Robert Brenner’s The Economics of Global Turbulence
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYWe are engaged in a close reading and extensive discussion of Robert Brenner's The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005. We read 10 to 15 pages in each session and expect to finish the book in 6 months. We will follow up with a reading of other recent works by Brenner, including The Boom and the Bubble.
Facebooking the Anthropocene with Bob Ostertag
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYVideo available: https://youtu.be/EG2B_Vf1KZY
Bob Ostertag's new book, Facebooking the Anthropocene in Raja Ampat: Technics and Civilization in the 21st Century, offers a deeply intimate portrait of the cataclysmic shifts between humans, technology, and the so-called natural world. Amid the breakneck pace of both technological advance and environmental collapse, he explores how we are changing as fast as the world around us—from how we make music, to how we have sex, to what we do to survive, and who we imagine ourselves to be. And though the environmental crisis terrifies and technology overwhelms, Ostertag finds enough creativity, compassion, and humor in our evolving behavior to keep us laughing and inspired as the world we are building overtakes the world we found.
Video available at https://youtu.be/EG2B_Vf1KZY
Science Fiction/ Visionary Fiction Reading Group Summer Season
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NY“The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny." “People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.” --The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin Summertime ... Read more
Celebrate the Life of Michael Lardner
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesVideo available: https://youtu.be/aGkzsiT7kdQ
Michael Lardner, longtime organizer with the Marxist Education Project, died on July 21, 2022, following a brief but valiant struggle with an aggressive cancer. Join us to celebrate his life and contributions.
If you are unable to attend in person a Zoom link will be provided when you register or submit the RSVP.
Adventure Capitalism: Raymond Craib Looks at ‘Libertarian Exit’
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYVideo available: https://youtu.be/QwctEaH5_54
The past half century is littered with the remains of experiments in “libertarian exit.” Raymond Craib's new PM Press book Adventure Capitalism traces the history history of individualist, property-oriented “escape” projects pursued by the likes of Michael Oliver, Peter Thiel, and Bitcoin bros.
Jean Jaurès and the Socialist History of the French Revolution
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYVideo available: https://youtu.be/mtT8owRC5Fw
Jean Jaurès's magisterial work, A Socialist History of the French Revolution, has endured for over a century as one of the most influential accounts ever published. Mitchell Abidor's abridged translation of the original six-volume work makes this new edition truly accessible to an Anglophone audience. Geoff Kurtz, author of a 2014 biography of Jaurès, joins Mitch for a conversation about the History and the author's life and times.
Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire
Video available on YouTubeVideo available: https://youtu.be/C5YAw174E7s
Palm oil, found in half of supermarket products, has shaped our world. Max Haiven uncovers how the gears of capitalism are literally and metaphorically lubricated by this ubiquitous elixir.
Climate Justice and Socialist Strategy with Jason W. Moore
Video available on YouTubeVideo available at https://youtu.be/2nZ9xgNn35A
Jason W. Moore addresses the missed opportunity for a program of planetary justice as the “Environmentalism of the Rich” came to the fore after 1968 and overshadowed Martin Luther King, Jr.’s appeal for radical action against capitalism’s “triple evils” of racism, militarism, and class exploitation. As King underscored in his final months, justice cannot be effectively pursued piece by piece. The “whole society” with and within the web of life must be reinvented, inasmuch as we are “all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.”
Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-Pandemic
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYVideo available: https://youtu.be/FlJYh3VDWNU
William I. Robinson's new book Global Civil War provides a big-picture account of how the coronavirus pandemic and new digital technologies have drastically transformed capitalism and the entire global economy and society. Analyzing the concentration of power and control in the hands of corporate conglomerates, tech giants, megabanks, and the military-industrial complex, the book documents the extent of unprecedented global inequalities as the mass of humanity faces violent dispossession and uncertain survival. The book issues a dire warning against the emergence of a dystopic digitalized dictatorship but also finds great hope and inspiration in the burgeoning social movements of the poor and the dispossessed as humanity descends into global civil war.
Envisioning Social Change: New Voices in Science Fiction
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYIn order to build a better world, we have to envision it first. Join us to read more science fiction through the lens of social change. Readings this fall will include Selections from Octavia's Brood, edited by adrienne marie brown and Walida Imarisha, who conceptualized Visionary Fiction and this book to honor Octavia Butler. Emily ... Read more
From Austerity to Fascism: The Capital Order
Video available on YouTubeIn The Capital Order, Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital-and indeed capitalism - in times of social upheaval from below. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material from Britain and Italy, she offers a damning account of the rise of austerity - and of modern economics - at the levers of contemporary political power. Mattei reveals how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across societies.
Climate, Class, and Degrowth
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYJoin the MEP's Ecosocialist Study Group as we reconvene to consider two books that are provoking wide discussion and debate: Matt Huber's Climate Change as Class War, and The Future Is Degrowth, by Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan, and Andrea Vetter.
The Novels of Nanni Balestrini with the MEP Literature Group
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYThe MEP Literature Group resumes this fall/winter to read several works by the Italian author Nanni Balestrini, including We Want Everything and The Unseen.
Hegel for Radicals: Part II – Phenomenology of Spirit
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYWith Alex Steinberg. This class series is a continuation of the series from the Spring of 2022 where we introduced Hegel’s Philosophy of History. We will dive directly into that mysterious book, The Phenomenology of Spirit. No prior experience with studying Hegel is expected or required. We will make Hegel's book less mysterious as we go along and try to tease out the revolutionary implications in the thought of Hegel and explain their significance for our time.
The Political Writings of Marx and Engels: Social Classes, Revolution, and Human Freedom
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYThis group will read and discuss original texts by Marx and Engels about their theory of class struggles as the motive force of human social evolution and the modern working class as the political antagonist of the capitalist system - the class that has the power, by abolishing itself, to usher in a society beyond class exploitation.