April 2019
4 Month Pass: April 18 through August 18, 2019
For a one-time sliding scale fee of $150, $200, or $250 attend any and all classes and events of The Marxist Education Project. For $50 more ($200, $250 or $300) bring a guest as often as you would like to the classes and events between April 1 and August 15, 2019.
Find out more »Ecology, Capital and History
Join us for a close reading of Jason W. Moore's Capitalism in the Web of Life. Using Moore's world-ecology framework, we will rethink the history of capitalism as a dialectic in which wealth, power, and nature interact to produce recurring crises - including today's troubling nexus of global warming, mass extinction, and the exceeding of planetary boundaries.
Find out more »A Spring Fever of World Literature
Four writers (John Berger, China Miéville, Arundathi Roy and Chris Abani) who have provided us with an array of work to counter the despair of late capital during this period when the scales are weighted far more towards barbarity and continual degradation of our biosphere, than towards what should be an equally shared planet by all who inhabit it. Please join us for close readings and discussions of works spanning the last century and much of the globe.
Find out more »2008 Capitalist Crisis: McNally’s Global Slump
It remains important for us to understand the underlying causes within this late stage of capitalist development that led to the 2008 crisis, and how the international community of capitalist interests regrouped so that we of the working classes develop our capacity to effectively take on the political, ideological and economic challenges we are facing now and in the struggles ahead for a better life for all. McNally’s Global Slump is an impressive attempt to provide such a Marxist understanding for the crisis and a good example to see the explanatory power of Marx's social theory as laid out in the three volumes of Capital.
Find out more »Black Reconstruction
THIS SERIES HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO MAY 20!
...the great social revolution of that momentous period following the Civil War was surely the “reconstruction” of social relations in the former slave states. In his groundbreaking study (1935), W.E.B. DuBois reveals that this social revolution was both initiated by slaves in the midst of the war and carried through by the emancipated Black population during and after the period when federal troops occupied the former Confederate states.
Tout Va Bien: Screening with Discussion
“Tout Va Bien insists on class struggle throughout but is mainly about radicalizing its stars. Their role in the factory is to look and learn. Indeed, Godard and Gorin upped the class-resentment ante by having the striking workers played not by real workers but by unemployed actors.” —J. Hoberman, for Criterion, Tout Va Bien Revisited
Find out more »Forewarned is Forearmed: Graphic Novels in Late Capitalism
The innocent and marginalized that seem destined to be lost in the history of a world cold to their existence and beyond their ability to affect, would get their days back and the publishing world had an explosion of creative expression by some of the biggest names in comic book history.The Pulitzer Prize winning Maus by Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller’s gritty The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore’s prophetic V for Vendetta, Will Eisner’s semi-biographical A Contract with God and the grim post-nuclear When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs are some of the books this forward-looking and exciting 8-week class will read, consider and discuss.
Find out more »May 2019
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?
Find out more »Capital, Volume 2
How the hell can reproduction of society as a whole take place when there is no conscious social planning that insures that all needs are met and in the necessary proportions such that a continuous reproduction of the conditions of life can take place and reproduce the capitalist relations of production? By looking at capitalist social reproduction from this viewpoint, in Volume II we discover the solution to this problem while new internal contradictions and instabilities at a societal level inherent to this mode of production are explained.
Find out more »Marx and Engels: Political and Historical Works, Part 1
As Engels stated at the grave of Marx in 1883:
“…Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. ”
Join us this May as we read early political and historical works up to the 1848 revolutionary wave.