Theodore Allen’s ‘The Kernel and Meaning’: A Strategic Critique of U.S. Labor History
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBefore Theodore W. Allen turned to his magnum opus, The Invention of the White Race, he drafted an essay "The Kernel and Meaning: A Contribution to a Proletarian Critique of U.S. Historiography." In it, he assessed how the industrial bourgeoisie successfully overturned plantation capital's rule while assuring its own ascendancy over the proletariat. Allen reviewed six commonly held explanations as to why, despite favorable objective conditions, the U.S. left and workers movements failed to establish socialism or even a permanent working-class party. Participants in this group will read and discuss the original, 160-page typescript of Allen's unpublished essay.
Chile’s 9/11: Fifty Years of Literary Resistance
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsSeptember 2023 marks fifty years since the overthrow of Salvador Allende's socialist government on September 11, 1973. To honor the struggles and sufferings of the Chilean people, the MEP's Literature Group dedicates two eight-week series to Chilean writers active before, during, and since the Pinochet dictatorship.
Classical Political Economy and Marx’s Critique: Theories of Surplus-Value
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsFollowing up on the MEP's long-running and recently completed study group on Marx's Grundrisse, we will closely read and discuss extensive selections from Marx's Theories of Surplus Value (sometimes referred to as Volume 4 of Capital), supplemented by chapters from I.I. Rubin's History of Economic Thought.
Hegel for Radicals: The Science of Logic
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe MEP's recurring series Hegel for Radicals continues this fall with a reading of Hegel's magnum opus, The Science of Logic. Familiarity with this work greatly aids any reading of Marx's Capital. Alex Steinberg will guide participants past the legendary obstacles to understanding this unsurpassed presentation of dialectics. Its depth and systematic structure is without parallel in any other of Hegel's works.
Commons, Commoning, Communism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBefore the advent of capitalism, much of humanity produced their immediate livelihoods on lands and with tools to which they either had rights of use or held as individual property. All that came to a violent end with what Marx preferred to call the "original expropriation" (often misleadingly termed "primitive accumulation"). This reading group will explore the historical roots and persistence of such crimes and the resistance they evoke by reading together Ian Angus's recently published The War Against the Commons, Peter Linebaugh's Stop Thief! and related texts.
Classical Political Economy and Marx’s Critique: Theories of Surplus-Value
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsFollowing up on the MEP's long-running and recently completed study group on Marx's Grundrisse, we will closely read and discuss extensive selections from Marx's Theories of Surplus Value (sometimes referred to as Volume 4 of Capital), supplemented by chapters from I.I. Rubin's History of Economic Thought.
Hegel for Radicals: The Science of Logic
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe MEP's recurring series Hegel for Radicals continues this fall with a reading of Hegel's magnum opus, The Science of Logic. Familiarity with this work greatly aids any reading of Marx's Capital. Alex Steinberg will guide participants past the legendary obstacles to understanding this unsurpassed presentation of dialectics. Its depth and systematic structure is without parallel in any other of Hegel's works.
Commons, Commoning, Communism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBefore the advent of capitalism, much of humanity produced their immediate livelihoods on lands and with tools to which they either had rights of use or held as individual property. All that came to a violent end with what Marx preferred to call the "original expropriation" (often misleadingly termed "primitive accumulation"). This reading group will explore the historical roots and persistence of such crimes and the resistance they evoke by reading together Ian Angus's recently published The War Against the Commons, Peter Linebaugh's Stop Thief! and related texts.
Chile’s 9/11: Fifty Years of Literary Resistance
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsSeptember 2023 marks fifty years since the overthrow of Salvador Allende's socialist government on September 11, 1973. To honor the struggles and sufferings of the Chilean people, the MEP's Literature Group dedicates two eight-week series to Chilean writers active before, during, and since the Pinochet dictatorship.
Annual Pass
This pass entitles the purchaser to attend any or all Marxist Education Project classes and events during an entire year from the month of purchase. (For example, a pass purchased on January 7, 2023, will be valid until January 31, 2024.)
Classical Political Economy and Marx’s Critique: Theories of Surplus-Value
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsFollowing up on the MEP's long-running and recently completed study group on Marx's Grundrisse, we will closely read and discuss extensive selections from Marx's Theories of Surplus Value (sometimes referred to as Volume 4 of Capital), supplemented by chapters from I.I. Rubin's History of Economic Thought.
Hegel for Radicals: The Science of Logic
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe MEP's recurring series Hegel for Radicals continues this fall with a reading of Hegel's magnum opus, The Science of Logic. Familiarity with this work greatly aids any reading of Marx's Capital. Alex Steinberg will guide participants past the legendary obstacles to understanding this unsurpassed presentation of dialectics. Its depth and systematic structure is without parallel in any other of Hegel's works.
Reading Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWe continue to study selected passages from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. We delve into key themes and concepts related to civil society and state: politics and the arts, racism, class and gender, religion, linguistics, and other methods of analysis, critical theory, mass media, and cinema, hegemony, and subaltern studies, as well as the role of intellectuals and activists in discovering new methods and languages to be transformative.
Blood and Fire: The Violent Origins of Capitalism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsJoin the MEP's Capital Study Group in a four-week study of the concluding section of volume I of Marx's Capital, which discloses the widespread violence and dispossession - in both Europe and colonized areas - that accompanied the emergence of capitalism.
Oppression and Resistance in New Chinese and Chinese-American Science Fiction
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBefore Theodore W. Allen turned to his magnum opus, The Invention of the White Race, he drafted an essay "The Kernel and Meaning: A Contribution to a Proletarian Critique of U.S. Historiography." In it, he assessed how the industrial bourgeoisie successfully overturned plantation capital's rule while assuring its own ascendancy over the proletariat. Allen reviewed six commonly held explanations as to why, despite favorable objective conditions, the U.S. left and workers movements failed to establish socialism or even a permanent working-class party. Participants in this group will read and discuss the original, 160-page typescript of Allen's unpublished essay.