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DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200319T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200319T213000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20191231T140728Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T031424Z
UID:10006118-1584646200-1584653400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:American Writing: Changing Locations
DESCRIPTION:American Writing: 4 Seasons \nSeason 1: Changing Places in America\nHerman Melville\,  The Confidence-Man (1857). John Barth\, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) Lisa Ko\, The Leavers (2017) \nIn 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. \nAmerican 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. \nOur first thematic 12 week term concerns Change of Place. \nThis first session will begin with Melville. Though centered around the title character\, Melville’s The Confidence-Man portrays passengers on a steamboat with stories that are told as they travel to New Orleans down the Mississippi River. The narrative structure is reminiscent the Canterbury Tales.The novel is written as cultural satire\, and metaphysical treatise\, and deals with a number of themes including sincerity\, economic dislocation and materialism\, identity\, cynicism\, and more.Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Moby Dick and “Bartleby\, the Scrivener”  as precursors to 20th-century literary preoccupations around nihilism\, the absurd and existentialism. \nDale Jones citing R. W. B. Lewis\, who feels the necessity of defining a new genre for [The Confidence- Man] and its literary descendants: “it is the recognizable and awe-inspiring ancestor of several subse- quent works of fiction in America: Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger\, Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust\, Faulkner’s The Hamlet\, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man\, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor\, Thomas Pynchon’s V. Melville bequeathed to those works . . . the vision of an apocalypse that is no less terrible for being enormously comic\, the self-extinction of a world characterized by deceit and thronging with imposters and masqueraders…” \nA worthy contender for the title of Great American Novel\, Barth’s masterpiece is a work of astonishing virtuosity and range to some. Others look at this\, as did the author himself\, as the end of the novel as known before it’s publication. Barth had changed midstream in the writing of The Sot-Weed Factor. Among American novels\, in terms of sheer linguistic brilliance\, it is surpassed only by Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Melville’s matchless Moby Dick. \nHere is Barth’s opening sentence: “In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy\, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke\, more ambitious than talented\, and yet more talented than prudent\, who\, like his friends-in-folly\, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge\, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over\, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship\, had learned the knack of versifying\, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day\, afroth with Joves and Jupiters\, aclang with jarring rhymes\, and string-taught with similes stretched to the snapping point.” \nThis Cooke does as an early settler\, bounding from London cafes to the “wilds” of Maryland\, in this novel depicting the consciousness\, in mid-20th century post-modernism\, the colonizing beings early on inhabiting the North American contenent. \nSet in New York and China\, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away\, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past. \nOne morning\, Deming Guo’s mother\, Polly\, an undocumented Chinese immigrant\, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone\, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors\, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he’s ever known\, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents’ desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind. \nTold from the perspective of both Daniel—as he grows into a directionless young man—and Polly\, Ko’s novel gives us one of fiction’s most singular mothers. Loving and selfish\, determined and frightened\, Polly is forced to make one heart-wrenching choice after another. \nUpcoming terms will include the following: William Gass\, Middle C\, Maxine Hong Kingston\,Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book\, Ishmael Reed\, Mumbo Jumbo\, Russell Banks\, Cloudsplitter\, Jeffrey Eugenides\, Middlesex\, Gina Apostol\, Insurrecto and more.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/american-writing-changing-locations/2020-03-19/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Lit_ChangingLocale_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200321T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200321T140000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20191119T155546Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200327T034004Z
UID:10006065-1584788400-1584799200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 3
DESCRIPTION:First 12 sessions \nLet’s make the Anthropocene stage of the earth’s evolution\, the turning point of world history. After all\, paraphrasing Marx\, since we are the species that can know ourselves as a product of natural history\, we are responsible to all of nature. We have the power within us to make the Anthropocene not the capitalist endgame but the naturalization of our species and the humanization of nature. Capital\, a Critique of Political Economy\, can help effectively situate ourselves to face the challenges before all of humanity and nature\, and begin the process of reclaiming and putting into effect our human capacities for the betterment and advancement of each and all. \nThe 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. \nCapital\, Volume III\, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole\, completes Marx’s task of moving from the imaginary concrete—the researcher and scientist analyzing the appearances we see in everyday life such as in the Grundrisse\, to the abstract concrete. The results of the analytic study of the phenomenon that has revealed the social/natural content of that phenomenon (Volumes I and II)\, to the real concrete—how this content is expressed in everyday life through the mechanisms by which the actors determine their actions and appropriate wealth (Volume III). \nWith the conceptual integration of production and circulation (Volumes I and II) from the standpoint of the process of capitalist production as a whole\, Marx returns to the starting point of the research categories\, the imaginary concrete\, concepts seen as empirical givens as facts in themselves— profits\, interests\, rents\, rate of profit\, prices. These sensuously perceived givens (the way the world directly appears to us) are the starting point of the research analysis\, not the science. But now\, after the analysis\, these interrelated aspects of what appear on the surface of society are no longer imaginary but real\, understood as interrelated dynamics and mechanisms in everyday life by which the actors reproduce the social relations and physical conditions of capitalist society. 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. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than nearly three years. We are a group of workers\, students\, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-3/2020-03-21/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Marx's Capital,Multi-session Classes
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/HeartfieldCorpRobotsSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200323T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200323T203000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200107T061827Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T033800Z
UID:10006691-1584988200-1584995400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Unearthing The Grundrisse (continuation)
DESCRIPTION: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. As Nicolaus asserts\, Marx considered this effort to be ‘the first scientific elaboration of the theoretical foundations of communism’. Moreover\, represented by both brief and often lengthy segments of planned works\, it contains what Nicolaus argues is the only outline of the entire political economic project Marx hoped—but was mostly unable—to complete. As Nicolaus suggests\, the Grundrisse provides fresh insights into the ‘inner logic’ of Capital and perhaps the most important source for understanding Marx’s method; particularly as it develops and ‘turns Hegel’s philosophy on its feet’. Moreover\, it perhaps most clearly unites what some have\, instead\, argued is a separation between Marx’s early ‘humanism’ and his later economic work. Indeed\, in the Foreword to the Grundrisse\, Nicolaus argues that it “challenges and puts to the test every serious interpretation of Marx yet received”. \nThe second half of the MEP class focuses on the heart of the Grundrisse\, the second and final ‘Chapter on Capital’ that dissects the exploitation of labor and the contradiction between labor and capital. \nGIL GARDNER has interests in radical prisoner education and political economic analysis. He has taught in\, developed and administered college programs and in prisons for 40 years\, including initiating Marxist education in Colorado’s state prisons. Gil’s writing and research includes works on the history of prison industry in the U.S. and he is presently completing an introduction to the works of Marx.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/unearthing-the-grundrisse-2/2020-03-23/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Marx's Capital,Marxist Method,Political Economy,Science and Method
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Grundrisse_FBnew.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200324T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200324T200000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20191212T153750Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T033533Z
UID:10006102-1585074600-1585080000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Invention of the White Race
DESCRIPTION:a reading and discussion group convened The Revolutions Study Group with Sean Ahern \nSince its origin in the class struggles of colonial Virginia and Maryland\, the “white race\,” the most peculiar aspect of the “Peculiar Institution\,” has remained the most contentious and misunderstood identity in American life. \nThe 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. \nAllen defines racial slavery as a particular form of racial oppression homologous with gender and class oppression. The system of racial privileges defined and established the “white” race as a “bourgeois social control formation with consequences ruinous to the interests of the Afro-American workers but also disastrous for the white worker.” \nAllen concludes Volume II with the following message to a new generation of activists: “Perhaps in the impending renewal of the struggle of ‘the common people’ and the ‘Titans\,’ the Great Safety Valve of white-skin privileges may finally come to be seen and rejected by laboring-class European-Americans as the incubus that for three centuries has paralyzed their will in defense of their class interests vis-a-vis those of the ruling class.” \nThe Revolutions Study Group (started at the Brecht Forum) has met since 2009. The groups has recently completed a year-long study of W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction. Participants have come and gone\, however the group has held together\, studying in depth a wide range of history including the French Revolution\, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917\, the Mau-Mau Revolt in Kenya\, the Haitian Revolution\, the 1848 European Revolutions\, the May 68 movement in France and the Hot Autumn of Italy and much more. \n  \nfees are sliding scale. no one is turned away for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/invention-of-the-white-race/2020-03-24/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Multi-session Classes
