Oppression and Resistance in New Chinese and Chinese-American Science Fiction
2023-09-18 17:00 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | Online Event – Zoom Meeting
Join us to read selections from the best of Chinese and Chinese-American science fiction. Over the last ten years, authors have reached English-speaking audiences with exciting and award-winning new literature using the metaphors and methods of speculative and visionary writing.
The new wave of younger Chinese science fiction writers often brings exciting explorations of political and social themes. Alongside daring new scientific imaginations, our selections this fall feature issues of anti-Asian violence and racism, colonialism, then and now, and the cruelties of global capitalism, often resulting in resistance to oppression. Our selections truly merit the new tag of “visionary fiction.”
Our reading group includes people steeped in the speculative fiction tradition as well as new readers exploring themes with us for the first time. The tilt of global economics, scientific research, and politics Eastward makes this fall’s theme timely.
Our list, still in formation, tentatively includes:
Vagabonds by Hao Jinfang, as well as her Hugo award-winning story, “Folding Beijing”
Selections from short story collections written, translated or edited by Ken Liu: Hidden Planets, Broken Planets, and The Hidden Girl
Babel, by RF Kuang
Our Missing Children, by Celeste Ng
Severance, by Ling Ma
We plan to experiment with a hybrid format. We will meet monthly for a longer, in-depth discussion as we finish a book. This more typical book club may better suit you if you want to read on your own and then take part in an overall discussion of the readings. We will also continue our weekly ninety-minute meetings for those who can make that commitment. You can register for all or just the monthly longer sessions.
Convened by Steve Backman, long-time explorer of the visionary side of science fiction; member of the MEP leadership team

Reading Marx’s Capital, Volume I (third series)
2023-09-24 13:30 - 15:30, 2023-10-01 13:30 - 15:30, 2023-10-08 13:30 - 15:30, 2023-10-15 13:30 - 15:30, 2023-10-22 13:30 - 15:30, 2023-10-29 13:30 - 15:30, 2023-11-05 13:30 - 15:30, 2023-11-12 13:30 - 15:30 | Online Event – Zoom Meeting
Covering Parts V through VIII of Capital, volume 1
Join us as we continue the close reading of Volume 1 of Marx’s Capital begun earlier this year, guided by an experienced team led by Lisa Maya Knauer. This fall we will be reading Parts V through VIII, covering Wages, the Accumulation of Capital, and the so-called Primitive Accumulation. Each week, we recap the passages covered at the previous session, introduce new material, and open up a discussion. We read the more challenging sections together a paragraph or two at a time. Supplementary materials and/or questions for reflection are circulated prior to each week’s session, and the conversation continues in the group’s Slack channel.
Lisa Maya Knauer has been involved with Marxist education in New York for her entire adult life, and has taught a variety of classes at the MEP and its predecessors. Her current activist work focuses on immigrant workers’ rights and indigenous struggles for land and water. In her day job, she is a tenured radical at a public university.
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Oppression and Resistance in New Chinese and Chinese-American Science Fiction
2023-09-25 17:00 - 18:30, 2023-10-02 17:00 - 18:30, 2023-10-09 17:00 - 18:30, 2023-10-16 17:00 - 18:30 | Online Event – Zoom Meeting
Join us to read selections from the best of Chinese and Chinese-American science fiction. Over the last ten years, authors have reached English-speaking audiences with exciting and award-winning new literature using the metaphors and methods of speculative and visionary writing.
The new wave of younger Chinese science fiction writers often brings exciting explorations of political and social themes. Alongside daring new scientific imaginations, our selections this fall feature issues of anti-Asian violence and racism, colonialism, then and now, and the cruelties of global capitalism, often resulting in resistance to oppression. Our selections truly merit the new tag of “visionary fiction.”
Our reading group includes people steeped in the speculative fiction tradition as well as new readers exploring themes with us for the first time. The tilt of global economics, scientific research, and politics Eastward makes this fall’s theme timely.
Our list, still in formation, tentatively includes:
Vagabonds by Hao Jinfang, as well as her Hugo award-winning story, “Folding Beijing”
Selections from short story collections written, translated or edited by Ken Liu: Hidden Planets, Broken Planets, and The Hidden Girl
Babel, by RF Kuang
Our Missing Children, by Celeste Ng
Severance, by Ling Ma
We plan to experiment with a hybrid format. We will meet monthly for a longer, in-depth discussion as we finish a book. This more typical book club may better suit you if you want to read on your own and then take part in an overall discussion of the readings. We will also continue our weekly ninety-minute meetings for those who can make that commitment. You can register for all or just the monthly longer sessions.
Convened by Steve Backman, long-time explorer of the visionary side of science fiction; member of the MEP leadership team
Please click to see ticket options for this series and register. You can see all registration options on the first date listing for this reading group.

