September 2020
China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse
As the world hurtles towards environmental oblivion, China is leading the charge. The nation's CO2 emissions are more than twice those of the US with a GDP just two-thirds as large. China leads the world in renewable energy yet it is building new coal-fired power plants faster than renewables. Richard contends that nothing short of drastic shutdowns and the scaling back of polluting industries, especially in China and the US, will suffice to slash greenhouse gas emissions enough to prevent climate catastrophe.
Find out more »21st Century Communists of the Commons and Contemporary Proudhonism
The sum of what the 21st Century Proudhonists put forth as innovation, is instead prey to a series of misunderstandings – of the concept of the commons itself, of contemporary capitalism whose dynamics forms the backdrop of their project and key economic and political ideas of Marx whose authority they seek to attach to their project.
Find out more »October 2020
Lit and Film: Noir for the Summer of Covid-19
Continuing in the MEP LITERATURE GROUP summer tradition, we will once again delve into Noir genres– but with a twist! Starting August 6, we will read four books and watch the movies that are based on them. Please join us for four books with the four movies that resulted from them.
Find out more »Capital, Volume 3, Part 7, the last chapters of volume 3
The study of Volume III is essential to understanding the complex dynamics at work in the present realities we are facing and how these realities are the necessary results of the inner logic of capital. In this moribund stage of late capitalist/imperialist development we see the rise of rentier and finance capital—the introduction of financial instruments being used to make money make more money, jumping over and above the actual real wealth produced by trading on future wealth (derivatives and other forms of fictitious capital); overriding supply and demand as a price mechanism in such necessities as foodstuffs so that their prices continuously rise resulting in more poverty and starvation on a world scale and here in the US; turning new technologies into means of collecting rents—the internet, mobile devices; expropriation of taxes paid by the working class to developers who are often tax exempt while our city and state governments give them tracts of our physical space; commodification of debt; privatization of public spaces, properties and institutions; foreclosures; and the list goes on.
Find out more »Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations
Radhika will propose that Marx’s purpose in these investigations and commentaries had nothing to do with either a stagist or a determinist view of history. Against these accusations, often levelled at Marx and often put forth by the exertions of many a “Marxist”, there are reasons to believe that Marx was going beyond the stagism and determinism of received accounts to something far more sophisticated and radical.
Find out more »November 2020
Commodity Fetishism vs Capital Fetishism
The focus will be on the analysis of commodity fetishism, in an effort to contribute to the comprehension of the different dimensions of this concept, especially in Marx’s Capital. For this purpose, we will pursue the following course: There will be an overview of various Marxist approaches to the subject. Subsequently, we are going to consider these approaches in the light of Marx’s analysis.
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 »Social Reproduction and the City
Feminist political economy and feminist welfare state scholarship have not focused on the urban as a scale of analysis, and critical approaches to urban neoliberalism often fail to address questions of social reproduction. To address these unexplored areas, Black unpacks the urban as a contested site of welfare state restructuring and examines the escalating crisis in social reproduction. He lays bare the aftermath of the welfare-to-work agenda of the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations.
Find out more »Women Write Against Fascism
We will look at themes around resistance and collaboration. Beauvoir and Ginzburg write of the period occupation by the Nazis in Vichy France and the period of Mussolini's fascist dictatorship in Italy, while Jelinek's Wonderful Wonderful Times describes the lingering effects naziism had during the years of recovery from the fascist years in Austria in society and within a family.
Find out more »Considerations on Bolshevism Before Stalinism
We will consider questions such as: Were the Bolsheviks inherently authoritarian? What was 'democratic centralism'? Is the Bolshevik type organization necessary for revolutionary change? What exactly was the role of the Bolsheviks in the revolution? What were the Soviets? How did the soviets come into being? Did soviets represent a higher form of democracy?
Find out more »Realistic Metaphysics and the Materialist Conception of History
Marxism's central preoccupation has been that of *class* consciousness. Marx spoke of the working class’s need to transform itself from a class *in itself* (en sich) into a class *for itself* (für sich). After two decades of revolutionary defeats and counter-revolutionary triumphs Trotsky described the situation as “the crisis of proletarian leadership.”
But these were prescriptions, now plainly further from realization than ever. In describing the proletariat as the “universal class,” Marx projected that by establishing its dictatorship (ie., radical democracy) in the proximate interest of all its members, the proletariat begins the human historical project of complete transcendence of class society. The present crisis, however, demands that this concept of “universal” be deepened and enriched. The politics based on consciousness of proximate material interest must give way to the politics of a *planetary* consciousness. The final line of our anthem, “l’Internationale sera le genre humain,” should now be taken literally.
Find out more »Marx Dead and Alive: Reading Capital in Precarious Times
In Marx, Dead and Alive—a book that begins and ends beside Marx’s recently violated London graveside—Merrifield makes a spirited case for a critical thinker who can still offer people a route toward personal and social authenticity.
Find out more »Capital, Volume 1
Marx’s scientific presentation of the laws of motion of capitalist development begins by analyzing the fundamental or elemental form which wealth takes in our society, the commodity. Understanding this form leads us to the most basic law that grounds social reproduction in societies under the domination of capital, the law of value. Therefore, our first task will be to break through the appearance and reveal the social content of the commodity form. This begins the unraveling of the why and how of what we necessarily, under the domination and exploitation of capital, experience every day in our lives.
Find out more »Blood and Money
Even before capitalism arose – in a process Marx termed the “so-called primitive accumulation” – money and markets were implicated in the rise and fall of states and empires that conquered and enslaved vast numbers of human bodies. This group will address these histories and their persisting consequences.
THIS EVENT SOLD OUT ON SEPTEMBER 27 at 6 PM. Please write to info@marxedproject.org
The new offering of this course will begin on Monday, January 25, 1 pm to 3 pm New York City time
December 2020
Invention of the White Race
Allen had concluded by the mid 1960’s that white supremacism was the central obstacle to progressive movements in American life, past and present, yet the “white” race itself remained the most peculiar, contentious and generally misunderstood “identity,” blocking all efforts to achieve a just society. Accordingly, Allen spent the next 40 years in writing and primary research to discern when, where, how and why the Plantation Bourgeoisie invented this “white” race in colonial Virginia and Maryland
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