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Howard_Pyle_-_The_Burning_of_Jamestown.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200326T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200326T193000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200303T152702Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200303T152702Z
UID:10006701-1585245600-1585251000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capitalism and Robbery: The Planetary Mine
DESCRIPTION:Convened by Fred Murphy and Gerardo Rénique\nThis eight-week study group 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 – as we will read in Martín Arboleda’s innovative new contribution to international political economy\, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. \nI see the mountains fall\, the terrain open up in angry dark cavities\, the desert\, the temporary shacks. The mineral is fired and beaten and handled to become military ingots\, battalions of merchandise. The ships depart. Wherever the copper arrives\, as utensil or wire\, no one who touches it sees the rugged solitudes of Chile\, or the small houses at the edge of the desert … —Pablo Neruda\, Ode to Copper \nOnline participation by Zoom teleconferencing can be arranged. \nFRED MURPHY has led numerous study groups at the Marxist Education Project since 2015. He studied and taught Latin American history at the New School for Social Research. In the 1980s he traveled in Latin America as a journalist for several socialist publications. \nGERARDO RÉNIQUE teaches history at the City College of the City University of New York. He is a frequent contributor to Socialism and Democracy and NACLA: Report on the Americas. His research interests include the political traditions of popular movements in Latin America\, and race\, national identity and state formation in Mexico. \nContributions:\nClassroom attendance\, sliding scale: $65 / $80 / $95\nRemote participation via Zoom\, sliding scale: $40 / $50 / $60\nNo one is denied participation for lack of ability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capitalism-and-robbery-the-planetary-mine/2020-03-26/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Climate Change,Extractivism,Indigenous Peoples,Marxist Method,Science and Method,Science and Technology
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/MineAndBook.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200326T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200326T213000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20191231T140728Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T031424Z
UID:10006119-1585251000-1585258200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:American Writing: Changing Locations
DESCRIPTION:American Writing: 4 Seasons \nSeason 1: Changing Places in America\nHerman Melville\,  The Confidence-Man (1857). John Barth\, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) Lisa Ko\, The Leavers (2017) \nIn 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. \nAmerican 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. \nOur first thematic 12 week term concerns Change of Place. \nThis first session will begin with Melville. Though centered around the title character\, Melville’s The Confidence-Man portrays passengers on a steamboat with stories that are told as they travel to New Orleans down the Mississippi River. The narrative structure is reminiscent the Canterbury Tales.The novel is written as cultural satire\, and metaphysical treatise\, and deals with a number of themes including sincerity\, economic dislocation and materialism\, identity\, cynicism\, and more.Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Moby Dick and “Bartleby\, the Scrivener”  as precursors to 20th-century literary preoccupations around nihilism\, the absurd and existentialism. \nDale Jones citing R. W. B. Lewis\, who feels the necessity of defining a new genre for [The Confidence- Man] and its literary descendants: “it is the recognizable and awe-inspiring ancestor of several subse- quent works of fiction in America: Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger\, Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust\, Faulkner’s The Hamlet\, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man\, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor\, Thomas Pynchon’s V. Melville bequeathed to those works . . . the vision of an apocalypse that is no less terrible for being enormously comic\, the self-extinction of a world characterized by deceit and thronging with imposters and masqueraders…” \nA worthy contender for the title of Great American Novel\, Barth’s masterpiece is a work of astonishing virtuosity and range to some. Others look at this\, as did the author himself\, as the end of the novel as known before it’s publication. Barth had changed midstream in the writing of The Sot-Weed Factor. Among American novels\, in terms of sheer linguistic brilliance\, it is surpassed only by Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Melville’s matchless Moby Dick. \nHere is Barth’s opening sentence: “In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy\, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke\, more ambitious than talented\, and yet more talented than prudent\, who\, like his friends-in-folly\, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge\, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over\, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship\, had learned the knack of versifying\, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day\, afroth with Joves and Jupiters\, aclang with jarring rhymes\, and string-taught with similes stretched to the snapping point.” \nThis Cooke does as an early settler\, bounding from London cafes to the “wilds” of Maryland\, in this novel depicting the consciousness\, in mid-20th century post-modernism\, the colonizing beings early on inhabiting the North American contenent. \nSet in New York and China\, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away\, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past. \nOne morning\, Deming Guo’s mother\, Polly\, an undocumented Chinese immigrant\, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone\, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors\, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he’s ever known\, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents’ desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind. \nTold from the perspective of both Daniel—as he grows into a directionless young man—and Polly\, Ko’s novel gives us one of fiction’s most singular mothers. Loving and selfish\, determined and frightened\, Polly is forced to make one heart-wrenching choice after another. \nUpcoming terms will include the following: William Gass\, Middle C\, Maxine Hong Kingston\,Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book\, Ishmael Reed\, Mumbo Jumbo\, Russell Banks\, Cloudsplitter\, Jeffrey Eugenides\, Middlesex\, Gina Apostol\, Insurrecto and more.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/american-writing-changing-locations/2020-03-26/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Lit_ChangingLocale_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200328T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200328T140000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20191119T155546Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200327T034004Z
UID:10006066-1585393200-1585404000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 3
DESCRIPTION:First 12 sessions \nLet’s make the Anthropocene stage of the earth’s evolution\, the turning point of world history. After all\, paraphrasing Marx\, since we are the species that can know ourselves as a product of natural history\, we are responsible to all of nature. We have the power within us to make the Anthropocene not the capitalist endgame but the naturalization of our species and the humanization of nature. Capital\, a Critique of Political Economy\, can help effectively situate ourselves to face the challenges before all of humanity and nature\, and begin the process of reclaiming and putting into effect our human capacities for the betterment and advancement of each and all. \nThe 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. \nCapital\, Volume III\, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole\, completes Marx’s task of moving from the imaginary concrete—the researcher and scientist analyzing the appearances we see in everyday life such as in the Grundrisse\, to the abstract concrete. The results of the analytic study of the phenomenon that has revealed the social/natural content of that phenomenon (Volumes I and II)\, to the real concrete—how this content is expressed in everyday life through the mechanisms by which the actors determine their actions and appropriate wealth (Volume III). \nWith the conceptual integration of production and circulation (Volumes I and II) from the standpoint of the process of capitalist production as a whole\, Marx returns to the starting point of the research categories\, the imaginary concrete\, concepts seen as empirical givens as facts in themselves— profits\, interests\, rents\, rate of profit\, prices. These sensuously perceived givens (the way the world directly appears to us) are the starting point of the research analysis\, not the science. But now\, after the analysis\, these interrelated aspects of what appear on the surface of society are no longer imaginary but real\, understood as interrelated dynamics and mechanisms in everyday life by which the actors reproduce the social relations and physical conditions of capitalist society. 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. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than nearly three years. We are a group of workers\, students\, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-3/2020-03-28/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Marx's Capital,Multi-session Classes
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/HeartfieldCorpRobotsSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200330T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200330T203000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200107T061827Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T033800Z
UID:10006692-1585593000-1585600200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Unearthing The Grundrisse (continuation)
