March 2020
The Orient: Foucault’s Achilles’ Heel
This talk will explore the intellectual sources of Foucault’s anti-humanist approach to non-western cultures as it documents his personal disorientation and struggles in Tunisia, Iran and Japan.
Find out more »Technology, Science and Capitalism
What is technology? Does technological change drive social change? Is technology independent of social relations? What are the consequences of “technological progress” under capitalism? What constraints does capitalism place on such progress?
Find out more »Highlights of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1
While Capital consists of three volumes, a basic familiarity with the key concepts and sections of Volume I offers many tools for understanding the mode of production we live under.
Find out more »April 2020
Capital, Volume 3
Volume III integrates and completes the analysis of the process of capitalist production as a whole, enabling us to understand and make sense of how each of the appearances and processes we see occurring on the surface of society are related to the whole. When we do so all the laws of motion previously revealed in the first two volumes take on new dimensions. Internal dynamics and contradictions burst out and situate humanity withina historical process that calls us to figure out how to go beyond capital and develop the conditions that insure that the development of each is the precondition for the development of all.
Find out more »Invention of the White Race
The Invention of the White Race Volumes I & II, Theodore W. Allen's historical materialist analysis of racial slavery, documents how the plantation elite put in place this system of social control following Bacon's Rebellion of 1676. In the final stage of this uprising, an army of European and African chattel bond laborers burned Jamestown to the ground and temporarily drove Governor Berkeley into exile across the Chesapeake Bay.The terrified planter bourgeoisie, in a deliberate response to this display of labor solidarity, enacted a series of laws and practices in the late 17th and early 18th centuries which implanted a system of 'white' racial privileges that enabled the imposition of racial slavery and white male supremacy.
Find out more »American Writing: Changing Locations
Season 1: Changing Places in America
Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man (1857). John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) Lisa Ko, The Leavers (2017)
In his 1970 essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction,” William Gass brought the term “metafiction” forward to the reading public as a way to characterize the work writers such as Borges, Barth, Flann O’Brien, as well as the type of novels Gass himself would write. He described metafiction as writing “in which the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed”. Does metafiction provide escape for the committed writer from the bourgeois strictures that the novel form imposes? As critical readers we need to check out all the angles. The metafiction form will over time become incorporated as yet another aspect of modern fiction as ultimately there is no way to over-ride what happens when ink is committed to paper, impulses to the interactive screen.
American fiction writers have lots to write about. We are introducing a four term look at writing by American authors who have novels appropriate to four themes important to critical thinkers of the broad American questions on nation, class, race and gender. Much of this fiction becomes part of what our unfolding reality is as a nation, group of nations, as aspiring internationalists. Many of the fictional works we will read are not as formally postmodern or would formally fall in the metafiction category as delineated by Barth.
Find out more »Unearthing The Grundrisse (continuation)
After the defeat of the 1848-50 revolutions in Europe, Marx acknowledged that he failed to provide an adequate analysis of the economic foundation of society and turned from a focus on organizing to an intense, life-long study of political economy. Catalyzed by the first global economic crisis in 1857 and after 10 years of concentrated study, he started the first of seven notebooks to self-clarify his work up to that point. Not published or available outside the USSR until 1953, Martin Nicolaus provided the first—and only —English translation of all seven notebooks in 1973 as the Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy.
Find out more »May 2020
Capitalism and Robbery: The Planetary Mine
We will consider how capitalism is rooted in robbery—of the earth, of the water, air, and soil of communities, of the livelihoods of working people. Such theft is becoming more massive in scale and more technologically sophisticated, but is also evoking new forms of popular resistance.
Find out more »Covid-19 Capitalism: Big Farms Make Big Flu
Rob Wallace’s book is an indispensable handbook to the inevitable pandemics stemming from agribusiness. Monthly Review is making it available at a big discount until April 17. We at the MEP are hosting an online reading and discussion group to share the comprehensive research and writing that is contained in Wallace’s book. We will cover all seven sections, plus the two-part update being published in Monthly Review’s next two issues.
Find out more »June 2020
Socialism or Barbarism? (and Existential Despair)
The four panelists will address the existential moment we are all navigating in the face of the multiple crises facing us in the light of the multiple tipping points that threaten existence yet are necessary to further accumulate capital. Following presentations from the four panelists, the audience is invited to enlarge the discussion with their own questions and comments.
Find out more »Descent Into the Inferno: The Politics of Marx’s Capital
Marx’s Inferno, by William Clare Roberts, reconstructs the major arguments of volume I of Karl Marx’s Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading. His argument is that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers’ movement of the mid-19th century. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. For Roberts, Capital was ingeniously modeled on Dante’s Inferno, with Marx in the role of the proletariat's Virgil guiding us down to the secret depths of capitalism’s “social Hell.”
Find out more »Final Friday Films: Modern Times
Bringing back The Tramp to the era of sound in 1936, Chaplin plays an assembly line worker where he is subjected to being force-fed by a malfunctioning "feeding machine" (cutting the vital minutes of lunch) and an accelerating assembly line where he screws nuts at an ever-increasing rate onto pieces of machinery.
Find out more »July 2020
Multi-Month Pass: now through August 31, 2020
For a one-time sliding scale fee of $150, $200, or $250 attend any and all classes and events of The Marxist Education Project. For $50 more ($200, $250 or $300) bring a guest as often as you would like to the classes, films and events between now and August 31, 2020.
Find out more »Capital, Volume 3, 2nd Sessions
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 »6 Plays of Bertolt Brecht
Beginning April 23 we will read aloud six of the many plays Bertolt Brecht wrote between the 1920s and his death in 1956. The six plays are The Threepenny Opera, The Mother, The Exception and The Rule, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechuan and The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui. There will be time to read aloud—taking on various characters among ourselves. There will also be substantive discussion of these works which span all the decades of his writing. The Epic theater, musical theater along with the learning plays are represented in this selection of plays. Each session will be conducted via Zoom until we have an all-clear to return to the classroom. With your registration, the zoom password will be sent to you.
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