to the forces of production, the means of production.
Find out more »Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1, Special 4 week
Starting 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.
Find out more »Empire’s Endgame with Gargi Bhattacharyya and co-authors including Adam Elliott-Cooper, Sita Balani and others
Engaging 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.
Find out more »Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality. A discussion of Volume 2 with Jeff B. Perry
In 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.
Find out more »Towards a Revolution in Labor History: White Supremacism and Bourgeois Social Control
Why is the US working class unorganized and suffering to a far greater extent than in other advanced capitalist societies?
Find out more »150th Anniversary of the Paris Commune
Please join us on March 18 –the date the uprising began – as Mitch Abidor, editor and translator of two books on the fighters in the 1871 uprising, Communards and Voices of the Paris Commune, recounts what happened over the 71 days that followed, in all its complexity, both its heroism and its failings, as well as its role as inspiration with lessons for the movements that followed in its footsteps.
Find out more »Marx and Emancipatory Political Theory
This 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
Find out more »Working Class Cinema in the Age of Digital Capitalism
Why does the story of cinema begin with the end of work? Is it because, as has been suggested, it is impossible to represent work from the perspective of labor but only from the point of view of capital, because the revolutionary horizon of the working class coincides with the end of work? After all, the early revolutionary art avant-garde had an ambiguous relationship with capitalism: it provided both a critique of commodification while also reproducing the commodity form.
Find out more »April 2021
Reinventing the Welfare State with Ursula Huws (Pluto FireWorks Series)
In “Reinventing the Welfare State: Digital Platforms and Public Policies” Ursula Huws proposes a welfare state infused with social justice and equality, including a redistributive UBI (Universal Basic Income), decommodification of platforms and also universal workers' rights. With positivity and rigour, she outlines a ‘digital welfare state’ for the 21st century, which would involve a repurposing of online platform technologies under public control to modernize and expand public services, and improve accessibility.
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