DESCRIPTION: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. As Nicolaus asserts\, Marx considered this effort to be ‘the first scientific elaboration of the theoretical foundations of communism’. Moreover\, represented by both brief and often lengthy segments of planned works\, it contains what Nicolaus argues is the only outline of the entire political economic project Marx hoped—but was mostly unable—to complete. As Nicolaus suggests\, the Grundrisse provides fresh insights into the ‘inner logic’ of Capital and perhaps the most important source for understanding Marx’s method; particularly as it develops and ‘turns Hegel’s philosophy on its feet’. Moreover\, it perhaps most clearly unites what some have\, instead\, argued is a separation between Marx’s early ‘humanism’ and his later economic work. Indeed\, in the Foreword to the Grundrisse\, Nicolaus argues that it “challenges and puts to the test every serious interpretation of Marx yet received”. \nThe second half of the MEP class focuses on the heart of the Grundrisse\, the second and final ‘Chapter on Capital’ that dissects the exploitation of labor and the contradiction between labor and capital. \nGIL GARDNER has interests in radical prisoner education and political economic analysis. He has taught in\, developed and administered college programs and in prisons for 40 years\, including initiating Marxist education in Colorado’s state prisons. Gil’s writing and research includes works on the history of prison industry in the U.S. and he is presently completing an introduction to the works of Marx.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/unearthing-the-grundrisse-2/2020-03-30/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Marx's Capital,Marxist Method,Political Economy,Science and Method
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Grundrisse_FBnew.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200331T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200331T200000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20191212T153750Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T033533Z
UID:10006103-1585679400-1585684800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Invention of the White Race
DESCRIPTION:a reading and discussion group convened The Revolutions Study Group with Sean Ahern \nSince its origin in the class struggles of colonial Virginia and Maryland\, the “white race\,” the most peculiar aspect of the “Peculiar Institution\,” has remained the most contentious and misunderstood identity in American life. \nThe 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. \nAllen defines racial slavery as a particular form of racial oppression homologous with gender and class oppression. The system of racial privileges defined and established the “white” race as a “bourgeois social control formation with consequences ruinous to the interests of the Afro-American workers but also disastrous for the white worker.” \nAllen concludes Volume II with the following message to a new generation of activists: “Perhaps in the impending renewal of the struggle of ‘the common people’ and the ‘Titans\,’ the Great Safety Valve of white-skin privileges may finally come to be seen and rejected by laboring-class European-Americans as the incubus that for three centuries has paralyzed their will in defense of their class interests vis-a-vis those of the ruling class.” \nThe Revolutions Study Group (started at the Brecht Forum) has met since 2009. The groups has recently completed a year-long study of W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction. Participants have come and gone\, however the group has held together\, studying in depth a wide range of history including the French Revolution\, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917\, the Mau-Mau Revolt in Kenya\, the Haitian Revolution\, the 1848 European Revolutions\, the May 68 movement in France and the Hot Autumn of Italy and much more. \n  \nfees are sliding scale. no one is turned away for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/invention-of-the-white-race/2020-03-31/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Multi-session Classes
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Howard_Pyle_-_The_Burning_of_Jamestown.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200402T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200402T193000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200303T152702Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200303T152702Z
UID:10006702-1585850400-1585855800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capitalism and Robbery: The Planetary Mine
DESCRIPTION:Convened by Fred Murphy and Gerardo Rénique\nThis eight-week study group 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 – as we will read in Martín Arboleda’s innovative new contribution to international political economy\, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. \nI see the mountains fall\, the terrain open up in angry dark cavities\, the desert\, the temporary shacks. The mineral is fired and beaten and handled to become military ingots\, battalions of merchandise. The ships depart. Wherever the copper arrives\, as utensil or wire\, no one who touches it sees the rugged solitudes of Chile\, or the small houses at the edge of the desert … —Pablo Neruda\, Ode to Copper \nOnline participation by Zoom teleconferencing can be arranged. \nFRED MURPHY has led numerous study groups at the Marxist Education Project since 2015. He studied and taught Latin American history at the New School for Social Research. In the 1980s he traveled in Latin America as a journalist for several socialist publications. \nGERARDO RÉNIQUE teaches history at the City College of the City University of New York. He is a frequent contributor to Socialism and Democracy and NACLA: Report on the Americas. His research interests include the political traditions of popular movements in Latin America\, and race\, national identity and state formation in Mexico. \nContributions:\nClassroom attendance\, sliding scale: $65 / $80 / $95\nRemote participation via Zoom\, sliding scale: $40 / $50 / $60\nNo one is denied participation for lack of ability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capitalism-and-robbery-the-planetary-mine/2020-04-02/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Climate Change,Extractivism,Indigenous Peoples,Marxist Method,Science and Method,Science and Technology
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/MineAndBook.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200402T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200402T213000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20191231T140728Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T031424Z
UID:10006120-1585855800-1585863000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:American Writing: Changing Locations
DESCRIPTION:American Writing: 4 Seasons \nSeason 1: Changing Places in America\nHerman Melville\,  The Confidence-Man (1857). John Barth\, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) Lisa Ko\, The Leavers (2017) \nIn 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. \nAmerican 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. \nOur first thematic 12 week term concerns Change of Place. \nThis first session will begin with Melville. Though centered around the title character\, Melville’s The Confidence-Man portrays passengers on a steamboat with stories that are told as they travel to New Orleans down the Mississippi River. The narrative structure is reminiscent the Canterbury Tales.The novel is written as cultural satire\, and metaphysical treatise\, and deals with a number of themes including sincerity\, economic dislocation and materialism\, identity\, cynicism\, and more.Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Moby Dick and “Bartleby\, the Scrivener”  as precursors to 20th-century literary preoccupations around nihilism\, the absurd and existentialism. \nDale Jones citing R. W. B. Lewis\, who feels the necessity of defining a new genre for [The Confidence- Man] and its literary descendants: “it is the recognizable and awe-inspiring ancestor of several subse- quent works of fiction in America: Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger\, Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust\, Faulkner’s The Hamlet\, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man\, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor\, Thomas Pynchon’s V. Melville bequeathed to those works . . . the vision of an apocalypse that is no less terrible for being enormously comic\, the self-extinction of a world characterized by deceit and thronging with imposters and masqueraders…” \nA worthy contender for the title of Great American Novel\, Barth’s masterpiece is a work of astonishing virtuosity and range to some. Others look at this\, as did the author himself\, as the end of the novel as known before it’s publication. Barth had changed midstream in the writing of The Sot-Weed Factor. Among American novels\, in terms of sheer linguistic brilliance\, it is surpassed only by Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Melville’s matchless Moby Dick. \nHere is Barth’s opening sentence: “In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy\, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke\, more ambitious than talented\, and yet more talented than prudent\, who\, like his friends-in-folly\, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge\, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over\, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship\, had learned the knack of versifying\, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day\, afroth with Joves and Jupiters\, aclang with jarring rhymes\, and string-taught with similes stretched to the snapping point.” \nThis Cooke does as an early settler\, bounding from London cafes to the “wilds” of Maryland\, in this novel depicting the consciousness\, in mid-20th century post-modernism\, the colonizing beings early on inhabiting the North American contenent. \nSet in New York and China\, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away\, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past. \nOne morning\, Deming Guo’s mother\, Polly\, an undocumented Chinese immigrant\, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone\, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors\, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he’s ever known\, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents’ desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind. \nTold from the perspective of both Daniel—as he grows into a directionless young man—and Polly\, Ko’s novel gives us one of fiction’s most singular mothers. Loving and selfish\, determined and frightened\, Polly is forced to make one heart-wrenching choice after another. \nUpcoming terms will include the following: William Gass\, Middle C\, Maxine Hong Kingston\,Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book\, Ishmael Reed\, Mumbo Jumbo\, Russell Banks\, Cloudsplitter\, Jeffrey Eugenides\, Middlesex\, Gina Apostol\, Insurrecto and more.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/american-writing-changing-locations/2020-04-02/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Lit_ChangingLocale_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200404T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200404T140000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20191119T155546Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200327T034004Z
