Marxist Education Project

LA Is Burning with Dennis Broe
2025-02-15 14:00 - 15:30 (America/New_York) | Recording available on YouTube
A recording of this February 15, 2025, event is available on our YouTube channel.
Politicians are blaming the destruction and loss of life in the Los Angeles wildfires on each other, but the truth is the fires are the result of not even years or decades but centuries of neglect. Dennis Broe examines this history and sheds light on the ingrained power, the structural class and racial imbalances, and the wanton devastation of a city organized not for its people but for its elites. Using Mike Davis’s classic Ecology of Fear as a blueprint, Broe will put the still smoldering fires in context by looking at five areas: the geological long durée of a land of fires, earthquakes, tornados and mudslides; the ecological relationship of the fires to ever more intense global warming; the neoliberal moment of the deterioration of the state in its domestic and global dimensions; the region’s sedimented class and racial inequalities (exemplified by the recently devastated African-American community of Altadena); and the altered character of Los Angeles–and especially “Hollywood”–as no longer simply a site of imagined disasters but one that is now all too real.
Dennis Broe, a journalist, critic and scholar who has taught at the Sorbonne and spoken at many MEP events, is the author of many books on film noir, media, and television, including five novels set in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 50s, the latest of which is The Dark Ages, about the coming of McCarthyism to Hollywood.

Bertolt Brecht's Anti-Capitalist Aesthetics
2025-02-22 14:00 - 15:30 | Recording available on YouTube
A video of this February 22, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.
Presenting Bertolt Brecht’s Adaptations and Anti-capitalist Aesthetics Today, a new book by Anthony Squiers. The author will provide an overview of Brecht’s revolutionary Marxist aesthetic and examine its usefulness as a weapon in today’s struggles.
Squiers’s book, published by Brill, examines Brecht’s theory and method of adaptation, using four key Brechtian concepts: Fabel, gestus, estrangement effects, and historicizing. Using that framework, it analyzes four Brechtian adaptations: The Tutor, Don Juan, “Socrates Wounded,” and Kriegsfibel, concluding that Brecht is useful for anti-capitalist aesthetics today because through him one can foster a new consciousness which enables the creation of better social conditions. The book is of value to theatrical practitioners, artists, and theorists.
Anthony Squiers is a faculty member at AMDA College of the Performing Arts and co-editor of E-CIBS, the performance journal of the International Brecht Society. He is author of An Introduction to the Social and Political Philosophy of Bertolt Brecht.

Literature of Burundi – A poorly reported conflict
2025-02-27 19:00 - 21:00
Thursdays in February, Starting February 6, at 7:00 pm US ET
In February, the Literature Reading Group will leave countries with extensive literature translated into English for Burundi, an East African nation considered the poorest country in the world. Burundi has had only two novels translated into English. Both novels take as a backdrop the country’s history of tribal conflict between Tutsi and Hutu in the lives of two young boys.
February 6 – Baho! A Novel by Roland Rugero (Author), Christopher Schaefer (Translator). 91 pages When Nyamuragi, an adolescent mute, attempts to ask a young woman in rural Burundi for directions to an appropriate place to relieve himself, his gestures are mistaken as premeditation for rape. To the young woman’s community, his fleeing confirms his guilt, setting off a chain reaction of pursuit, mob justice, and Nyamuragi’s attempts at explanation. Young Burundian novelist Roland Rugero’s second novel Baho!, the first Burundian novel to ever be translated into English, explores the concepts of miscommunication and justice against the backdrop of war-torn Burundi’s beautiful green hillsides.
February 13 and 20 – Small Country by Gaël Faye (Author) 2019 192 pages, Burundi, 1992. For ten-year-old Gabriel, life in his comfortable expatriate neighborhood of
Bujumbura with his French father, Rwandan mother and little sister Ana, is something close to paradise.
These are carefree days of laughter and adventure – sneaking Supermatch cigarettes and gorging on stolen mangoes – as he and his mischievous gang of friends transform their tiny cul-de-sac into their kingdom.
But dark clouds are gathering over this small country, and soon their peaceful existence will shatter when Burundi, and neighboring Rwanda, are brutally hit by civil war and genocide.
A novel of extraordinary power and beauty, Small Country describes an end of innocence as seen through the eyes of a child caught in the maelstrom of history. Shot through with shadows and light, tragedy and humor, it is a stirring tribute not only to a dark chapter in Africa’s past, but also to the bright days that preceded it.
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, Jacqueline has taken the lead in furthering the group’s goals of exploring international fiction and encouraging thoughtful conversation.

Reading Science Fiction Politically: In Ascension
2025-03-17 17:00 - 18:30 | Online Event – Zoom Meeting
March 17, Mondays, new season continuing every other Monday at 5:00 pm US ET
The long-running Science and Visionary Fiction book group next reads In Ascension by Martin MacInnes. Set against looming climate disaster, MacInnes’s powerful story moves from the still-unexplored vastness of the ocean to the beckoning vastness of interstellar space. For politically-oriented fiction readers, MacInnes provokes discussion of how social relations and contradictions shape and distort scientific discovery and research. The novel explores these themes from the vantage point of richly-drawn Dutch marine scientist Leigh Hasenbosch.
Join us March 3 for lively discussion on this 2024 Arthur C Clarke Award winner for 2024, also long-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize. In Ascension offers a powerful opportunity for introspection and intentionality as we all explore our relationship to and our agency in the ongoing crisis around us.
We read this and all our selections mindful of our book group’s overall commitment, To build a better future, we have to envision it first (adapted from Walidah Imarisha). Reading science, speculative and visionary fiction, discussing it together, and reading it politically, offers one tool for envisioning a future worth building. This spring, we will continue our explorations of diverse points of view of social conflict and resolution, possible and imagined just worlds, here on Earth and perhaps afar.
Whether you have always read science fiction or never given it a second thought, consider spending a season with the MEP Science and Visionary Fiction book group.
And help us choose our spring list, from among these and other titles under consideration:

NK Jemisin, The Stone Sky
Paul Lynch, Prophet Song (2023 Booker Prize)
Cory Doctorow, the lost cause
Annalee Newitz, The Terraformers
NNedi Okorafor, Death of the Author
Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

