Events
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Capitalism and the Politics of Nature with Alyssa Battistoni
Recording available on YouTubeRescheduled to November 16 / In her new book 'Free Gifts,' Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to place value on nature. But the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn’t be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven’t been. Recovering and reinterpreting classical economists' idea of "free gifts of nature," Battistoni builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking.
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Reading Marx’s Capital, Volume III
A weekly study group covering Marx's Capital, Volume III, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. This work integrates and completes Marx's analysis, enabling us to understand and make sense of how the phenomena we see occurring on the surface of society are related to the underlying system of capitalism.
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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 participantsHave 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’
Alternate 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 participantsAn 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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Immigration and Chicano/Latin American Liberation: Repression & Resistance
FeaturedOnline: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsTuesdays, 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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Planetary Crises: Capital vs. the ‘Free Gifts’ of Nature
FeaturedOnline: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe MEP's Ecosocialist Study Group welcomes new participants as we read and discuss a range of important new works on the science and politics of the climate emergency, the nature of economic and ecological crises, the status of freedom with respect to environmental constraints, and related topics. The recently published books we are reading include: ... Read more
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Roundtable on Venezuela, Oil, and Global Politics
FeaturedOnline: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsJoin us for a timely 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 assesses the implications for global political economy, and Christy Thornton offers analysis of the diverse effects on - and responses by - Mexico and other Latin American states.
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The Aesthetics of Resistance: Art and Fascism in the 1930s
FeaturedOnline: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsJoin ongoing weekly sessions of the MEP Literature Group as we read together The Aesthetics of Resistance, the masterwork of German author Peter Weiss. This trilogy of historical novels opens in 1937 and details the interactions of the narrator and his peers and family with historical figures of the European left engaged in the fight ... Read more
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