UID:10006067-1585998000-1586008800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 3
DESCRIPTION:First 12 sessions \nLet’s make the Anthropocene stage of the earth’s evolution\, the turning point of world history. After all\, paraphrasing Marx\, since we are the species that can know ourselves as a product of natural history\, we are responsible to all of nature. We have the power within us to make the Anthropocene not the capitalist endgame but the naturalization of our species and the humanization of nature. Capital\, a Critique of Political Economy\, can help effectively situate ourselves to face the challenges before all of humanity and nature\, and begin the process of reclaiming and putting into effect our human capacities for the betterment and advancement of each and all. \nThe 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. \nCapital\, Volume III\, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole\, completes Marx’s task of moving from the imaginary concrete—the researcher and scientist analyzing the appearances we see in everyday life such as in the Grundrisse\, to the abstract concrete. The results of the analytic study of the phenomenon that has revealed the social/natural content of that phenomenon (Volumes I and II)\, to the real concrete—how this content is expressed in everyday life through the mechanisms by which the actors determine their actions and appropriate wealth (Volume III). \nWith the conceptual integration of production and circulation (Volumes I and II) from the standpoint of the process of capitalist production as a whole\, Marx returns to the starting point of the research categories\, the imaginary concrete\, concepts seen as empirical givens as facts in themselves— profits\, interests\, rents\, rate of profit\, prices. These sensuously perceived givens (the way the world directly appears to us) are the starting point of the research analysis\, not the science. But now\, after the analysis\, these interrelated aspects of what appear on the surface of society are no longer imaginary but real\, understood as interrelated dynamics and mechanisms in everyday life by which the actors reproduce the social relations and physical conditions of capitalist society. 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. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than nearly three years. We are a group of workers\, students\, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-3/2020-04-04/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Marx's Capital,Multi-session Classes
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/HeartfieldCorpRobotsSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200406T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200406T203000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200107T061827Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T033800Z
UID:10006693-1586197800-1586205000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Unearthing The Grundrisse (continuation)
DESCRIPTION: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. As Nicolaus asserts\, Marx considered this effort to be ‘the first scientific elaboration of the theoretical foundations of communism’. Moreover\, represented by both brief and often lengthy segments of planned works\, it contains what Nicolaus argues is the only outline of the entire political economic project Marx hoped—but was mostly unable—to complete. As Nicolaus suggests\, the Grundrisse provides fresh insights into the ‘inner logic’ of Capital and perhaps the most important source for understanding Marx’s method; particularly as it develops and ‘turns Hegel’s philosophy on its feet’. Moreover\, it perhaps most clearly unites what some have\, instead\, argued is a separation between Marx’s early ‘humanism’ and his later economic work. Indeed\, in the Foreword to the Grundrisse\, Nicolaus argues that it “challenges and puts to the test every serious interpretation of Marx yet received”. \nThe second half of the MEP class focuses on the heart of the Grundrisse\, the second and final ‘Chapter on Capital’ that dissects the exploitation of labor and the contradiction between labor and capital. \nGIL GARDNER has interests in radical prisoner education and political economic analysis. He has taught in\, developed and administered college programs and in prisons for 40 years\, including initiating Marxist education in Colorado’s state prisons. Gil’s writing and research includes works on the history of prison industry in the U.S. and he is presently completing an introduction to the works of Marx.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/unearthing-the-grundrisse-2/2020-04-06/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Marx's Capital,Marxist Method,Political Economy,Science and Method
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Grundrisse_FBnew.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200407T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200407T200000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20191212T153750Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T033533Z
UID:10006104-1586284200-1586289600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Invention of the White Race
DESCRIPTION:a reading and discussion group convened The Revolutions Study Group with Sean Ahern \nSince its origin in the class struggles of colonial Virginia and Maryland\, the “white race\,” the most peculiar aspect of the “Peculiar Institution\,” has remained the most contentious and misunderstood identity in American life. \nThe 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. \nAllen defines racial slavery as a particular form of racial oppression homologous with gender and class oppression. The system of racial privileges defined and established the “white” race as a “bourgeois social control formation with consequences ruinous to the interests of the Afro-American workers but also disastrous for the white worker.” \nAllen concludes Volume II with the following message to a new generation of activists: “Perhaps in the impending renewal of the struggle of ‘the common people’ and the ‘Titans\,’ the Great Safety Valve of white-skin privileges may finally come to be seen and rejected by laboring-class European-Americans as the incubus that for three centuries has paralyzed their will in defense of their class interests vis-a-vis those of the ruling class.” \nThe Revolutions Study Group (started at the Brecht Forum) has met since 2009. The groups has recently completed a year-long study of W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction. Participants have come and gone\, however the group has held together\, studying in depth a wide range of history including the French Revolution\, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917\, the Mau-Mau Revolt in Kenya\, the Haitian Revolution\, the 1848 European Revolutions\, the May 68 movement in France and the Hot Autumn of Italy and much more. \n  \nfees are sliding scale. no one is turned away for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/invention-of-the-white-race/2020-04-07/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Multi-session Classes
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Howard_Pyle_-_The_Burning_of_Jamestown.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200408T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200408T201500
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200331T032831Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200507T155623Z
UID:10006726-1586370600-1586376900@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Covid-19 Capitalism: Big Farms Make Big Flu
DESCRIPTION:8 Week Reading Group: \nThe year 2020 has brought together a devastating viral pandemic and what is shaping up as the deepest cyclical crisis of capitalism in history. Covid-19 is not the first such episode rooted in the risky practices of capitalist agribusiness\, as detailed in Rob Wallace’s Big Farms Big Flu. We need to set ourselves to the task of how to respond that will have an impact on the causes of the circumstances we are facing as a species. To do this requires organizing and knowledge of the science that is behind the origins and spreading of Covid-19 so that our anti-capitalist activities and campaigns can be effective both in the short and long term. \nRob 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. \nFrom the Introduction to Big Farms Make Big Flu:  \n“…humans have built physical and social environments on land and sea that have radically altered the pathways along which pathogens evolve and dispense. \n“Pathogens\, however\, are no mere protagonists\, buffered to and fro by the tides of human history. They also act of their own volition\, if you will excuse the anthropomorphism. They display agency. And they have by their evolutionary changes forced agribusiness to the bargaining table\, a place where that ilk\, given their prior successes\, think they excel.” \nThe book is offered by Monthly Review in paper at $10 or as an ebook at $5 until April 17: https://monthlyreview.org/product/big_farms_make_big_flu/ \nFees for the MEP zoom sessions are sliding scale; no one is turned away for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/covid-19-capitalism-big-farms-make-big-flu/2020-04-08/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:Agribusiness,Capital Studies,Classes/Events,Climate Change,Evolutionary biology,Marxist Method,Multi-session Classes,Science and Method,Science and Technology
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Covid19Capitalism.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200409T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200409T193000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200303T152702Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200303T152702Z
UID:10006703-1586455200-1586460600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capitalism and Robbery: The Planetary Mine
DESCRIPTION:Convened by Fred Murphy and Gerardo Rénique\nThis eight-week study group 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 – as we will read in Martín Arboleda’s innovative new contribution to international political economy\, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. \nI see the mountains fall\, the terrain open up in angry dark cavities\, the desert\, the temporary shacks. The mineral is fired and beaten and handled to become military ingots\, battalions of merchandise. The ships depart. Wherever the copper arrives\, as utensil or wire\, no one who touches it sees the rugged solitudes of Chile\, or the small houses at the edge of the desert … —Pablo Neruda\, Ode to Copper \nOnline participation by Zoom teleconferencing can be arranged. \nFRED MURPHY has led numerous study groups at the Marxist Education Project since 2015. He studied and taught Latin American history at the New School for Social Research. In the 1980s he traveled in Latin America as a journalist for several socialist publications. \nGERARDO RÉNIQUE teaches history at the City College of the City University of New York. He is a frequent contributor to Socialism and Democracy and NACLA: Report on the Americas. His research interests include the political traditions of popular movements in Latin America\, and race\, national identity and state formation in Mexico. \nContributions:\nClassroom attendance\, sliding scale: $65 / $80 / $95\nRemote participation via Zoom\, sliding scale: $40 / $50 / $60\nNo one is denied participation for lack of ability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capitalism-and-robbery-the-planetary-mine/2020-04-09/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Climate Change,Extractivism,Indigenous Peoples,Marxist Method,Science and Method,Science and Technology