'Citizen Marx' with author Bruno Leipold
2025-03-26 18:00 - 20:30 | Recording available on YouTube
A video of this March 26, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.
As some of the most powerful capitalists in history are openly disavowing political democracy and calling for the unbridled rule of private wealth, now is a good time to revisit Karl Marx’s revolutionary republicanism and his ideas about political power and social classes. In his recently published Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought, Bruno Leipold argues that Karl Marx’s thinking was deeply informed by republicanism. Challenging common depictions of Marx that downplay or ignore his commitment to politics, democracy, and freedom, Leipold shows that Marx viewed democratic political institutions as crucial to overcoming the social unfreedom and domination of capitalism.
Placing Marx’s republican communism in its historical context—but not consigning him to that context—Leipold traces Marx’s shifting relationship to republicanism across three broad periods. First, Marx began his political life as a republican committed to a democratic republic in which citizens held active popular sovereignty. Second, he transitioned to communism, criticizing republicanism but incorporating the republican opposition to arbitrary power into his social critiques. He argued that although a democratic republic was not sufficient for emancipation, it was necessary for it. Third, spurred by the events of the Paris Commune of 1871, he came to view popular control in representation and public administration as essential to the realization of communism. Leipold shows how Marx positioned his republican communism to displace both antipolitical socialism and anticommunist republicanism. One of Marx’s great contributions, Leipold suggests, was to place politics (and especially democratic politics) at the heart of socialism.
Bruno Leipold is a fellow in political theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
He is the coeditor of Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage.

'The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads' with author Kevin Anderson
2025-03-29 14:00 - 15:30 | Recording available on YouTube
A video of this March 29, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.
Kevin B. Anderson presents his newly published book, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads, based on systematic analysis of Karl Marx’s “Ethnological Notebooks” and related Marx texts from his final years, 1869-1883.
In these writings, Marx traveled beyond the boundaries of capital and class in the Western European and North American contexts, turning his attention to colonialism, agrarian Russia and India, Indigenous societies, and gender. Anderson’s book focuses on how the late Marx sees a wider revolution that included the European proletariat but would be touched off by revolts by oppressed ethno-racial groups, peasant communes, and Indigenous communist groups, in many of which women held great social power. As Anderson shows, the late Marx elaborated a truly global, multilinear theory of modern society and its revolutionary possibilities that continues to speak to us today.
The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism is available from Verso and from other online booksellers.
Kevin B. Anderson teaches at University of California, Santa Barbara. He has been a scholar-activist since the 1970s, working in social and political theory, especially Marx, Hegel, Lenin, Luxemburg, Marxist humanism, and the Frankfurt School. Among his numerous books are Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism (1995), Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (with Janet Afary, 2005), and Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies (2010/2016). He is is the coeditor, with Peter Hudis, of the Rosa Luxemburg Reader. He writes regularly for New Politics, The International Marxist-Humanist, LA Progressive, and Jacobin.

State of Emergency in US Higher Education
2025-04-12 14:00 - 16:00 | Recording available on YouTube
A video of this April 12, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.
Alan Wald presents an overview of the state of emergency in higher education in the United States that recalls earlier eras of extreme political repression, such as McCarthyism in the 1950s. Students, faculty, and staff at US colleges and universities who stand up for Palestinian human rights and stopping the genocide in Gaza are being punished by the administrations, and in some cases – such as Mahmoud Khalil – threatened with deportation. They are charged with being antisemitic, even though the movement is antiracist and a sizable fraction of the protesters are themselves Jewish. This campaign is being used as a smokescreen to dismantle programs in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and set Jews against other minorities. Students, faculty, and staff are facing deportation, arrest, suspension, termination, and other draconian measures that undermine both civil liberties and academic freedom.
Alan Wald is active in this controversy as it plays out at the University of Michigan (U-M), through his membership in the U-M Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, and nationally, as a member of the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace. He is the H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus of English Literature and American Culture at U-M, and formerly director of the U-M Department of American Culture. His academic specialty is the US Literary Left, about which he has authored nine books, and he is an editor of the journals Against the Current and Science & Society.

Trump, the State, and Global Capital
2025-04-19 14:00 - 16:00 | Recording available on YouTube
A video of this April 19, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.
A conversation with Steve Maher and Clara Mattei
In the early weeks of the Trump administration in the United States we have seen on-again, off-again tariffs, bluster against longstanding allies and friendly approaches to erstwhile foes, alarming threats to civil liberties and press freedom, accelerating deportations of immigrant workers, mass firings and layoffs of Federal employees, dismantling of key Federal agencies, and indifference toward threats of measles and bird-flu epidemics – and that’s only a partial list. Looking at all this through a Marxist lens presents a major challenge, but who better to meet it than Steve Maher and Clara Mattei, whose historical analyses of finance capital and the capitalist state have garnered well-deserved praise. Join us as we engage Steve and Clara in an open-ended conversation aimed at bringing some clarity to the burgeoning chaos that is shaking up U.S. and global capitalism and the imperialist state system.
Stephen Maher is Assistant Professor of Economics at SUNY Cortland, and Co-Editor of the Socialist Register. With Scott Aquanno he is the co-author of The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to Blackrock. Steve also authored Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power.
Clara E. Mattei is the author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. She is Professor of Economics and Director of the recently inaugurated Center for Heterodox Economics (CHE) at The University of Tulsa. She previously taught at the The New School for Social Research and was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies.

Marx's Capital Volume 1: A Short Course for Today
2025-04-26 16:00 - 18:00 | Online Event – Zoom Meeting
A 12-session study group, February 1 – April 26

Have you always wanted to study Marx’s Capital, Vol 1, and hesitated because of the time commitment to read the entire volume from start to finish? Join us for a 12-week study group covering key sections of the book.
Experienced Capital study leader Lisa Maya Knauer will facilitate as we explore the relevance of Marx’s analysis to our current context. While we will go over the assigned material each week, participants will read the material on their own in advance. This reading group is open to both Capital newbies and those who have read it previously but want a refresher.

Lisa Maya Knauer, our facilitator, 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.
This group is approaching completion – please email info@marxedproject.org if you still wish to join.

