Summer Noir 2024
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYThe MEP Literature Group’s Summer Noir tradition of enjoying the bracing vitality of pulp continues with six short novels on the themes of difficult trips and political mayhem. Be warned: ... Read more
Conversations on the US Elections
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsJoin us online on Tuesday, September 17 at 6:30 pm US ET for an open-ended conversation about the evolving US political conjuncture now shaping the November elections. Drawing on our recent study of political strategy and fascism, we will assess the contending social and political forces in the US election campaign and consider the various approaches put forward by currents on the American left.
Reading Gramsci for Today’s Movements
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAn ongoing study group on the Prison Notebooks and other works of Antonio Gramsci. We explore Gramsci's themes and concepts, including state-civil society relations, historical bloc, hegemony, spontaneity, strategy and tactic, and language. We follow Gramsci’s philological method, addressing such areas as linguistics, cinema, critical theory, literature, journalism, comics, animation, plastic arts, mass media and Machiavellian political studies.
Reading Science Fiction Politically: Envision the Future We Seek
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants"To build a better future, we have to envision it first." Reading science fiction, discussing it together, and reading it politically, offers one tool for "envisioning" a future worth building. This fall, we continue our explorations of diverse points of view of social conflict and resolution, possible and imagined just worlds, here on Earth and perhaps afar.
Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAn open-ended reading group on Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life - a major manifesto of humanist Marxism and a clarion call for revolutionary praxis through sustained critique of daily living. “Lefebvre pushed philosophy out into the streets,” the critic McKenzie Wark has written; his work has influenced fields as diverse as sociology, cultural studies, architecture and urban planning, as well as movements including the Situationist International and the activists of May 1968.
AI versus Labor: Luddism and Beyond
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants8 weekly sessions starting Oct 1. Is Artificial Intelligence (AI, sic) really the dire threat to the future of humanity as even some of its proponents claim, or is it a more mundane and familiar threat to working people who face loss of their livelihoods and/or further speed-up and alienation? The entire history of industrial capitalism is punctuated by recurring waves of automation to reduce labor costs and turnover time, each time provoking strong resistance by the affected workforce. This reading group will probe the history both of AI and computer technology specifically and of working-class resistance to capitalist automation in general.
Celebrating 75 Years of Palestinian Literature – New Series
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYFifteen weekly sessions on Thursdays at 7 pm US ET, Oct 3 - Jan 30 The Marxist Education Project Literature Group will continue reading Palestinian literature this fall. We will ... Read more
Book Talk: Liberating Abortion
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsRegina Mahone presents Liberating Abortion, a galvanizing history recentering people of color to put forth a timely argument that we must liberate abortion for all. Mahone and co-author Renee Bracey Sherman illustrate the long racist history that brought us to this moment, uncover the hidden figures who laid the foundations that activists and storytellers are building on today, and explain how abortion has been and remains essential to the health of our communities.