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Events
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Through the Lens of Spectacle: Panel 1, Oversight
Recording available on YouTube“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. 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.
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Literary Echoes of Vietnam’s 1975 Victory
FeaturedOnline Event - Zoom MeetingWhile 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 ... Read more
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Aristotle, Hegel, Marx: A Philosophical Dialogue
Recording available on YouTubeJoin us for a dialogue on philosophical themes featuring the authors of two forthcoming books. 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.'
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Reading Death of the Author by Nigeria’s Nnedi Okorafor
Featured Science and Visionary FictionOnline Event - Zoom Meeting"To build a better future, we have to envision it first." Reading science fiction, discussing it together, and reading it politically, offers one tool for "envisioning" a future worth building. We continue our explorations of diverse points of view of social conflict and resolution, possible and imagined just worlds, here on Earth and perhaps afar.
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Book Talk: Brian Kwoba on Hubert Harrison
Recording available on YouTubeReading GroupA 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 ... Read more
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Reading Science Fiction Politically: Severance by Ling Ma
Featured Science and Visionary FictionOnline Event - Zoom Meeting"To build a better future, we have to envision it first." Reading science fiction, discussing it together, and reading it politically, offers one tool for "envisioning" a future worth building. We continue our explorations of diverse points of view of social conflict and resolution, possible and imagined just worlds, here on Earth and perhaps afar.
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Summer in France in the Shade of Noir
FeaturedOnline Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupThe MEP Literature Group continues its tradition of easy summer reading focusing on the noir genre. Our two selections - 'Command Performance' and 'Creation Lake' - 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.
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‘Fake Work’ with Leigh Claire La Berge
FeaturedRecording available on YouTubeA 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 ... Read more
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Resisting Oppression: Reading Science Fiction Politically
Featured Science and Visionary FictionOnline Event - Zoom Meeting"To build a better future, we have to envision it first." Reading science fiction, discussing it together, and reading it politically, offers one tool for "envisioning" a future worth building. We continue our explorations of diverse points of view of social conflict and resolution, possible and imagined just worlds, here on Earth and perhaps afar.
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Karl Marx in America with Andrew Hartman
FeaturedRecording available on YouTubeA 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 ... Read more
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Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary, with Mitchell Abidor
FeaturedRecording available on YouTubeJoin us for a conversation with Mitchell Abidor, author of the forthcoming book, "Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary."
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? -
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Animals and Capitalism: Metabolic Labor
FeaturedOnline Event - Zoom MeetingA five-session study group on nonhuman animals' relationship with capital as living, breathing, "commodified" beings. What differentiates nonhuman animals from non-living commodified objects is the way their metabolic and reproductive capacities are harnessed in production. In this study group, we will focus on how metabolic labor has been theorized in feminist studies and contemporary Marxist environmental and animal studies, with a specific focus on the particular function of nonhuman animals for capitalism.
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Roundtable on Venezuela, Oil, and Global Politics
Recording available on YouTubeA video of this January 21, 2026, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel. A conversation among leading left critics of the Trump administration's attack on Venezuelan sovereignty and its attempt to seize that nation's oil wealth. Matt Huber challenges interpretations of these events as simply another case of "blood for oil." Steve Maher ... Read more
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‘Black History Is for Everyone’ with Brian Jones
FeaturedSee link above to watch the recording on YouTubeA video of this May 2, 2026, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel. Longtime educator Brian Jones explores how the study of Black history challenges our understanding of race, nation, and the stories we tell about who we are. In Black History Is for Everyone, Jones offers a meditation on the power of ... Read more
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Topics in Strategic Studies – Spring 2026 Series
FeaturedOnline Event - Zoom MeetingReading GroupWe are currently reading 'The Choice of Civil War' by Pierre Dardot et al. Alberto Toscano calls this work "a trenchant and provocative study of the symbolic, legal and material violence that has been deployed over the past half-century to secure the rule of capital across the planet. The Choice of Civil War breaks with antiseptic images of neoliberalism as the production of docile subjects or the marketization of everyday life, revealing it as the theory and practice of class warfare."
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