60 Years Since the April Revolution in Santo Domingo
2025-05-03 14:00 - 16:00 | Online Event – Zoom Meeting
Sixty years ago, on April 24, 1965, tens of thousands of ordinary people in Santo Domingo (also known as the Dominican Republic) joined a popular revolt which sought to restore President Juan Bosch to power after he was overthrown in a US-backed, right-wing military coup in September, 1963. Posing a threat to both local elites and Washington’s geopolitical expansion in the Caribbean, the April Revolution, and the subsequent anti-imperialist resistance that sprang up against US military occupation, contributed to the development of anti-imperialist politics in Santo Domingo and beyond.
Join us on May 3 for a panel to commemorate the 6oth anniversary of the April Revolution and discuss its political implications, the role of working-class Afro-Dominicans, women, LGBTQ people, Haitian internationalist fighters, socialists, writers and artists, as well as the worldwide international solidarity movement that ensued in the face of imperialist onslaught.
Génesis Lara is a scholar of Caribbean and Afro-Latinx Studies. Raised in both the Bronx and Miami, her research focuses on gender, Blackness, social movements, human rights, and diaspora world making. She explores the ways Afro-Caribbean women mobilized grief and mourning as ways to contest state violence in the twentieth century. Her work poses larger questions of ways Black people have conceived and fought for human rights. Génesis Lara completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Florida and her PhD at the University of California, Davis.
Gina Goico is a multidisciplinary artist, scholar, and self-proclaimed necia. Goico navigates their identity and the spaces where they exist in the Dominican Republic and the United States through their work, which ranges from embroidery to installations, ink drawings, and performances. Goico’s research focuses on how the aesthetics, performances, and organizing of self-identifying black Dominican artists and organizers operate as strategies that queer state-circulated identity in the Dominican Republic and its New York City diaspora. Goico was a Van Lier Fellow and artist in residence with Smack Mellon. They also participated in the AIM fellowship at The Bronx Museum of the Arts and were artist-in-residence at The Laundromat Project Kelly Street. Goico holds an AAS in Fine Arts and Illustration from Altos de Chavón and a BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design. They also have an MA in Arts Politics from NYU and are PhD candidate in Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University.
Amaury Rodriguez has been involved in Haitian-Dominican solidarity activism for more than two decades. His writing has appeared in NACLA, El Salto, Esendom and Jacobin. He is co-editor, with Raj Chetty, of a special issue of The Black Scholar journal dedicated to Dominican Black Studies.
Matías Bosch Carcuro studied Environmental Sciences and Arts at the Central University of Chile. He has a MA in Social Sciences with a minor in Politics and a MA in Public Management and Policy from the University of Chile. He is also a University professor and researcher on political economy, labor, development models, social rights, social protection and security systems, as well as state policies targeting discriminated and overexploited working people.

Karl Marx and Republicanism: Reading 'Citizen Marx'
2025-05-07 18:00 - 19:30 | Online Event – Zoom Meeting
“… It is still not adequately appreciated that Marx’s principal political value was freedom,
rather than, say, equality or community.” Bruno Leipold, Citizen Marx
A five-session reading group
What better time than the present moment to revisit Karl Marx’s commitment to the democratic republic as a necessary (if not sufficient) step on the path to human freedom? Over five weekly meetings we will read and discuss Bruno Leipold’s recently published Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought. As some of the most powerful capitalists in history are openly disavowing political democracy and calling for the unbridled rule of private wealth, we revisit Karl Marx’s revolutionary republicanism and his ideas about political power and social classes.
Convened by David Worley, a member of the executive committee of the Marxist Education Project and a longtime associate of the Brecht Forum, where he served a term as co-chair of the Board of Directors. David is a nonsectarian socialist, active since the 1960s in support of a wide range of peace and social justice causes.

Exploring the Literature of Afro-Surrealism
2025-05-08 19:00 - 21:00
Thursdays, 7-9 pm ET, beginning April 24
This spring, the MEP Literature Reading Group takes up novels loosely grouped as “Afro-Surrealism.” Borrowing from use by Amiri Baraka in the 1970s, D. Scot Miller encouraged use of the term through his 2009 essay, “Afrosurreal Manifesto.” Writers and artists in the African diaspora have now reclaimed the imaginative, wondrous, and contradictory aspects of Black life and artistic expression from the belittling slights of Western surrealists. We will read three novels contributing to this revival:

Tram 83, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, on April 24 and May 1
Oreo, by Fran Ross, on May 8 and 22
Ready to Burst, by Frankétienne, May 29 and June 5

Convened by Jacqueline Cantwell and the MEP Literature Reading Group. Jacqueline Cantwell 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 eight 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, Jacqueline has taken the lead in furthering the group’s goals of exploring international fiction and encouraging thoughtful conversation.
The image used here accompanied the Fall 2013 publication of Miller’s essay in Black Camera, based on artist and creative Sherese Francis’ 2012 illustration for Miller’s essay on Francis’ blog, futuristically ancient.

Reading 'Human Acts' by Han Kang
2025-05-15 19:00 - 20:30
Thursday, May 15 – 7 pm ET
MEP’s Literature Reading Group will commemorate the 1980 South Korean pro-democracy uprising with a reading of Han Kang’s Human Acts.
On May 18, 1980, the citizens of Gwangju, South Korea rose up in a ten-day revolt against the imposition of martial law. Factory workers, university and high school students, and ordinary citizens ran the city. On May 27, the South Korean army brutally put down “The Gwangju Commune” in a series of massacres and tortures.
Han Kang took as her theme the army’s devastating brutalities against survivors who had longed for justice. The book narrates in restrained and precise language the harrowing aftereffects of bodily violation and grief on survivors.
In 2024, the Nobel Prize committee honored Han Kang for literature, and, to honor her and the Korean Democratic Movement, join us to read this powerful and controversial novel together.
Convened by Jacqueline Cantwell and the MEP Literature Reading Group. Jacqueline Cantwell 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 eight 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, Jacqueline has taken the lead in furthering the group’s goals of exploring international fiction and encouraging thoughtful conversation.

'Roses for Gramsci' with Andy Merrifield
2025-05-17 14:00 - 16:00 | Recording available on YouTube
A video of this May 17, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.
Author Andy Merrifield presents Roses for Gramsci, a remarkable personal journey through the life and writings of the great Sardinian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci.
In the summer of 2023, Merrifield and his family move from the UK to Rome to begin a new life. Soon after his arrival, the author visits Gramsci’s grave and decides to take a volunteer position helping to maintain the cemetery. At the Non-Catholic Cemetery, home also to the great Romantics, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, he keeps a watchful eye on Gramsci’s tombstone, talking to some of his visitors, admiring the roses and notes that Gramsci’s guests leave, and communing with the sentinel cat that keeps watch near the gravesite. Thus begins Merrifield’s deep dive into Gramsci’s life almost a century after his death.
The result is a stunning portrait that offers fresh insights into nearly every aspect of Gramsci’s often tortured existence: a childhood scarred by severe health problems; his grasp of the culture of workers and peasants; his growing understanding of political economy; his friendship with the economist Piero Sraffa; his frustration trying to communicate with and be father to the son he never saw; his generosity and kindness. Above all, Merrifield illuminates how Gramsci kept his humanity, suffering horribly in prison while writing a revolutionary classic, The Prison Notebooks. Personal, compassionate, moving—and illustrated with the author’s photographs —Merrifield revives both the legacy and meaning of Gramsci’s work and the dying art of belles lettres. Roses for Gramsci is an evocative and indelible book.
Andy Merrifield is an independent scholar and author of a dozen books including, most recently, Beyond Plague Urbanism and Marx, Dead and Alive: Reading “Capital” in Precarious Times. He has written numerous articles, essays and reviews appearing in Monthly Review, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, New Left Review, The Guardian, Literary Hub, Jacobin, and Dissent. He is a prolific writer about urbanism, political theory and literature.

