May 2021
Socialist Register 2021: Beyond Digital Capitalism (the entire series)
Beyond Digital Capitalism: New Ways of Living Continues on April 27 with another final session on May 2 There are tickets for each session for those who are unable to be present for this series. The series tickets provide entrance to the remaining 6 presentations with discussions. “In addressing how far digital technology has become integral to the capitalist market dystopia of the first decades the 21st century, we were deliberately seeking to counter so much facile futurist ‘cyber-utopian’ thinking…
Find out more »Dual Presentation: Community Restaurants with Benjamin Selwyn / Postcapitalism: Alternatives or Detour?
Community Restaurants: Decommodifying Food as Socialist Strategy with Benjamin Selwyn The outbreak of Covid-19 has exacerbated many of the system’s worst aspects. In the UK, the birthplace of free wage-labor based capitalist agriculture, the pandemic has exacerbated existing food inequities. The pandemic has stimulated discussions about how to remedy the world’s corporate-dominated food system. The most popular alternative visions propose shifting production and consumption away from meat increasingly to plant-based diets produced according to agro-ecological principles. While these approaches could be part of a broader solution,…
Find out more »Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg: Reconsidering Primitive Accumulation
This session will be devoted to engaging with Rosa’s pivotal reworking of the concept of primitive accumulation, with attention to historical and contemporary South Africa, medieval European race-making and its legacies, and contemporary commodification of women’s reproductive labor.
Find out more »Capitalism and the Sea
While sea beds are drilled for their fossil fuels and minerals, and coastlines developed for real estate and leisure, the oceans continue to absorb the toxic discharges of carbon civilization – warming, expanding, and acidifying the blue water part of the planet in ways that will bring unpredictable but irreversible consequences for the rest of the biosphere.
Find out more »Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (a close reading group)
Empire's Endgame maps the complex relations between empire, racist culture, political economy, and the practices of a security-oriented state seeking legitimacy in times of unbearable economic uncertainty. While the book's story unfolds in Britain, its lessons and warnings may well apply to the United States and many other crisis-ridden imperialist polities.
Find out more »The MEP Bookstore, Winter/Spring 2021—Books with shipping included (US and Puerto Rico only)
Books that will be used during the Winter of 2021 sessions—good for a lifetime of learning. The Pluto FireWorks series and The Brutish Museums have just been added.
Find out more »The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy
With cutting-edge analyses, this book looks at the many dark facets of the corporation, including automation, surveillance, tech work, workers' struggles, algorithmic challenges, the disruption of local democracy and much more. “The Cost of Free Shipping” shows how Amazon represents a fundamental shift in global capitalism that we should name, interrogate and be primed to resist.
Find out more »Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois
Black Reconstruction 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.”
Find out more »Towards a Revolution in Labor History: White Supremacism and Bourgeois Social Control
Why is the US working class unorganized and suffering to a far greater extent than in other advanced capitalist societies?
Find out more »Matters of State: Literature & Espionage
WHY SPY NOVELS? Spy novels emerged as a distinct genre around the time of World War I, coinciding with the creation of formal intelligence agencies in many countries. This was a period characterized by heightened concern on the part of rulers about national security, imperial strength, and the impending conflict of the Great War. Spy novels from the early twentieth century reflect these concerns, and generally feature secret agents and seemingly realistic tales of international intrigue. With the rise of fascism, spy novels shifted their focus to examine the dynamics of political movements within individual states, assessing their threats to the stability of the international political order. In these stories, the anxiety over the powerlessness of the individual is assuaged by the resourcefulness and ultimate success of exceptional or lucky individuals in confronting such harrowing problems as war, nuclear proliferation, and terrorism.
Find out more »New York City and the Experience of Modernity (6 more sessions)
This is a seminar about New York City and its people. It is not a study of architectural styles and objects, - although the physical stuff of cities does play a role -, but it is a course about the experience of the way in which modernity builds and destroys cities.
Modernity is a historical force. It is messy. In architecture history modernity is usually narrated as an interplay between the combined forces of the Industrial Revolution and capital, with social upheaval, explosive population growth and immigration as its result...
Find out more »Grundrisse
In the Grundrisse Marx arguably bridges his early writings on philosophy and Hegel, and the writing and revisions of Capital that dominated much of the rest of his life. We will undertake a close, word by word reading of the text with a view to understanding the concepts that evolve within it. This first term will begin with the chapter on money.
Find out more »Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg: Unfinished Conversations with Revolutionary Women
The remaining five sessions of this seminar series explore some of her signal contributions—her argument that imperialism and primitive accumulation are endemic to capitalism; her prescient attention to racist super-exploitation in southern Africa; her insistence that socialism had to be created in and through the widest form of participatory democracy, including the mass strike; her reflections, with attention to the other-than-human world and incarceration, on transformative subjectivities—through putting them in conversation with Global Southern thinkers past and present.
Find out more »Capital, Volume 1, Part 3
Chapters 16 through 25, will trace this development and reveals new dynamics and contradictions inherent to the logic of capitalist accumulation, culminating in Chapter 25, The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation. These developmental processes continue to be played out to this day and are witnessed in the immensity of wealth for a few at one pole of humanity, poverty at another, ruthless misuse and degradation of nature, and reduction of the human subject, the producing masses of real individuals, to an alienated object for capitalist exploitation.
Find out more »Re:sources / Re:lations with Working Group on Globalization and Culture
The Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture will share our collective research on two ubiquitous words of our contemporary vocabulary: resources and relations. There will be two meetings, one on May 16 and the second on June 6.
THEMATIC CLUSTERS ONE: On Sunday May 16, we will present the first two clusters, Affordances for Whom? Making and Unmaking Resources, and Language as Resource and Relation.
THEMATIC CLUSTERS TWO: On Sunday June 6, we will present the final two clusters: Source Memory: Relating Archival Contradictions and The Relations of Human Resources.