Facebooking the Anthropocene with Bob Ostertag
Video available: https://youtu.be/EG2B_Vf1KZY
Bob Ostertag's new book, Facebooking the Anthropocene in Raja Ampat: Technics and Civilization in the 21st Century, offers a deeply intimate portrait of the cataclysmic shifts between humans, technology, and the so-called natural world. Amid the breakneck pace of both technological advance and environmental collapse, he explores how we are changing as fast as the world around us—from how we make music, to how we have sex, to what we do to survive, and who we imagine ourselves to be. And though the environmental crisis terrifies and technology overwhelms, Ostertag finds enough creativity, compassion, and humor in our evolving behavior to keep us laughing and inspired as the world we are building overtakes the world we found.
Video available at https://youtu.be/EG2B_Vf1KZY
Science Fiction/ Visionary Fiction Reading Group Summer Season
“The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny." “People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.” --The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin Summertime ... Read more
Celebrate the Life of Michael Lardner
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesVideo available: https://youtu.be/aGkzsiT7kdQ
Michael Lardner, longtime organizer with the Marxist Education Project, died on July 21, 2022, following a brief but valiant struggle with an aggressive cancer. Join us to celebrate his life and contributions.
If you are unable to attend in person a Zoom link will be provided when you register or submit the RSVP.
Adventure Capitalism: Raymond Craib Looks at ‘Libertarian Exit’
Video available: https://youtu.be/QwctEaH5_54
The past half century is littered with the remains of experiments in “libertarian exit.” Raymond Craib's new PM Press book Adventure Capitalism traces the history history of individualist, property-oriented “escape” projects pursued by the likes of Michael Oliver, Peter Thiel, and Bitcoin bros.
Jean Jaurès and the Socialist History of the French Revolution
Video available: https://youtu.be/mtT8owRC5Fw
Jean Jaurès's magisterial work, A Socialist History of the French Revolution, has endured for over a century as one of the most influential accounts ever published. Mitchell Abidor's abridged translation of the original six-volume work makes this new edition truly accessible to an Anglophone audience. Geoff Kurtz, author of a 2014 biography of Jaurès, joins Mitch for a conversation about the History and the author's life and times.
Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire
Recording available on YouTubeVideo available: https://youtu.be/C5YAw174E7s
Palm oil, found in half of supermarket products, has shaped our world. Max Haiven uncovers how the gears of capitalism are literally and metaphorically lubricated by this ubiquitous elixir.
Climate, Class, and Degrowth
Join the MEP's Ecosocialist Study Group as we reconvene to consider two books that are provoking wide discussion and debate: Matt Huber's Climate Change as Class War, and The Future Is Degrowth, by Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan, and Andrea Vetter.
Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism
This study group is reading and discussing Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism.
The Novels of Nanni Balestrini with the MEP Literature Group
The MEP Literature Group resumes this fall/winter to read several works by the Italian author Nanni Balestrini, including We Want Everything and The Unseen.
Annual Pass
This pass entitles the purchaser to attend any or all Marxist Education Project classes and events during an entire year from the month of purchase. (For example, a pass purchased on January 7, 2023, will be valid until January 31, 2024.)
Hegel for Radicals: Part II – Phenomenology of Spirit
With Alex Steinberg. This class series is a continuation of the series from the Spring of 2022 where we introduced Hegel’s Philosophy of History. We will dive directly into that mysterious book, The Phenomenology of Spirit. No prior experience with studying Hegel is expected or required. We will make Hegel's book less mysterious as we go along and try to tease out the revolutionary implications in the thought of Hegel and explain their significance for our time.
The Political Writings of Marx and Engels: Social Classes, Revolution, and Human Freedom
This group will read and discuss original texts by Marx and Engels about their theory of class struggles as the motive force of human social evolution and the modern working class as the political antagonist of the capitalist system - the class that has the power, by abolishing itself, to usher in a society beyond class exploitation.
Climate Justice and Socialist Strategy with Jason W. Moore
Recording available on YouTubeVideo available at https://youtu.be/2nZ9xgNn35A
Jason W. Moore addresses the missed opportunity for a program of planetary justice as the “Environmentalism of the Rich” came to the fore after 1968 and overshadowed Martin Luther King, Jr.’s appeal for radical action against capitalism’s “triple evils” of racism, militarism, and class exploitation. As King underscored in his final months, justice cannot be effectively pursued piece by piece. The “whole society” with and within the web of life must be reinvented, inasmuch as we are “all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.”
Envisioning Social Change: New Voices in Science Fiction
In order to build a better world, we have to envision it first. Join us to read more science fiction through the lens of social change. Readings this fall will include Selections from Octavia's Brood, edited by adrienne marie brown and Walida Imarisha, who conceptualized Visionary Fiction and this book to honor Octavia Butler. Emily ... Read more
Invention of the White Race – Fall 2022
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA reading and discussion group convened with Sean Ahern, on Theodore W. Allen's The Invention of the White Race. In 1972, after over 30 years of activism in the labor and communist movements, Allen shared the following strategic insight with a new generation of revolutionaries: “The most vulnerable point at which a decisive blow can be struck against bourgeois rule in the United States is white supremacy. White supremacy is both the keystone (in the arch) and the Achilles heel of U.S. bourgeois democracy, the historic form of bourgeois rule in the US. It is a vulnerable point because it is a historically developed and unresolvable internal contradiction of US bourgeois democracy. It is the decisive vulnerable point because – as history has repeatedly proved – the basic class contradictions in bourgeois democracy can never fully mature until and unless the anti-proletarian nature of white supremacy has been completely established in the minds of the proletarian masses.” Allen spent the next 20 years researching the primary sources and writing his magnum opus.