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.
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.
From Austerity to Fascism: The Capital Order
Recording available on YouTubeIn The Capital Order, Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital-and indeed capitalism - in times of social upheaval from below. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material from Britain and Italy, she offers a damning account of the rise of austerity - and of modern economics - at the levers of contemporary political power. Mattei reveals how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across societies.
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.
Woman, Life, Freedom: Iran through the Lens of Antonio Gramsci
Juxtaposing documentary video footage with selected readings from Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, we will deepen our understanding of the current uprising among women and young people in Iran. Applying Gramsci's dual perspective on Individuality/Universality, Hegemony/Authority, Force/Consent, Terror/Legitimacy, Strategy/Tactic, Agitation/Propaganda, and State/Civil Society, we will examine spontaneous movements, subaltern groups, and the balance of domestic and international forces. Convened and facilitated by Piruz Alemi.
Staring Down the Apocalypse: Three Visions of Earth’s Future
The Science and Visionary Fiction Reading Group will read three powerful explorations of human agency, individual and collective--three debut novels from three different time periods. Seventy years ago, in the ... 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.
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.
Marx’s Grundrisse: Notebook VII
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAn ongoing group conducting a page-by-page reading of Karl Marx's Grundrisse, a work that can be seen as a veritable "laboratory" in which we can observe Marx in the very process of unfolding his dialectical investigation of the movement of capitalist social and economic forms. In 2023 we will be working our way through Notebook VII, the final part of the book that includes the widely discussed "Fragment on Machines."
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.)
Reading Mike Davis: Between Catastrophe and Revolution
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA 10-week series of readings to commemorate, celebrate, and learn from the ecological/Marxist works of Mike Davis (1946-2022).
Iran Awakening: Novels by Iranian Women
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe winter 2023 series of the MEP Literature Group focuses on Iranian women writing since the 1978-79 Revolution whose stories are set in Iran in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will read three novels from the 1920s to the present: 'The Gardens of Consolation,' by Parisa Reza; 'Women Without Men,' by Shahrnush Parsipur; and 'Man of My Time,' by Dalia Sofer.
The Political Writings of Marx and Engels: Part II, Surveys From Exile
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis group is reading and discussing 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 primary text is the anthology 'Karl Marx: The Political Writings,' recently published by Verso. In this part 2, we will be reading the "Surveys From Exile" section, which begins with "The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850" and takes us through Marx's articles on the Civil War in the United States.
Capital’s Terrorists in the Long Nineteenth Century
Recording available on YouTubeIn his new book Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century, Chad E. Pearson details how US employers at the turn of the twentieth century deployed a variety of tactics to secure their power in and out of workplaces, acting extralegally through the Ku Klux Klan, Law and Order Leagues, Stockgrowers' organizations, and Citizens' Alliances,