Darkest Los Angeles
2025-05-23 19:00 - 20:30 | Institute for the Radical Imagination, NY, United States
Film Noir, Greed, and Corporate Graft in LaLa Land
A five-session reading group with novelist and scholar Dennis Broe, presented by the Institute for the Radical Imagination and co-sponsored by the MEP, LA Progressive and People’s World
Orson Welles once called Los Angeles “a bright, guilty place,” and that is as true today as it was in the 1940s when Welles coined this description. Dennis Broe leads a group reading of his five Los Angeles novels* set in the film-noir period of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The contradictions we will unearth in that postwar period, the period of crime films that visually documented this seedy reality, have never been resolved, only continually papered over, and so they resound today. We will look at five industries and moments in this period with a view toward explaining how the postwar period set the tone for what was to follow, leading to the present era of a vast income disparity and frequent “natural,” though totally avoidable, disasters.
*The novels – Left of Eden, A Hello to Arms, The Precinct with the Golden Arm, The House That Buff Built, and The Dark Ages – are detailed in this syllabus. They are available from various online booksellers.
Dennis Broe is a professor, journalist and novelist whose books include: Film Noir, American Workers and Postwar Hollywood; Class, Crime and International Film Noir: Globalizing America’s Dark Art; and Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception. He has taught at The Sorbonne and is the Parisian correspondent for Arts Express on The Pacifica Network. Dennis also writes for LA Progressive, People’s World, Crime Time, Culture Matters, the British daily Morning Star and Monthly Review Online. His series of five novels is continuing with his latest, Pornocopia, about the corporate takeover of Las Vegas and the porn industry. Dennis has also just launched a new podcast, Culture and Barbarism, with Toby Miller.
Register for this class series at the Institute for the Radical Imagination

Through the Lens of Spectacle: Panel 1, Oversight
2025-06-15 14:00 - 16:00 | Recording available on YouTube
Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture
A video of this June 15, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.
“The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep,” Guy Debord declared in The Society of the Spectacle (1967): it is “a permanent opium war.” A half-century later, the specter of the spectacle continues to haunt Marxist cultural studies. Do we still sleep in Debord’s spectacle, a world of images, infinitely consumable and reproducible, devoid of meaning outside the hollow, homogenous temporality of the commodity? Or have we entered an age where the audience is more appropriately conceived, not as isolated onlookers, but as a network of users–with unprecedented access to digital information while subjected to pervasive forms of control and surveillance? Does “a critical theory of the spectacle” still allow us to make sense of shared sensorial flashpoints, past and present? And what does it mean to be a spectator–to regard, to look, to witness? In two linked panels, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture proposes to track “the worldwide division of spectacular tasks” from lens manufacture to retail logistics, stadiums to camptowns, polar expeditions to spring festivals, as well as revolutionary specters in novels and borders, assassinations and squares.
The first panel, “Oversight,” considers the dual meanings of oversight: as surveillance – “watching over” – and as that which is missed – “overlooked.” In “That Superficial, Theatric Sense,” Suvij Sudershan opens by exploring the resonances of spectacle and speculation in reflections on revolutions from Edmund Burke to Lukács. In “Roving Eyes: The Stereoscopic Vision of War,” Jane Zhang examines the production and marketing of optical lens to offer an alternative history of stereoscopic vision. In a pre-history of our contemporary era of Amazon last-mile delivery and e-commerce, “From Errand to Spectacle,” Sofia Cutler follows the delivery drivers who serviced elite white women shopping at early 20th-century department stores to show how their labor transformed shopping. In “Vita Contemplativa: Beijing Coma and China’s Modern Constitution,” Henry Zhang explores Ma Jian’s anatomy of the student movement and its aftermath. In “Arenas of Conflict” Jess Cruz traces the unexpected uses of Miami’s stadiums and their links to the city’s multigenerational devotion to anti-communism and transnational right-wing politics.
The Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture is an interdisciplinary cultural studies research collective that has been practicing at Yale University since 2003. Over the years, we have presented our work at the Left Forum, Historical Materialism, the Marxist Education Project, Occupy Boston, and the World Social Forum. Past projects have appeared as “Going into Debt,” online in Social Text‘s Periscope, and as “Spaces and Times of Occupation” in Transforming Anthropology; a collective interview regarding “Matters of Life and Death” was published in Revue Française d’Études Américaines. Our current members are: Damanpreet Pelia (doctoral researcher in American Studies; research interests include religion, sovereignty, and empire); Henry Zhang (doctoral researcher in English; research focuses on the aesthetics of post-war memory and post-socialist transition in East Asia and its diaspora during the long cold war); Jane Zhang (doctoral researcher in Comparative Literature and Film & Media Studies; research focuses on the intersecting history of medicine, consumer culture, and notions of selfhood); Javier Porras Madero (doctoral researcher in Latin American history; research focuses on revolution and border formation); Jess Cruz (doctoral researcher in History; research focuses on the history of Miami, Florida as a center for the Latin American Right across the 1980s-1990s); Madeleine Han (doctoral researcher in American Studies; research focuses on US militarism, cold war cultures, and overlapping imperialisms in Asia); Michael Denning (professor of American Studies; research focuses on labor, critical theory, and social movements); Morgan E. Freeman (doctoral researcher in American Studies; her research focuses on the contemporary art and visual cultures of Black and Native practitioners as it relates to belonging and place specificity); Sofia Cutler (doctoral researcher in American Studies; research traces the cultural and political history of last-mile delivery–or the last-leg of a product’s long journey across supply chains to a customer’s front door; and Suvij Sudershan (doctoral researcher in English and Film; research focuses on 19th and 20th century global anglophone, francophone, and South Asian vernacular literature, the development of the novel, ideas of realism and modernism, and the depiction of peasant revolt and rural modernization).

