Science and Method
Big Farms Make Big Flu
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NY“If you’ve missed the wit and brilliance of Stephen Jay Gould, here’s consolation: holistic, radical science from the frontlines of the battle against emergent diseases…. Bravo to Monthly Review Press for publishing this landmark collection of essays.” —Mike Davis
Biology as Means of Production and Ideology
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYThis talk will report on the current biotechnological landscape and describe challenges to its enabling genetic determinist ideology from dialectical and multi-causal explanatory modes within the emerging field of evolutionary developmental biology.
Counter-cartographies of the global supply chain
New Perspectives Theatre 456-458 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesWe will explore the potential for our own insurgent mapping projects, seeking to understand how supply chains are resilient yet vulnerable and fragile—and to identify where working-class solidarity has the greatest possibility to spread up and down the chain, across sectors, borders–and even oceans.
Use: A Users’ Manual
...we approach the various ways that “use” enters into and exercises power within our lexicon, performances, and politics. From commonplace phrases like “what’s the use?” and “make yourself useful!” to the Marx’s explication of a commodity’s use value, the language of use pops up in far flung and sometimes unexpected spheres. How do we delineate the useful and the useless, the usual and the unusual?
Capital, Volume 2, Third Sessions
Join us as we journey through this movement from the imaginary concrete to the abstract concrete to the real concrete. Come and challenge your way of thinking and understanding the world as it appears to you and begin to identify some of what needs to be overcome and done to bring about a better world. In Volume 2 we further our ability to de-fetishize the machinations that appear on the surface of society and their real relationship to the production of wealth and the circulation of that wealth throughout all the competing capitalist interests and the various branches of capital, and the different strata of the proletariat —prices, wages, interests, rents, dividends, rates of profit, fictitious capital—while revealing the necessity of tendential contradictions that result in episodic crisis of the system leading to periodic booms and busts!
Capital: A Review of Volumes 1 and 2
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesIn review of Volumes One and Two of Capital and in preparation for our study of Volume 3 we will have a 4 week intersession reading from Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho’s Karl Marx’s Capital. These sessions are suggested as a good review for those who would like to join in for the coming sessions of our close reading of Volume 3 which will begin on January 18. Of course, anyone interested in a review of Capital and/or would simply like to read and discuss the Fine and Saad-Filho book are encouraged to attend as well.
Technology, Science and Capitalism
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYWhat is technology? Does technological change drive social change? Is technology independent of social relations? What are the consequences of “technological progress” under capitalism? What constraints does capitalism place on such progress?
Highlights of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1
While Capital consists of three volumes, a basic familiarity with the key concepts and sections of Volume I offers many tools for understanding the mode of production we live under.
Unearthing The Grundrisse (continuation)
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYAfter the defeat of the 1848-50 revolutions in Europe, Marx acknowledged that he failed to provide an adequate analysis of the economic foundation of society and turned from a focus on organizing to an intense, life-long study of political economy. Catalyzed by the first global economic crisis in 1857 and after 10 years of concentrated study, he started the first of seven notebooks to self-clarify his work up to that point. Not published or available outside the USSR until 1953, Martin Nicolaus provided the first—and only —English translation of all seven notebooks in 1973 as the Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy.
Capitalism and Robbery: The Planetary Mine
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYWe will consider how capitalism is rooted in robbery—of the earth, of the water, air, and soil of communities, of the livelihoods of working people. Such theft is becoming more massive in scale and more technologically sophisticated, but is also evoking new forms of popular resistance.
Covid-19 Capitalism: Big Farms Make Big Flu
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsRob Wallace’s book is an indispensable handbook to the inevitable pandemics stemming from agribusiness. Monthly Review is making it available at a big discount until April 17. We at the MEP are hosting an online reading and discussion group to share the comprehensive research and writing that is contained in Wallace’s book. We will cover all seven sections, plus the two-part update being published in Monthly Review’s next two issues.
Descent Into the Inferno: The Politics of Marx’s Capital
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsMarx’s Inferno, by William Clare Roberts, reconstructs the major arguments of volume I of Karl Marx’s Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading. His argument is that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers’ movement of the mid-19th century. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. For Roberts, Capital was ingeniously modeled on Dante’s Inferno, with Marx in the role of the proletariat's Virgil guiding us down to the secret depths of capitalism’s “social Hell.”
Social Reproduction in the 21st Century
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAs capital commodifies and marketizes social reproduction labor and the time squeeze on households is intensified, the contribution to this year’s Socialist Register by Ursula Huws is of highest importance. “Consumption labor does not produce surplus value directly, but is implicated in the externalization of tasks formerly carried out by paid workers and could thus be regarded as contributing indirectly to the exploitation of the labor of productive workers.”
For a Sustainable Future: The Centrality of Public Goods
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWe should use every means we can to raise people’s understanding that they are 1) the only basis of real security; 2) should be accessible to all as a right, like universal health care, and hence no one should be excluded by the alleged rights of private property; and 3) are foundational to the most rational way to organize society. Nancy’s presentation will consider some examples of strategies that fit this approach.