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/MineAndBook.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200409T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200409T213000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20191231T140728Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T031424Z
UID:10006121-1586460600-1586467800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:American Writing: Changing Locations
DESCRIPTION:American Writing: 4 Seasons \nSeason 1: Changing Places in America\nHerman Melville\,  The Confidence-Man (1857). John Barth\, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) Lisa Ko\, The Leavers (2017) \nIn 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. \nAmerican 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. \nOur first thematic 12 week term concerns Change of Place. \nThis first session will begin with Melville. Though centered around the title character\, Melville’s The Confidence-Man portrays passengers on a steamboat with stories that are told as they travel to New Orleans down the Mississippi River. The narrative structure is reminiscent the Canterbury Tales.The novel is written as cultural satire\, and metaphysical treatise\, and deals with a number of themes including sincerity\, economic dislocation and materialism\, identity\, cynicism\, and more.Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Moby Dick and “Bartleby\, the Scrivener”  as precursors to 20th-century literary preoccupations around nihilism\, the absurd and existentialism. \nDale Jones citing R. W. B. Lewis\, who feels the necessity of defining a new genre for [The Confidence- Man] and its literary descendants: “it is the recognizable and awe-inspiring ancestor of several subse- quent works of fiction in America: Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger\, Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust\, Faulkner’s The Hamlet\, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man\, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor\, Thomas Pynchon’s V. Melville bequeathed to those works . . . the vision of an apocalypse that is no less terrible for being enormously comic\, the self-extinction of a world characterized by deceit and thronging with imposters and masqueraders…” \nA worthy contender for the title of Great American Novel\, Barth’s masterpiece is a work of astonishing virtuosity and range to some. Others look at this\, as did the author himself\, as the end of the novel as known before it’s publication. Barth had changed midstream in the writing of The Sot-Weed Factor. Among American novels\, in terms of sheer linguistic brilliance\, it is surpassed only by Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Melville’s matchless Moby Dick. \nHere is Barth’s opening sentence: “In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy\, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke\, more ambitious than talented\, and yet more talented than prudent\, who\, like his friends-in-folly\, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge\, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over\, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship\, had learned the knack of versifying\, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day\, afroth with Joves and Jupiters\, aclang with jarring rhymes\, and string-taught with similes stretched to the snapping point.” \nThis Cooke does as an early settler\, bounding from London cafes to the “wilds” of Maryland\, in this novel depicting the consciousness\, in mid-20th century post-modernism\, the colonizing beings early on inhabiting the North American contenent. \nSet in New York and China\, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away\, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past. \nOne morning\, Deming Guo’s mother\, Polly\, an undocumented Chinese immigrant\, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone\, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors\, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he’s ever known\, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents’ desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind. \nTold from the perspective of both Daniel—as he grows into a directionless young man—and Polly\, Ko’s novel gives us one of fiction’s most singular mothers. Loving and selfish\, determined and frightened\, Polly is forced to make one heart-wrenching choice after another. \nUpcoming terms will include the following: William Gass\, Middle C\, Maxine Hong Kingston\,Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book\, Ishmael Reed\, Mumbo Jumbo\, Russell Banks\, Cloudsplitter\, Jeffrey Eugenides\, Middlesex\, Gina Apostol\, Insurrecto and more.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/american-writing-changing-locations/2020-04-09/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Lit_ChangingLocale_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200411T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200411T140000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200327T035801Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200714T144743Z
UID:10006712-1586602800-1586613600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 3\, 2nd Sessions
DESCRIPTION:Second 12 session series \nLet’s make the Anthropocene stage of the earth’s evolution\, the turning point of world history. After all\, paraphrasing Marx\, since we are the species that can know ourselves as a product of natural history\, we are responsible to all of nature. We have the power within us to make the Anthropocene not the capitalist endgame but the naturalization of our species and the humanization of nature. Capital\, a Critique of Political Economy\, can help effectively situate ourselves to face the challenges before all of humanity and nature\, and begin the process of reclaiming and putting into effect our human capacities for the betterment and advancement of each and all. \nThe 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. \nCapital\, Volume III\, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole\, completes Marx’s task of moving from the imaginary concrete—the researcher and scientist analyzing the appearances we see in everyday life such as in the Grundrisse\, to the abstract concrete. The results of the analytic study of the phenomenon that has revealed the social/natural content of that phenomenon (Volumes I and II)\, to the real concrete—how this content is expressed in everyday life through the mechanisms by which the actors determine their actions and appropriate wealth (Volume III). \nWith the conceptual integration of production and circulation (Volumes I and II) from the standpoint of the process of capitalist production as a whole\, Marx returns to the starting point of the research categories\, the imaginary concrete\, concepts seen as empirical givens as facts in themselves— profits\, interests\, rents\, rate of profit\, prices. These sensuously perceived givens (the way the world directly appears to us) are the starting point of the research analysis\, not the science. But now\, after the analysis\, these interrelated aspects of what appear on the surface of society are no longer imaginary but real\, understood as interrelated dynamics and mechanisms in everyday life by which the actors reproduce the social relations and physical conditions of capitalist society. 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. \nWe will be starting or close to starting Part 3 of the volume on The Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit. Until the Coronavirus and safe distancing and with staying at home being the healthy and responsible choice\, these sessions will be conducted via Zoom. If you register to participate\, you will be contacted with all information needed and a zoom link will be provided each week until we can meet in person\, if such conditions exist between now and mid-July. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than nearly three years. We are a group of workers\, students\, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nAll classes and events of The MEP are sliding scale. No one is turned away for inability to pay. Zoom classes rates are slightly less than in person meetings. However\, there are costs involved in keeping our site running\, having zoom sessions and paying for our office.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-3-2nd-sessions/2020-04-11/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Marx's Capital,Political Economy
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/SchwittersFragment.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="Capital Studies Group":MAILTO:info@marxedproject.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200413T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200413T203000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200107T061827Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T033800Z
UID:10006694-1586802600-1586809800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Unearthing The Grundrisse (continuation)
DESCRIPTION: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. As Nicolaus asserts\, Marx considered this effort to be ‘the first scientific elaboration of the theoretical foundations of communism’. Moreover\, represented by both brief and often lengthy segments of planned works\, it contains what Nicolaus argues is the only outline of the entire political economic project Marx hoped—but was mostly unable—to complete. As Nicolaus suggests\, the Grundrisse provides fresh insights into the ‘inner logic’ of Capital and perhaps the most important source for understanding Marx’s method; particularly as it develops and ‘turns Hegel’s philosophy on its feet’. Moreover\, it perhaps most clearly unites what some have\, instead\, argued is a separation between Marx’s early ‘humanism’ and his later economic work. Indeed\, in the Foreword to the Grundrisse\, Nicolaus argues that it “challenges and puts to the test every serious interpretation of Marx yet received”. \nThe second half of the MEP class focuses on the heart of the Grundrisse\, the second and final ‘Chapter on Capital’ that dissects the exploitation of labor and the contradiction between labor and capital. \nGIL GARDNER has interests in radical prisoner education and political economic analysis. He has taught in\, developed and administered college programs and in prisons for 40 years\, including initiating Marxist education in Colorado’s state prisons. Gil’s writing and research includes works on the history of prison industry in the U.S. and he is presently completing an introduction to the works of Marx.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/unearthing-the-grundrisse-2/2020-04-13/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Marx's Capital,Marxist Method,Political Economy,Science and Method