Through the Lens of Spectacle: Panel 2, Witness
2025-06-21 14:00 - 16:00 | Recording available on YouTube
Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture
A video of this June 21, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.
“The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep,” Guy Debord declared in The Society of the Spectacle (1967): it is “a permanent opium war.” A half-century later, the specter of the spectacle continues to haunt Marxist cultural studies. Do we still sleep in Debord’s spectacle, a world of images, infinitely consumable and reproducible, devoid of meaning outside the hollow, homogenous temporality of the commodity? Or have we entered an age where the audience is more appropriately conceived, not as isolated onlookers, but as a network of users–with unprecedented access to digital information while subjected to pervasive forms of control and surveillance? Does “a critical theory of the spectacle” still allow us to make sense of shared sensorial flashpoints, past and present? And what does it mean to be a spectator–to regard, to look, to witness? In two linked panels, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture proposes to track “the worldwide division of spectacular tasks” from lens manufacture to retail logistics, stadiums to camptowns, polar expeditions to spring festivals, as well as revolutionary specters in novels and borders, assassinations and squares.
The second panel, “Witness,” asks how various spectral presences–of memory, rebellion, interiority, history–demand us to account for spectacle’s reversals, negations, and reenactments in mass protests and counter-spectacles. Is the society of the spectacle necessarily also one of bearing witness? In “Delineating Specters,” Javier Porras Madero considers how the conjuration and nationalization of specters deepened the contradictions of border formation in the decades following the Mexican Revolution. In “Spectacles of Sympathy,” Morgan E. Freeman analyzes human interest stories produced in the age of polar exploration to consider this genre as a vehicle for mythologies of the bourgeoisie. In “Spectacular Reversal,” Damanpreet Pelia reflects on the spectacle of political violence by tracking the spectral presence of the bāz (from the Persian for hawk) in the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by Satwant Singh and Beant Singh in 1984. In “The Spectacle of the Mass Demonstration,” Michael Denning reflects on Marx’s account of mass demonstrations and universal suffrage in the wake of a decade of occupations: citizens in the streets and elected populists as the religion of everyday life. In “Detouring the US Military Camptown,” Madeleine Han explores tourism as memory work toward remembering the US military’s legacy and ongoing occupation of Korea.
The Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture is an interdisciplinary cultural studies research collective that has been practicing at Yale University since 2003. Over the years, we have presented our work at the Left Forum, Historical Materialism, the Marxist Education Project, Occupy Boston, and the World Social Forum. Past projects have appeared as “Going into Debt,” online in Social Text‘s Periscope, and as “Spaces and Times of Occupation” in Transforming Anthropology; a collective interview regarding “Matters of Life and Death” was published in Revue Française d’Études Américaines. Our current members are: Damanpreet Pelia (doctoral researcher in American Studies; research interests include religion, sovereignty, and empire); Henry Zhang (doctoral researcher in English; research focuses on the aesthetics of post-war memory and post-socialist transition in East Asia and its diaspora during the long cold war); Jane Zhang (doctoral researcher in Comparative Literature and Film & Media Studies; research focuses on the intersecting history of medicine, consumer culture, and notions of selfhood); Javier Porras Madero (doctoral researcher in Latin American history; research focuses on revolution and border formation); Jess Cruz (doctoral researcher in History; research focuses on the history of Miami, Florida as a center for the Latin American Right across the 1980s-1990s); Madeleine Han (doctoral researcher in American Studies; research focuses on US militarism, cold war cultures, and overlapping imperialisms in Asia); Michael Denning (professor of American Studies; research focuses on labor, critical theory, and social movements); Morgan E. Freeman (doctoral researcher in American Studies; her research focuses on the contemporary art and visual cultures of Black and Native practitioners as it relates to belonging and place specificity); Sofia Cutler (doctoral researcher in American Studies; research traces the cultural and political history of last-mile delivery–or the last-leg of a product’s long journey across supply chains to a customer’s front door; and Suvij Sudershan (doctoral researcher in English and Film; research focuses on 19th and 20th century global anglophone, francophone, and South Asian vernacular literature, the development of the novel, ideas of realism and modernism, and the depiction of peasant revolt and rural modernization).

Literary Echoes of Vietnam's 1975 Victory
2025-06-26 19:00 - 20:30 | Online Event – Zoom Meeting
While the bombs were falling, only a stone wouldn’t be terrified. If the Americans noticed movement in the forest, they would eliminate the forest. Who knows how much money was spent? American taxpayers’ money. If a cluster of napalm bombs were dropped, the jungle would turn into a sea of fire. Can you imagine a sea of fire? –Bao Ninh
Join with the MEP Literature Group to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1975 fall of Saigon, bringing an end to the Vietnam War. This month, we will read two volumes by Bao Ninh–The Sorrow of War and Hà Nôi at Midnight.
Born in October 1952, Bao Ninh experienced the effects of US bombing while growing up and later joined the “Glorious 27th Youth Brigade” at the age of 17. Bao Ninh’s writing offers restrained, poignant, yet powerful accounts of the “sorrow of war,” the losses and grief of a generation who fought to unify the country.
Convened by Jacqueline Cantwell and the MEP Literature Reading Group. Jacqueline Cantwell 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 eight 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, Jacqueline has taken the lead in furthering the group’s goals of exploring international fiction and encouraging thoughtful conversation.
(Bao Ninh quote from Ken Burns’ series The Vietnam War)

Trotsky in New York Walking Tour
2025-06-28 15:00 - 17:00
Socialists and Immigrants in the Lower East Side
Join Alex Steinberg and Daniel Lazare for a historical walking tour of Lower Manhattan as we explore some of the places where Leon Trotsky visited and worked during his nine week stay in New York in early 1917.
We will explore the culture of the radicalized immigrant communities of Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe as well as German, Russian, Italian and Greek immigrants. These communities supported a thriving socialist movement in New York. And in 1917, ferment and struggle increased dramatically as America entered World War I on April 6, 1917 and Russia’s revolutionary wave exploded a few months later.
After beginning at Cooper Union, we will walk to 77 St. Marks Place, which housed the offices of the Russian language newspaper Novy Mir and where Trotsky and other future Bolshevik leaders worked daily. From there, the tour will walk to the building of the Jewish Daily Forward in Seward Park, where we will learn of Trotsky’s dramatic confrontation with more conservative socialists. As we walk we will pass by a number of places that were important in understanding the history of the social struggles of immigrants in a New York very different than the city we know today.
Led by Alex Steinberg and Daniel Lazare. Alex is a frequent teacher of Marxist Education Project classes on the philosophy of Hegel and related topics. Daniel is is a journalist and author; his books include The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy.
Meet in front of the main entrance to The Great Hall of Cooper Union, behind the statue of Peter Cooper, East 7th Street between 3rd and 4th Avenues.

Aristotle, Hegel, Marx: A Philosophical Dialogue
2025-06-29 16:00 - 18:00 | Recording available on YouTube
A video of this June 29, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.
Join us for a dialogue on philosophical themes featuring two authors of forthcoming books from Stanford University Press. Michael Lazarus is the author of Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx, and Jensen Suther is the author of True Materialism: Hegelian Marxism and the Modernist Struggle for Freedom. Lazarus situates Marx within a shared tradition of ethical inquiry, placing him in close dialogue with Aristotle and Hegel. His book traces the ethical and political dimensions of Marx’s work missed by Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, two of the most profound critics of modern politics and ethics. Ultimately, the book claims that Marx’s value-form theory is both a continuation of Aristotelian and Hegelian themes and at the same time his most distinctive theoretical achievement. In True Materialism, Suther engages with three titans of literary modernism—Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Samuel Beckett—to pursue not only an account of Hegel’s materialism but also a new critique of capitalist modernity. Breaking with the received view of Marx’s relation to German Idealism, the book argues that the materialist critique of capitalist production is inseparable from Hegel’s idea that the demand for freedom is a demand for mutual recognition.
Michael Lazarus is a postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin University.
Jensen Suther received his PhD from Yale University and is currently a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Reading Death of the Author by Nigeria's Nnedi Okorafor
2025-06-30 17:00 - 18:30 | Online Event – Zoom Meeting
Next, Monday June 30, 5:00 pm
Africanfuturism is concerned with visions of the future, is interested in technology, leaves the earth, skews optimistic, is centered on and predominantly written by people of African descent (black people) and it is rooted first and foremost in Africa. It’s less concerned with “what could have been” and more concerned with “what is and can/will be”. It acknowledges, grapples with and carries “what has been.” —NNedi Okorafor
Dip into the growing realm of Africanfuturism reading NNedi Okorafor’s most recent novel, Death of the Author. Her science fiction successful and highly popular today, Okorafor here provides both an introduction to Nigerian science fiction for those that need it and a reflection on its cultural meaning for those who have read Binti, others from Okorfor, or other Nigerian- or African-inspired visionary and speculative fiction today.
Death of the Author centers on a Nigerian woman setting out to write science fiction, perhaps like Okorafor herself years and many novels back. The novel explores Zelu’s dilemmas and doubts, her relationship with family and community, the world of publishing in ways that may reflect Okorfor’s past. It also features a story within the story about intelligent robots in a futuristic African context. The two stories blend together in unusual and unexpected ways, and fit well with concerns of politically conscious readers of fiction and science fiction today.

July Book Selection: Severance, by Ling Ma.
Watch this page for more information.
For more than three years, the MEP Science and Visionary Fiction reading group has explored topics of oppression and resistance, history and science, capitalist and post-capitalist future, human and nonhuman intelligence. We read with an overall commitment, To build a better future, we have to envision it first (adapted from Walidah Imarisha). Reading science, speculative and visionary fiction, discussing it together, and reading it politically, offers one tool for envisioning a future worth building.
Give it a try for your summer reading: drop in, stay for a while, and contribute to lively, present day-centered discussions. Everyone has something to contribute, whether you read this sort of thing regularly or have hardly ever given it a second thought. Convened by Steve Backman

Book Talk: Brian Kwoba on Hubert Harrison
2025-07-01 19:00 - 20:30 | Recording available on YouTube
A video of this July 1, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.
Brian Kwoba speaks on his newly published book Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism and Harrison’s prominent role in the early Socialist Party, IWW, and Black radicalism during the 1910s and 20s. Brian’s visit forms part of our current study group on the Historical Roots of American Fascism.
The following excerpt from the Introduction to Kwoba’s book gives a taste of his new approach:
“In the face of the superexploitation of working people by the likes of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan—the capitalist robber barons of the Gilded Age—Harrison crystallized a secular Black revolutionary Socialist politics. In so doing, he theorized the role of anti-Black racial oppression in preventing the emancipation of the working class from the wage slavery of industrial capitalism.
In contrast to the Eurocentric mass media and education systems, Harrison’s spellbinding street-corner speaking, commitment to grassroots empowerment, fearless journalism, and encyclopedic knowledge allowed him to crystallize a new and revolutionary model—what some called the “Outdoor University”—for free urban Black emancipatory education. It stood in stark contrast to both the industrial education symbolized by Booker T. and Margaret Murray Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and the “higher” elite education of the colleges and universities that were inaccessible to the masses of Black people. Perched atop a sidewalk stepladder at 135th Street and Seventh Avenue and addressing audiences large enough to block traffic, Harrison spoke on subject matter ranging across such topics as African American art and popular culture, sociology, scientific racism, English literature, evolutionary biology, theological criticism, African history, macroeconomics, and global geopolitics. A. Philip Randolph aptly described this model of education as “one of the great intellectual forums in America.”
In the face of rampant racism in white society and President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to take the United States of America into World War I, Harrison helped crystallize Harlem’s political “New Negro” movement. Calling for voting rights for Black men and Black women, federal antilynching legislation, armed self-defense, and an end to Jim Crow racial oppression, Harrison’s Liberty League of Negro-Americans cohered a pan-African and people-centered movement for Black self-empowerment. By recruiting and training an unknown Jamaican immigrant by the name of Marcus Garvey, Harrison’s Liberty League catalyzed the emergence of the largest international organization of Black people in modern history.
Harrison spoke out about injustices taking place all over the globe. Standing against European colonialism and the predatory imperial powers of the world, Harrison crystallized a new form of radical internationalism in his groundbreaking theorization of the “Colored International.” As a revolutionary political alliance of colonized peoples in the Islamic world, India, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, the Colored International he envisioned would smash the giant triplets of capitalism, imperialism, and white racial domination.
In a city where white people put a Congolese man named Ota Benga on display in the Bronx Zoo, Harrison self-identified as an “untamed, untamable African” and crystallized a model of African consciousness for the Black diaspora based on his deep study of African history, culture, and politics.
After a childhood upbringing steeped in the Anglican Church, Harrison broke with Christianity and religion more generally. He would later emerge as the most prominent Black freethinker of his generation. As against the conservative dogmas of the church, Harrison crystallized—for a new generation—a Black agnosticism grounded in modern science, empirical evidence, and rational explanation over religious dogma. As a militant “truth seeker,” he demanded the taxation of church properties, an end to prayers in school and courtroom Bible oaths, and a complete separation of church and state.
In the face of federal government censorship, repression, and criminalization of sexuality—and widespread policing of sexual morality by the church—Harrison crystallized a Black free love politics. In that respect, he emerged among the earliest of Black voices advocating for legalizing access to contraception, offering public-facing courses in sex education, and explicitly advancing a conception of love based on variety and freedom from compulsory monogamy and the Puritanical sex-negativity of US culture and society.
As a result of crystallizing so many political breakthroughs, Harrison developed a kaleidoscopic radicalism that connected multiple worlds of counter-hegemonic knowledge. As Kirnon put it, “Harrison was the first Negro who boldly preached racialism and all forms of radicalism in New York. He preached them continuously and consistently. He was the first Negro whose radicalism was comprehensive enough to include racialism, science, politics, sociology and education in a thorough-going, scientific manner.”…
Scholars of a particular figure or organization are often ideologically partisan toward it and therefore less comfortable remembering—let alone actually engaging with—forceful internal critics like Harrison. As Harrison once observed, “Even savants are prone to forget that they do most of their thinking with their desires, beliefs, prejudices and subconscious urges, which they then proceed to rationalize.”23 This explains, in part, why those who are partial to one or another ideological framework that Harrison criticized have so often run from him—whether consciously or subconsciously—like a rich person avoiding a beggar. His legacy has been forbidden precisely because it forces us to rethink fundamentally what we think we know—about everything from poverty, war, and racism, to love, sex, and religion.
And this is precisely why it is so revealing to study Hubert Henry Harrison.
On the one hand, the most relevant historiographies—of Black Marxism, Black freethinkers, Garveyism, Black sexual liberation, and the New Negro “Renaissance”—have either marginalized or omitted him entirely. On the other hand, Harrison played a groundbreaking role in the crystallization of each of these formations. Therefore, putting him back into the picture opens multiple highly revealing angles of vision on the conjunctures both within and between them.
Recovering Harrison’s legacy requires us to: reexamine the history of Black people in relation to the Socialist and Communist Parties; recover a forgotten strand of Black class-conscious, anti-imperialist, “colored” internationalism; reframe the spatial and intellectual possibilities for Black liberatory education in light of Harlem’s “Outdoor University”; rethink the genealogy of the Black secular and freethinking traditions; reappraise the origins and pitfalls of the global Garvey movement; reinterrogate the mythology of the “Harlem Renaissance”; excavate an onyx crystalline layer in the historical geology of free love politics. In short, to reimagine the horizons of the Black radical tradition.”

