The Fallout of War: Metonyms of Militarism
Recording available on YouTubeVideo available at https://youtu.be/h0dYxI2zDoY
In the second of two linked sessions, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture presents their collective research on a keyword of contemporary cultural studies - war - and investigates its many valences as lived reality and as metaphor. Taking account of war as constitutive of the present, the working group explores war's myriad meanings.
The Politics of the Other: New Visionary Fiction
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe Science and Visionary Fiction Reading Group spring season takes on three of the most richly inventive and deeply challenging novels of our time. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness Cixin Liu, Three-Body Problem Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time All three create and adapt new worlds to explore themes of existential species ... Read more
Animals at Work Under Capitalism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA discussion and reading group on the central role of human and nonhuman animal labor in the capitalist economy, both historically and today. What are the anthropocentric premises underlying mainstream understandings of labor in Marxist theory? How might we expand our thinking to include the multiple forms of nonhuman labor necessary for capitalism? What kinds of labor do nonhuman animals provide in production, and on what cultural, ideological and economic bases is work divided among people, nonhuman animals and machines?
Iran Awakening II: More Novels by Iranian Women
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe spring 2023 series of the MEP Literature Group continues to focus on Iranian women writing since the 1978-79 Revolution whose stories are set inside Iran.
‘The Man Who Changed Colors’
Recording available on YouTubeVideo available at https://youtu.be/ABOczzUs8nQ
Bill Fletcher Jr's 'The Man Who Changed Colors' delves into the complicated relationships between Cape Verdean Americans and African Americans, Portuguese fascist gangs, and abusive shipyard working conditions. When a dockworker falls to his death under strange circumstances, investigative journalist David Gomes is on the case. His dogged pursuit of the truth puts his life in danger and upends the scrappy Cape Cod newspaper he works for.
Reading Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA close reading over 10 weeks of W.E.B. Du Bois's classic work, Black Reconstruction, with Sean Ahern. The book provides a basis for a much overdue revolution in US labor history. As Du Bois so eloquently and bluntly put in in 1935: “The South, after the war, presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see again for many decades. Yet, the labor movement, with but few exceptions, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction, the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.”
Reading Marx’s Capital, Volume I (second series)
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsSecond series in our close reading and discussion of Marx's magnum opus, with Lisa Maya Knauer and other facilitators from the MEP's Capital Studies Group. This series covers parts 3 and 4 of Capital I, on the production of absolute and relative surplus-value.
Reading Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA close reading over 10 weeks of W.E.B. Du Bois's classic work, Black Reconstruction, with Sean Ahern. The book provides a basis for a much overdue revolution in US labor history. As Du Bois so eloquently and bluntly put in in 1935: “The South, after the war, presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see again for many decades. Yet, the labor movement, with but few exceptions, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction, the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.”
Political Writings of Marx and Engels III
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsDiscussion of texts by Marx and Engels on India, China, and European colonialism; essays on the Civil War in the United States; documents related to the International Workingmen's Association; Marx's classic The Civil War in France and related essays; polemics against Bakunin; and Marx's correspondence about the rise of the workers' political party in Germany, including his Critique of the Gotha Program.
Reading Marx in the Anthropocene
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAn eight-week reading group centered on Kohei Saito's newly published Marx in the Anthropocene: Toward the Idea of Degrowth Communism, with some side glances at some of Saito's critics and at further elaborations of the notion of "degrowth communism."
Summer with Hegel: The Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA seven-week summer course with Alex Steinberg that concludes our ongoing studies of Hegel's mysterious work, The Phenomenology of Spirit. We will do a close reading of the Preface to the Phenomenology , a work that can be read on its own and is considered the most succinct and comprehensive statement of Hegel's philosophy.
Reading Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWe continue to study selected passages from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. We delve into key themes and concepts related to civil society and state: politics and the arts, racism, class and gender, religion, linguistics, and other methods of analysis, critical theory, mass media, and cinema, hegemony, and subaltern studies, as well as the role of intellectuals and activists in discovering new methods and languages to be transformative.
“We’re Going on an Adventure”: Summer Visionary Fiction
The MEP's Science and Visionary Fiction Reading Group will read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Ruin this summer. The catchphrase, "We're going on an adventure," signals the novel's overlapping themes of contemporary significance--desperate efforts to escape war and corporate destruction on Earth, species-level competition to make new homes elsewhere, and the varieties and the social significance ... Read more
Summertime … and the Living Ain’t Easy: Black Noir
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe Marxist Education Project's Literature Group continues its summertime tradition of reading noir fiction: the popular American crime genre that explores the corruption of society - and, in our selected books by Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, Attica Locke, and Bill Fletcher Jr. - corruption in the workplace, in unions, and among workers.
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.)