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Grundrisse_FBnew.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200415T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200415T201500
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200331T032831Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200507T155623Z
UID:10006727-1586975400-1586981700@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Covid-19 Capitalism: Big Farms Make Big Flu
DESCRIPTION:8 Week Reading Group: \nThe year 2020 has brought together a devastating viral pandemic and what is shaping up as the deepest cyclical crisis of capitalism in history. Covid-19 is not the first such episode rooted in the risky practices of capitalist agribusiness\, as detailed in Rob Wallace’s Big Farms Big Flu. We need to set ourselves to the task of how to respond that will have an impact on the causes of the circumstances we are facing as a species. To do this requires organizing and knowledge of the science that is behind the origins and spreading of Covid-19 so that our anti-capitalist activities and campaigns can be effective both in the short and long term. \nRob 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. \nFrom the Introduction to Big Farms Make Big Flu:  \n“…humans have built physical and social environments on land and sea that have radically altered the pathways along which pathogens evolve and dispense. \n“Pathogens\, however\, are no mere protagonists\, buffered to and fro by the tides of human history. They also act of their own volition\, if you will excuse the anthropomorphism. They display agency. And they have by their evolutionary changes forced agribusiness to the bargaining table\, a place where that ilk\, given their prior successes\, think they excel.” \nThe book is offered by Monthly Review in paper at $10 or as an ebook at $5 until April 17: https://monthlyreview.org/product/big_farms_make_big_flu/ \nFees for the MEP zoom sessions are sliding scale; no one is turned away for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/covid-19-capitalism-big-farms-make-big-flu/2020-04-15/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:Agribusiness,Capital Studies,Classes/Events,Climate Change,Evolutionary biology,Marxist Method,Multi-session Classes,Science and Method,Science and Technology
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Covid19Capitalism.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200416T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200416T193000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200303T152702Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200303T152702Z
UID:10006704-1587060000-1587065400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capitalism and Robbery: The Planetary Mine
DESCRIPTION:Convened by Fred Murphy and Gerardo Rénique\nThis eight-week study group 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 – as we will read in Martín Arboleda’s innovative new contribution to international political economy\, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. \nI see the mountains fall\, the terrain open up in angry dark cavities\, the desert\, the temporary shacks. The mineral is fired and beaten and handled to become military ingots\, battalions of merchandise. The ships depart. Wherever the copper arrives\, as utensil or wire\, no one who touches it sees the rugged solitudes of Chile\, or the small houses at the edge of the desert … —Pablo Neruda\, Ode to Copper \nOnline participation by Zoom teleconferencing can be arranged. \nFRED MURPHY has led numerous study groups at the Marxist Education Project since 2015. He studied and taught Latin American history at the New School for Social Research. In the 1980s he traveled in Latin America as a journalist for several socialist publications. \nGERARDO RÉNIQUE teaches history at the City College of the City University of New York. He is a frequent contributor to Socialism and Democracy and NACLA: Report on the Americas. His research interests include the political traditions of popular movements in Latin America\, and race\, national identity and state formation in Mexico. \nContributions:\nClassroom attendance\, sliding scale: $65 / $80 / $95\nRemote participation via Zoom\, sliding scale: $40 / $50 / $60\nNo one is denied participation for lack of ability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capitalism-and-robbery-the-planetary-mine/2020-04-16/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Climate Change,Extractivism,Indigenous Peoples,Marxist Method,Science and Method,Science and Technology
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/MineAndBook.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200418T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200418T140000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200327T035801Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200714T144743Z
UID:10006713-1587207600-1587218400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 3\, 2nd Sessions
DESCRIPTION:Second 12 session series \nLet’s make the Anthropocene stage of the earth’s evolution\, the turning point of world history. After all\, paraphrasing Marx\, since we are the species that can know ourselves as a product of natural history\, we are responsible to all of nature. We have the power within us to make the Anthropocene not the capitalist endgame but the naturalization of our species and the humanization of nature. Capital\, a Critique of Political Economy\, can help effectively situate ourselves to face the challenges before all of humanity and nature\, and begin the process of reclaiming and putting into effect our human capacities for the betterment and advancement of each and all. \nThe 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. \nCapital\, Volume III\, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole\, completes Marx’s task of moving from the imaginary concrete—the researcher and scientist analyzing the appearances we see in everyday life such as in the Grundrisse\, to the abstract concrete. The results of the analytic study of the phenomenon that has revealed the social/natural content of that phenomenon (Volumes I and II)\, to the real concrete—how this content is expressed in everyday life through the mechanisms by which the actors determine their actions and appropriate wealth (Volume III). \nWith the conceptual integration of production and circulation (Volumes I and II) from the standpoint of the process of capitalist production as a whole\, Marx returns to the starting point of the research categories\, the imaginary concrete\, concepts seen as empirical givens as facts in themselves— profits\, interests\, rents\, rate of profit\, prices. These sensuously perceived givens (the way the world directly appears to us) are the starting point of the research analysis\, not the science. But now\, after the analysis\, these interrelated aspects of what appear on the surface of society are no longer imaginary but real\, understood as interrelated dynamics and mechanisms in everyday life by which the actors reproduce the social relations and physical conditions of capitalist society. 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. \nWe will be starting or close to starting Part 3 of the volume on The Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit. Until the Coronavirus and safe distancing and with staying at home being the healthy and responsible choice\, these sessions will be conducted via Zoom. If you register to participate\, you will be contacted with all information needed and a zoom link will be provided each week until we can meet in person\, if such conditions exist between now and mid-July. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than nearly three years. We are a group of workers\, students\, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nAll classes and events of The MEP are sliding scale. No one is turned away for inability to pay. Zoom classes rates are slightly less than in person meetings. However\, there are costs involved in keeping our site running\, having zoom sessions and paying for our office.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-3-2nd-sessions/2020-04-18/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Marx's Capital,Political Economy
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/SchwittersFragment.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="Capital Studies Group":MAILTO:info@marxedproject.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200422T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200422T201500
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200331T032831Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200507T155623Z
UID:10006728-1587580200-1587586500@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Covid-19 Capitalism: Big Farms Make Big Flu
DESCRIPTION:8 Week Reading Group: \nThe year 2020 has brought together a devastating viral pandemic and what is shaping up as the deepest cyclical crisis of capitalism in history. Covid-19 is not the first such episode rooted in the risky practices of capitalist agribusiness\, as detailed in Rob Wallace’s Big Farms Big Flu. We need to set ourselves to the task of how to respond that will have an impact on the causes of the circumstances we are facing as a species. To do this requires organizing and knowledge of the science that is behind the origins and spreading of Covid-19 so that our anti-capitalist activities and campaigns can be effective both in the short and long term. \nRob 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. \nFrom the Introduction to Big Farms Make Big Flu:  \n“…humans have built physical and social environments on land and sea that have radically altered the pathways along which pathogens evolve and dispense. \n“Pathogens\, however\, are no mere protagonists\, buffered to and fro by the tides of human history. They also act of their own volition\, if you will excuse the anthropomorphism. They display agency. And they have by their evolutionary changes forced agribusiness to the bargaining table\, a place where that ilk\, given their prior successes\, think they excel.” \nThe book is offered by Monthly Review in paper at $10 or as an ebook at $5 until April 17: https://monthlyreview.org/product/big_farms_make_big_flu/ \nFees for the MEP zoom sessions are sliding scale; no one is turned away for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/covid-19-capitalism-big-farms-make-big-flu/2020-04-22/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:Agribusiness,Capital Studies,Classes/Events,Climate Change,Evolutionary biology,Marxist Method,Multi-session Classes,Science and Method,Science and Technology
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Covid19Capitalism.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200423T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200423T193000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200303T152702Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200303T152702Z
UID:10006705-1587664800-1587670200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capitalism and Robbery: The Planetary Mine