Reading Science Fiction Politically: Severance by Ling Ma
2025-07-14 17:00 - 18:30 | Online Event – Zoom Meeting
Next, Monday July 14, 5:00 pm

Get started with the Science and Visionary Fiction book group with our July Book Selection: Severance, by Ling Ma. Severance combines two things. It offers a satirical, sardonic look at 21st century lives, loves and labor as experienced by Candace Chen. Candace has both the classic dilemmas of a first generation immigrant and the here and now reality of a millennial New Yorker setting out in today’s world.
Into this world comes Shen Fever, which brings an apocalypse not unlike what Covid 19 might have been. Ling Ma published the book in 2018, which makes its dystopian vision all the more remarkable. Candace winds up in a group of like minded would-be survivors and the tale unfolds.
The novel does offer a brisk pace yet we mostly read it for the author’s eyes and ears on our current dilemmas as we struggle to survive.

For more than three years, the MEP Science and Visionary Fiction reading group has explored topics of oppression and resistance, history and science, capitalist and post-capitalist future, human and nonhuman intelligence. We read with an overall commitment, To build a better future, we have to envision it first (adapted from Walidah Imarisha). Reading science, speculative and visionary fiction, discussing it together, and reading it politically, offers one tool for envisioning a future worth building.
Give it a try for your summer reading: drop in, stay for a while, and contribute to lively, present day-centered discussions. Everyone has something to contribute, whether you read this sort of thing regularly or have hardly ever given it a second thought. Convened by Steve Backman.

Hegel for Radicals: The Phenomenology of Spirit
2025-07-19 11:00 - 13:00 | Online Event – Zoom Meeting
The MEP’s recurring Hegel for Radicals series introduces what is living in Hegel for those who want to change the world. Over 16 Saturdays, beginning March 8, we will read and discuss one of the most influential books of all time, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This massive retelling of humanity defies traditional divisions between history, philosophy, comedy, and tragedy. As participants in Hegel’s Bacchanalian Revel we will step through such themes as

The Inverted World
The Dialectic of Master and Slave
The Cynical Bohemian
The Beautiful Soul
Freedom and Terror
Spirit Externalized as Nature and History
The Absolute

This journey provides a foundation for Hegel’s dialectic, which is in turn a key to Marx’s Capital.
We recommend the translation by A.V. Miller of the Phenomenology of Spirit, published by Oxford University Press and readily available as an inexpensive paperback.
Alex Steinberg is an independent scholar and lifelong socialist who has taught classes in Marxist philosophy, Hegel, the dialectics of nature, Heidegger, and Nietzsche at the New Space for Pluralistic Anti-Capitalist Education, The Brecht Forum, the Marxist Education Project, and other venues. Alex was a Conference Presenter at the First International Conference on Trotsky in Havana, Cuba. In addition to his scholarly activities Alex has been involved with the governance of WBAI radio, most recently as Chair of the Pacifica National Board from 2019 – 2021.
Registration for this study group is now closed.

Summer in France in the Shade of Noir
2025-08-28 19:00 - 21:00 | Online Event – Zoom Meeting
The MEP Literature Group continues its tradition of easy summer reading focusing on the noir genre. Our two selections are both set in France and both deal with corruption in high places by right-wing politicians and corporations who manipulate inept investigators of low social standing and morals.

Command Performance, by Jean Echenoz; translated by Mark Polizzotti (New York Review Books, 2020). A hapless unemployed flight attendant thinks he can solve his financial problems by becoming a private detective, but he ends up in the employ of a fractious right-wing political party. Things do not go well. Be prepared to discuss the entire book at our first session on August 6.
Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner (Scribners, 2024). Sadie Smith once worked as a government undercover operative within an environmental rights group. She got fired for entrapment and went to work in corporate espionage. Her summer assignment in France is to provoke an incident by an environmental rights group that will justify government action. Will Sadie’s honey trap tactics succeed? (August 13, 20, 24)

Convened by Jacqueline Cantwell and the MEP Literature Group. Jacqueline 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 eight 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, Jacqueline has taken the lead in furthering the group’s goals of exploring international fiction and encouraging thoughtful conversation.