Commons, Commoning, Communism
2023-09-26 13:00 - 14:30, 2023-10-03 13:00 - 14:30, 2023-10-10 13:00 - 14:30, 2023-10-17 13:00 - 14:30, 2023-10-24 13:00 - 14:30, 2023-10-31 13:00 - 14:30, 2023-11-07 13:00 - 14:30 | Online Event – Zoom Meeting
Various forms of commoning, some traditional and some not, provided the proletariat with means of survival in the struggle against capitalism. Commoning is a basis of proletarian class solidarity, and we can find this before, during, and after both the semantic and the political birth of communism. –Peter Linebaugh
Before the advent of capitalism, much of humanity produced their immediate livelihoods on lands and with tools to which they either had rights of use or held as individual property. All that came to a violent end with what Marx preferred to call the “original expropriation” (often misleadingly termed “primitive accumulation”) whereby the producers were deprived of access and the commons were enclosed. Peasants and artisans mounted strong resistance over centuries but in the end a propertyless proletariat emerged in countryside and city in England and other countries where capitalism triumphed. Such struggles continue down to the present, however, as working people continue to challenge new forms of expropriation such as intellectual-property laws, private patents on seeds and other life forms, displacement of urban communities, extortion through petty fines and regressive taxation, and seizures of land and water for mining and other profitable purposes. This reading group will explore the historical roots and persistence of such crimes and resistance by reading together The War Against the Commons, by Ian Angus; Stop, Thief! by Peter Linebaugh; and related texts.
Facilitated by Fred Murphy and Steve Knight of the MEP’s Ecosocialist Study Group.

Chile's 9/11: Fifty Years of Literary Resistance
2023-09-28 19:00 - 21:00, 2023-10-05 19:00 - 21:00, 2023-10-12 19:00 - 21:00, 2023-10-19 19:00 - 21:00, 2023-10-26 19:00 - 21:00, 2023-11-02 19:00 - 21:00, 2023-11-09 19:00 - 21:00 | Online Event – Zoom Meeting
September 2023 marks fifty years since the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s socialist government on September 11, 1973. To honor the struggles and sufferings of the Chilean people, the MEP’s Literature Group dedicates two eight-week series to Chilean writers active before, during, and since the Pinochet dictatorship. In addition to the justly well-known writings of Roberto Bolaño, many of our readings will be from translations by Megan McDowell. McDowell has worked with US and British independent publishers to promote a diverse group of writers largely unfamiliar to American audiences. Our aim, to quote McDowell, is “to expand our circles of empathy.”
Full book descriptions and a reading schedule are available here.
Convened by Jacqueline Cantwell, who became involved with the MEP’s Literature Group because of her love of Victor Serge’s novels. Participating in an MEP reading group led by Serge translator Richard Greeman seven years ago, Jacqueline found a community of readers eager to be challenged by the ambitions of international writers devoted to the creative potential of political fiction. Since the death of Michael Lardner, who hosted and organized the Literature Group for so many years, she has taken the lead in furthering the group’s goals of exploring international fiction and encouraging thoughtful conversation.

Annual Pass
2023-10-06, 2023-11-03
This pass entitles the purchaser to attend any or all Marxist Education Project classes and events during an entire year from the month of purchase. (For example, a pass purchased on January 7, 2023, will be valid until January 31, 2024.)

What Do We Need Bosses For? with Pete Dolack
2023-10-21 14:00 - 16:00 | Online Event – Zoom Meeting
Propaganda endlessly blares, “There is no alternative” to capitalism. But there is always an alternative. Humanity need not be condemned to sit by helplessly as an uncontrollable economic and political system spanning the world brings us devastating inequality, precarious jobs, environmental destruction, and life-threatening global warming. Pete Dolack’s latest book, What Do We Need Bosses For?: Toward Economic Democracy, analyzes past and present efforts to establish systems of economic democracy on a national or society-wide basis. In this context the book dissects the mounting inequalities of capitalism and discusses theoretical ideas as to how we might organize a better world.
Working people have repeatedly sought to create such a world. They have organized to reverse their subordinate positions in capitalist production and take charge of their working lives and their workplaces through egalitarian movements. Political democracy is impossible without economic democracy. Economic democracy, in turn, is impossible under capitalism. As ever more people realize the present world system offers them nothing but more hardship, movements to create a better world inevitably will rise again.
Alternatives discussed in the book include workers’ self-management in Yugoslavia, workers’ control in Czechoslovakia, the social-property area of Allende-era Chile, the democratic confederalism of Rojava, the cooperatives of Cuba and the communes of Venezuela, with brief discussions of a few other examples, including co-management in Tanzania, Chinese industrial cooperatives and British work-ins.
In addition to What Do We Need Bosses For?, Pete Dolack is also the author of It’s Not Over: Learning From the Socialist Experiment, a book examining the 20th century’s socialist experiments so we can do it better in the 21st century. He publishes on various websites, including CounterPunch, ZNet, The Ecologist, Dandelion Salad and his own Systemic Disorder blog. As an activist, Pete has participated in efforts around human rights, environmental, trade and social issues, among them the No Spray Coalition, the Brooklyn Greens, New Yorkers Against Fascism, Amnesty International and, most recently, Trade Justice New York Metro.