DESCRIPTION:Convened by Fred Murphy and Gerardo Rénique\nThis eight-week study group 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 – as we will read in Martín Arboleda’s innovative new contribution to international political economy\, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. \nI see the mountains fall\, the terrain open up in angry dark cavities\, the desert\, the temporary shacks. The mineral is fired and beaten and handled to become military ingots\, battalions of merchandise. The ships depart. Wherever the copper arrives\, as utensil or wire\, no one who touches it sees the rugged solitudes of Chile\, or the small houses at the edge of the desert … —Pablo Neruda\, Ode to Copper \nOnline participation by Zoom teleconferencing can be arranged. \nFRED MURPHY has led numerous study groups at the Marxist Education Project since 2015. He studied and taught Latin American history at the New School for Social Research. In the 1980s he traveled in Latin America as a journalist for several socialist publications. \nGERARDO RÉNIQUE teaches history at the City College of the City University of New York. He is a frequent contributor to Socialism and Democracy and NACLA: Report on the Americas. His research interests include the political traditions of popular movements in Latin America\, and race\, national identity and state formation in Mexico. \nContributions:\nClassroom attendance\, sliding scale: $65 / $80 / $95\nRemote participation via Zoom\, sliding scale: $40 / $50 / $60\nNo one is denied participation for lack of ability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capitalism-and-robbery-the-planetary-mine/2020-04-23/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Climate Change,Extractivism,Indigenous Peoples,Marxist Method,Science and Method,Science and Technology
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/MineAndBook.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200423T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200423T213000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200407T025518Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200521T164024Z
UID:10006743-1587670200-1587677400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:6 Plays of Bertolt Brecht
DESCRIPTION:Beginning April 23 we will read aloud six of the many plays Bertolt Brecht wrote between the 1920s and his death in 1956. We will spend three weeks with The Threepenny Opera\, one week with The Exception and The Rule\, and two weeks each for the other four plays. 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. \n \nThe Threepenny Opera 1928 \nThe Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) is a “play with music” by Bertolt Brecht\, adapted from a translation by Elisabeth Hauptmann of John Gay’s 18th-century ballad opera\, The Beggar’s Opera\, and four ballads by François Villon\, with music by Kurt Weill. The work offers a socialist critique of the capitalist world. Writing in 1929\, Weill made the political and artistic intents of the work clear: “With the Dreigroschenoper we reach a public which either did not know us at all or thought us incapable of captivating listeners\, Opera was founded as an aristocratic form of art. If the framework of opera is unable to withstand the impact of the age\, then this framework must be destroyed…. In the Dreigroschenoper\, reconstruction was possible insofar as here we had a chance of starting from scratch. Weill claimed at the time that “music cannot further the action of the play or create its background”\, but achieves its proper value when it interrupts the action at the right moments.” \nThe Mother 1931 \nBased on Maxim Gorky’s 1906 novel of the same name\, is Brecht’s most elaborate use of his radically experimental Lehrstücke\, or learning plays\, which he describes as “a piece of anti-metaphysical\, materialistic\, non-Aristotelian drama.” The play suggests that to become a good mother involves more than just complaining about the price of soup; rather\, one must struggle against it\, not only for her and her family’s sake\, but for the sake of all working families. The title character\, the mother Pelagea Vlassova\, journeys through the play’s 14 scenes\, the death of her son\, and her own impending illness\, fighting illiteracy while constantly filled with good humor and wily activism. The moment in October 1917 when she becomes free to carry and raise her own Red Flag on the eve of the czar’s overthrow proves momentous. \n \nThe Exception and the Rule 1933 \nThe play itself is short\, and lasts no longer than 60 minutes if performed in its entirety. It tells the story of a rich merchant\, who must cross the fictional Yahi Desert to close an oil deal. During the trip the class differences between him and his working-class porter (or “coolie” as he is called in most English language editions) are shown. As he becomes increasingly afraid of the desert\, the merchant’s brutality increases\, and he feels terribly alone without police nearby to protect him. \nMother Courage & Her Children 1941 \nFollowing Brecht’s own principles for political drama\, the play is not set in modern timesbut during the 30 Years’ War of 1618–1648. It follows the fortunes of Anna Fierling\, nicknamed Mother Courage\, who is determined to make her living from the war. Over the course of the play\, she loses all three of her children\, Schweizerkas\, Eilif\, and Kattrin\, to the very war from which she tried to profit. Mother Courage is an example of Brecht’s concepts of epic theatre and Verfremdungseffekt\, or “V” effect; preferably “alienation” or “estrangement effect” Verfremdungseffekt is achieved through the use of placards which reveal the events of each scene\, juxtaposition\, actors changing characters and costume on stage\, the use of narration\, simple props and scenery. \nThe Good Person of Szechwan 1943 \nBrecht’s interest in historical materialism is evident in the play’s definition of contemporary morality and altruism in social and economic terms. Shen Teh’s altruism conflicts with Shui Ta’s capitalist ethos of exploitation. The play implies that economic systems determine a society’s morality. \nThe Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui 1958 \nIt chronicles the rise of Arturo Ui\, a fictional 1930s Chicago mobster\, and his attempts to control the cauliflower racket by ruthlessly disposing of the opposition. The play is a satirical allegory of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany prior to World War II. The play has frequent references to Shakespeare. To highlight Ui’s evil and villainous rise to power\, he is explicitly compared to Shakespeare’s Richard III. Like Macbeth\, Ui experiences a visitation from the ghost of one of his victims. Finally\, Hitler’s practiced prowess at public speaking is referenced when Ui receives lessons from an actor in walking\, sitting and orating\, which includes his reciting Mark Antony’s famous speech from Julius Caesar.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/6-plays-of-bertolt-brecht/2020-04-23/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Literary Studies
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/BrechtPortrait.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="MEP Literature Group":MAILTO:info@marxedproject.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200425T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200425T140000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200327T035801Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200714T144743Z
UID:10006714-1587812400-1587823200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 3\, 2nd Sessions
DESCRIPTION:Second 12 session series \nLet’s make the Anthropocene stage of the earth’s evolution\, the turning point of world history. After all\, paraphrasing Marx\, since we are the species that can know ourselves as a product of natural history\, we are responsible to all of nature. We have the power within us to make the Anthropocene not the capitalist endgame but the naturalization of our species and the humanization of nature. Capital\, a Critique of Political Economy\, can help effectively situate ourselves to face the challenges before all of humanity and nature\, and begin the process of reclaiming and putting into effect our human capacities for the betterment and advancement of each and all. \nThe 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. \nCapital\, Volume III\, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole\, completes Marx’s task of moving from the imaginary concrete—the researcher and scientist analyzing the appearances we see in everyday life such as in the Grundrisse\, to the abstract concrete. The results of the analytic study of the phenomenon that has revealed the social/natural content of that phenomenon (Volumes I and II)\, to the real concrete—how this content is expressed in everyday life through the mechanisms by which the actors determine their actions and appropriate wealth (Volume III). \nWith the conceptual integration of production and circulation (Volumes I and II) from the standpoint of the process of capitalist production as a whole\, Marx returns to the starting point of the research categories\, the imaginary concrete\, concepts seen as empirical givens as facts in themselves— profits\, interests\, rents\, rate of profit\, prices. These sensuously perceived givens (the way the world directly appears to us) are the starting point of the research analysis\, not the science. But now\, after the analysis\, these interrelated aspects of what appear on the surface of society are no longer imaginary but real\, understood as interrelated dynamics and mechanisms in everyday life by which the actors reproduce the social relations and physical conditions of capitalist society. 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. \nWe will be starting or close to starting Part 3 of the volume on The Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit. Until the Coronavirus and safe distancing and with staying at home being the healthy and responsible choice\, these sessions will be conducted via Zoom. If you register to participate\, you will be contacted with all information needed and a zoom link will be provided each week until we can meet in person\, if such conditions exist between now and mid-July. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for more than nearly three years. We are a group of workers\, students\, activists and teachers who have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nAll classes and events of The MEP are sliding scale. No one is turned away for inability to pay. Zoom classes rates are slightly less than in person meetings. However\, there are costs involved in keeping our site running\, having zoom sessions and paying for our office.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-3-2nd-sessions/2020-04-25/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Marx's Capital,Political Economy
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/SchwittersFragment.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="Capital Studies Group":MAILTO:info@marxedproject.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20200427T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20200427T201500
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200404T042015Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200514T150801Z
UID:10006734-1588012200-1588018500@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Descent Into the Inferno:  The Politics of Marx’s Capital
