Events
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Slavery and Capitalism: A Book Talk by David McNally
Recording available on YouTubeA video of this November 29, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel. A book talk by David McNally on Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History. McNally injects new life into Karl Marx’s writings on enslavement and labor, presenting a new, systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery—using colonial ... Read more
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Marx’s Capital, Volume I – A Short Course on Capitalist Production
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsReading GroupHave you always wanted to study Marx’s Capital, Vol 1, and hesitated because of the time commitment to read the entire volume from start to finish? Join us for a 12-week study group covering key sections of the book.
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Octavia Butler: ‘Positive Obsession’ and ‘Wild Seed’
Reading GroupAlternate Mondays, Next on December 8, 5-6:30 pm ET Watch for new selections coming soon, featuring Frankenstein and the Chicano Frankenstein. Join us for a new appreciation of Octavia Butler, beginning with Susana M. Morris’s pathbreaking new biography, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia Butler followed by Butler’s prophetic Wild Seed and other ... Read more
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Hegel’s Preface to the ‘Phenomenology’
(ends on December 13) This eight-session course with Alex Steinberg 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 of Spirit, a work that can be read on its own and is considered the most succinct and comprehensive statement of ... Read more
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Animals and Capitalism: Metabolic Labor
FeaturedOnline: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA five-session study group on nonhuman animals' relationship with capital as living, breathing, "commodified" beings. What differentiates nonhuman animals from non-living commodified objects is the way their metabolic and reproductive capacities are harnessed in production. In this study group, we will focus on how metabolic labor has been theorized in feminist studies and contemporary Marxist environmental and animal studies, with a specific focus on the particular function of nonhuman animals for capitalism.
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Hegel, Marx, and Capital
Recording available on YouTubeAndy Blunden presents insights from two new books on Marx's use of Hegel's Logic in the writing of Capital.
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Reading ‘Karl Marx in America’
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsReading GroupAn eight-week study of Andrew Hartman's recently published Karl Marx in America. To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of ... Read more
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New Studies on the Left: A Panel Discussion
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsVirtual EventContributors Erica Carter, Jay Jurie, Paul Krehbiel, Harry Targ, Janet Tucker, Meta Van Sickle join editor Carl Davidson for a discussion of the latest New Studies on the Left. Contributors to this edition address four related themes: "Analysis and Global Reach," "Labor Rising Helps Everyone Else," and "Civil Society and Campaigns on Social Terrain," and ... Read more
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Slavery and Capitalism: A Reading Group
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsJoin us for a nine-session reading group on David McNally's recently published Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History. McNally's book presents a systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery to support the provocative claim that enslaved labor in the plantation system is a form of capitalist commodity production. Weaving together history, ... Read more
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Roundtable on Venezuela, Oil, and Global Politics
Recording available on YouTubeA video of this January 21, 2026, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel. A conversation among leading left critics of the Trump administration's attack on Venezuelan sovereignty and its attempt to seize that nation's oil wealth. Matt Huber challenges interpretations of these events as simply another case of "blood for oil." Steve Maher ... Read more
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Marxist Psychology: Vygotsky’s Cultural-Historical Theory
FeaturedOnline: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsReading GroupA six-week workshop with Carl Ratner, in which we will seek to solve the riddle Marx posed in his first thesis on Feuerbach: "in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such." Exploring a materialist theory of subjectivity which does know sensuous activity, we will see how historical materialism can be extended to reveal how it is compatible with psychology and how human psychology is itself a historical-materialist phenomenon.
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Immigration and Chicano/Latin American Liberation: Repression & Resistance
FeaturedOnline: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsReading GroupTuesdays, 7-9 pm ET Join us for an overview study of the relationship between Mexican immigration and the United States: its colonial foundation, vibrant new communities, cyclical labor exploitation, and state-sanctioned repression, liberation struggles. The Chicano liberation movement emerged as a direct response to this, and its legacy is critical to understanding immigration struggles today ... Read more
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Extraction: A Book Talk with Author Thea Riofrancos
FeaturedOnline: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThea Riofrancos, author of 'Extractions,' unpacks the challenges of "green capitalism" through the lens of lithium, a so-called "critical mineral" essential for its role in decarbonizing one of the most polluting sectors: transportation.
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Social Reproduction Theory with Lisa Maya Knauer
FeaturedOnline: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsReading GroupKarl Marx only sketched the concept of social reproduction in very broad terms, but it was taken up and expanded upon by Marxist and radical feminists, starting in the 1970s and 1980s. They argued that women’s oppression under capitalism is linked to their role in social (as well as biological) reproduction. This reading group will look at one of the germinal texts of social reproduction theory: Lise Vogel’s groundbreaking 1983 work, Marxism and the Oppression of Women.
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Protective Presence in the West Bank
FeaturedOnline: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsSpecial EventThe only people standing beside the Palestinians of the West Bank as they defend themselves from ethnic cleansing are protective presence activists. Celeste Marcus and Mitch Abidor have both spent time in the West Bank doing protective presence, accompanying Palestinians in their fields and with their flocks and confronting settlers who are far less likely ... Read more
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