'Fake Work' with Leigh Claire La Berge
2025-09-24 19:00 - 20:00 | Recording available on YouTube
A video of this September 24, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.
Using the most banal of office settings – corporate documentation – in the most extraordinary of circumstances – a looming Y2K apocalypse, Leigh Claire La Berge‘s newly published Fake Work offers not only a unique experience of alienated labor, but a novel type of Marxism: Marxist humor. The book recounts how a young white-collar worker discovers what capitalism is, what it does, and for whom. Described by the New York Times as a “memorable portrait of the mad hunger of corporate toil … superbly committed to its own beliefs — truthful, dryly funny and often subtly moving,” Fake Work is a story for anyone who has ever needed a job.
Leigh Claire La Berge is Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, and author of Fake Work, Marx for Cats, and Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art. She was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Free University of Berlin in 2021-2023.

Resisting Oppression: Reading Science Fiction Politically
2025-09-29 17:00 - 18:30 | Online Event – Zoom Meeting
Next on Monday September 29, 5:00 pm
We will begin Ryka Aoki’s, Light From Uncommon Stars, our third in a set of three novels of oppression and resistance perfect for times like these. We also read Woman on the Edge of Time and Rosewater, each featuring protagonists living and struggling on the margins of their societies. Each comes to envision a better world for themselves and their communities. Each draws on usual strengths, makes use of new technologies, and finds unusual allies.

Ryka Aoki’s In Light from Uncommon Stars, Katrina Nguyen, a runaway teen, trans violinist, finds her life entangled with world-famous violin teacher Shizuka Satomi and Lan Tran, retired starship captain, interstellar war refugee, mother of four, and California donut shop entrepreneur. All three address the complexity of technology in oppressive societies, alienation and true aliens, choice and unfreedom in contemporary capitalist social orders. This is a story for our challenging political and social times, a wild and fun read to challenge what it means to create political science fiction.
In Tade Thompson’s award-winning Rosewater, government agent and former thief Kaaro contends with social and class contradictions in contemporary Nigerian society, the government and alien powers for a positive, freer future for the city of Rosewater and beyond. The first-person novel features mesmerizing collages of scenes and conversations, mirroring perhaps the mysteries of the “Xenosphere” which frames the story. Join us to read this debut novel which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
Marge Piercy’s classic Woman on the Edge of Time tells the story of Connie, a working class Latina of the 1970s Los Angeles who envisions and pursues a utopian future from with involuntary institutionalization in the oppressive mental health system.

Book covers for current reading list
Written in different eras of our modern times, exploring different communities and peoples, and ultimately defining radical reimagining in unique ways, the three novels together will provide powerful reference points for our own dilemmas and choices.
Our format: we meet every other Monday; we give each monthly selection two takes; we all share responsibilities for shaping the discussion on each work as literature, each writer as a contributor to social change, and each vision as a reflection of and an intervention in our aspirations for a better world. Drop to read one novel that interests you with us, stay and while if it suits you, and always help shape our course. Our long term reading list.
Also watch for our next selection, Susana Morris’ new biography of Octavia Butler.
Convened by Steve Backman, reading visionary fiction since introduced to the liberating power of Alice in Wonderland and Jules Verne at a very young age.

The Politics of Collecting with Eunsong Kim
2025-10-11 14:00 - 15:30 | Online Event – Zoom Meeting
In her new book, The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property, Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms. Ranging from the conception of philanthropy devised by the robber barons of the late nineteenth century to ongoing digitization projects, Kim provides a new history of contemporary art that accounts for the complicated entanglement of race, capital, and labor behind storied art institutions and artists. Drawing on history, theory, and economics, Kim challenges received notions of artistic success and talent and calls for a new vision of art beyond the cultural institution.
Eunsong Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Northeastern University. Her practice spans literary studies, critical digital studies, poetics, translation, visual culture and critical race & ethnic studies. She is also the author of Gospel of Regicide (2017) and, with Sung Gi Kim, a translation of Kim Eon Hee’s poetic text Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days? (2019). In 2021 she co-founded the journal offshoot, an arts space for transnational activist conversations.

Karl Marx in America with Andrew Hartman
2025-10-26 14:00 - 16:00 | Recording available on YouTube
A video of this October 26, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.
Historian Andrew Hartman introduces his new book, Karl Marx in America. To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine. Marx is rarely considered alongside these figures, yet his ideas are the most relevant today because of capitalism’s centrality to American life. Karl Marx in America argues that even though Marx never visited America, the country has been infused, shaped, and transformed by him.
Andrew Hartman is professor of history at Illinois State University. He is the author of Karl Marx in America (2025) and A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (2015), both published by the University of Chicago Press, and Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (2008). He is also the coeditor of American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times (2018). Hartman has been published in a host of academic and popular venues, including the Washington Post, The Baffler, Chronicle of Higher Education, American Historian, Journal of American Studies, Reviews in American History, Journal of Policy History, Salon, Jacobin, Bookforum, and In These Times.

Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary, with Mitchell Abidor
2025-11-01 14:00 - 15:30 | Recording available on YouTube
A video of this November 1, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.
Mitchell Abidor, author of Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary presents the book in conversation with Jacob Plitman, former publisher of Jewish Currents.
Today, thanks to his classic memoirs and novels, Victor Serge is highly esteemed by virtually all segments of the left. But who was this man, who led such a thrilling life on the frontlines of history? An anarchist? A Bolshevik? A Trotskyist? Or did he evolve into something else entirely? In this comprehensive account of Serge’s life, work, and political evolution, Mitchell Abidor rescues his subject, in all his complexity, from the constraints of any single label. Painting a portrait of a man whose political ideas shifted continually in response to the major events of his life, we are introduced to several Victor Serges: the youthful anarchist in Belgium and France; the leading Bolshevik in Moscow; the anti-Stalinist who faced imprisonment and expulsion from the Soviet Union. Examining the lacunae and errors of fact in his memoirs, Abidor reveals the hidden Serge for what he ultimately was: an unruly revolutionary of both great courage and contradictions.
Mitchell Abidor is a writer and translator living in Brooklyn, New York. In addition to his many translation works, he is the author of May Made Me and I’ll Forget It When I Die!: The Bisbee Deportation of 1917. Abidor is the translator and editor of Victor Serge’s anarchist writings, Anarchists Never Surrender, and translated with Richard Greeman Serge’s Notebooks (1936-1947).
A 30% discount code for Victor Serge and other Pluto Press books by Mitchell Abidor will be provided to all ticket purchasers.