DESCRIPTION:with CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP \nAn 8-Week Reading Group: \nMarx’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.” \nCombining research on Marx’s interlocutors\, textual scholarship\, and forays into recent debates\, Roberts traces the continuities linking Marx’s theory of capitalism to the tradition of republican political thought. He immerses the reader in socialist debates about the nature of commerce\, the experience of labor\, the power of bosses and managers\, and the possibilities of political organization. Roberts rescues those debates from the past\, and shows how they speak to ever-renewed concerns about political life in today’s world. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP is a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. \nFees for the MEP zoom sessions are sliding scale; no one is turned away for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/descent-into-the-inferno-the-politics-of-marxs-capital/2020-04-27/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Marx's Capital,Marxist Method,Multi-session Classes,Political Economy,Revolutions Study Group,Science and Method,Science and Technology
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/MarxsInferno1.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="Capital Studies Group":MAILTO:info@marxedproject.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200429T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200429T201500
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200331T032831Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200507T155623Z
UID:10006729-1588185000-1588191300@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Covid-19 Capitalism: Big Farms Make Big Flu
DESCRIPTION:8 Week Reading Group: \nThe year 2020 has brought together a devastating viral pandemic and what is shaping up as the deepest cyclical crisis of capitalism in history. Covid-19 is not the first such episode rooted in the risky practices of capitalist agribusiness\, as detailed in Rob Wallace’s Big Farms Big Flu. We need to set ourselves to the task of how to respond that will have an impact on the causes of the circumstances we are facing as a species. To do this requires organizing and knowledge of the science that is behind the origins and spreading of Covid-19 so that our anti-capitalist activities and campaigns can be effective both in the short and long term. \nRob 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. \nFrom the Introduction to Big Farms Make Big Flu:  \n“…humans have built physical and social environments on land and sea that have radically altered the pathways along which pathogens evolve and dispense. \n“Pathogens\, however\, are no mere protagonists\, buffered to and fro by the tides of human history. They also act of their own volition\, if you will excuse the anthropomorphism. They display agency. And they have by their evolutionary changes forced agribusiness to the bargaining table\, a place where that ilk\, given their prior successes\, think they excel.” \nThe book is offered by Monthly Review in paper at $10 or as an ebook at $5 until April 17: https://monthlyreview.org/product/big_farms_make_big_flu/ \nFees for the MEP zoom sessions are sliding scale; no one is turned away for inability to pay.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/covid-19-capitalism-big-farms-make-big-flu/2020-04-29/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:Agribusiness,Capital Studies,Classes/Events,Climate Change,Evolutionary biology,Marxist Method,Multi-session Classes,Science and Method,Science and Technology
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Covid19Capitalism.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200430T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200430T193000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200303T152702Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200303T152702Z
UID:10006706-1588269600-1588275000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capitalism and Robbery: The Planetary Mine
DESCRIPTION:Convened by Fred Murphy and Gerardo Rénique\nThis eight-week study group 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 – as we will read in Martín Arboleda’s innovative new contribution to international political economy\, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. \nI see the mountains fall\, the terrain open up in angry dark cavities\, the desert\, the temporary shacks. The mineral is fired and beaten and handled to become military ingots\, battalions of merchandise. The ships depart. Wherever the copper arrives\, as utensil or wire\, no one who touches it sees the rugged solitudes of Chile\, or the small houses at the edge of the desert … —Pablo Neruda\, Ode to Copper \nOnline participation by Zoom teleconferencing can be arranged. \nFRED MURPHY has led numerous study groups at the Marxist Education Project since 2015. He studied and taught Latin American history at the New School for Social Research. In the 1980s he traveled in Latin America as a journalist for several socialist publications. \nGERARDO RÉNIQUE teaches history at the City College of the City University of New York. He is a frequent contributor to Socialism and Democracy and NACLA: Report on the Americas. His research interests include the political traditions of popular movements in Latin America\, and race\, national identity and state formation in Mexico. \nContributions:\nClassroom attendance\, sliding scale: $65 / $80 / $95\nRemote participation via Zoom\, sliding scale: $40 / $50 / $60\nNo one is denied participation for lack of ability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capitalism-and-robbery-the-planetary-mine/2020-04-30/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Climate Change,Extractivism,Indigenous Peoples,Marxist Method,Science and Method,Science and Technology
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/MineAndBook.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200430T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200430T213000
DTSTAMP:20260407T122909
CREATED:20200407T025518Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200521T164024Z
UID:10006744-1588275000-1588282200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:6 Plays of Bertolt Brecht
DESCRIPTION:Beginning April 23 we will read aloud six of the many plays Bertolt Brecht wrote between the 1920s and his death in 1956. We will spend three weeks with The Threepenny Opera\, one week with The Exception and The Rule\, and two weeks each for the other four plays. 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. \n \nThe Threepenny Opera 1928 \nThe Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) is a “play with music” by Bertolt Brecht\, adapted from a translation by Elisabeth Hauptmann of John Gay’s 18th-century ballad opera\, The Beggar’s Opera\, and four ballads by François Villon\, with music by Kurt Weill. The work offers a socialist critique of the capitalist world. Writing in 1929\, Weill made the political and artistic intents of the work clear: “With the Dreigroschenoper we reach a public which either did not know us at all or thought us incapable of captivating listeners\, Opera was founded as an aristocratic form of art. If the framework of opera is unable to withstand the impact of the age\, then this framework must be destroyed…. In the Dreigroschenoper\, reconstruction was possible insofar as here we had a chance of starting from scratch. Weill claimed at the time that “music cannot further the action of the play or create its background”\, but achieves its proper value when it interrupts the action at the right moments.” \nThe Mother 1931 \nBased on Maxim Gorky’s 1906 novel of the same name\, is Brecht’s most elaborate use of his radically experimental Lehrstücke\, or learning plays\, which he describes as “a piece of anti-metaphysical\, materialistic\, non-Aristotelian drama.” The play suggests that to become a good mother involves more than just complaining about the price of soup; rather\, one must struggle against it\, not only for her and her family’s sake\, but for the sake of all working families. The title character\, the mother Pelagea Vlassova\, journeys through the play’s 14 scenes\, the death of her son\, and her own impending illness\, fighting illiteracy while constantly filled with good humor and wily activism. The moment in October 1917 when she becomes free to carry and raise her own Red Flag on the eve of the czar’s overthrow proves momentous. \n \nThe Exception and the Rule 1933 \nThe play itself is short\, and lasts no longer than 60 minutes if performed in its entirety. It tells the story of a rich merchant\, who must cross the fictional Yahi Desert to close an oil deal. During the trip the class differences between him and his working-class porter (or “coolie” as he is called in most English language editions) are shown. As he becomes increasingly afraid of the desert\, the merchant’s brutality increases\, and he feels terribly alone without police nearby to protect him. \nMother Courage & Her Children 1941 \nFollowing Brecht’s own principles for political drama\, the play is not set in modern timesbut during the 30 Years’ War of 1618–1648. It follows the fortunes of Anna Fierling\, nicknamed Mother Courage\, who is determined to make her living from the war. Over the course of the play\, she loses all three of her children\, Schweizerkas\, Eilif\, and Kattrin\, to the very war from which she tried to profit. Mother Courage is an example of Brecht’s concepts of epic theatre and Verfremdungseffekt\, or “V” effect; preferably “alienation” or “estrangement effect” Verfremdungseffekt is achieved through the use of placards which reveal the events of each scene\, juxtaposition\, actors changing characters and costume on stage\, the use of narration\, simple props and scenery. \nThe Good Person of Szechwan 1943 \nBrecht’s interest in historical materialism is evident in the play’s definition of contemporary morality and altruism in social and economic terms. Shen Teh’s altruism conflicts with Shui Ta’s capitalist ethos of exploitation. The play implies that economic systems determine a society’s morality. \nThe Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui 1958 \nIt chronicles the rise of Arturo Ui\, a fictional 1930s Chicago mobster\, and his attempts to control the cauliflower racket by ruthlessly disposing of the opposition. The play is a satirical allegory of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany prior to World War II. The play has frequent references to Shakespeare. To highlight Ui’s evil and villainous rise to power\, he is explicitly compared to Shakespeare’s Richard III. Like Macbeth\, Ui experiences a visitation from the ghost of one of his victims. Finally\, Hitler’s practiced prowess at public speaking is referenced when Ui receives lessons from an actor in walking\, sitting and orating\, which includes his reciting Mark Antony’s famous speech from Julius Caesar.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/6-plays-of-bertolt-brecht/2020-04-30/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events,Literary Studies
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/BrechtPortrait.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="MEP Literature Group":MAILTO:info@marxedproject.org
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR