Socialism
Marxist Summer Intensive: July 15-17
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYThrough collaborative study and discussion, we aim to provide a challenging learning environment so each participant can develop his/her own theoretical and analytic tools to advance our organizing and movement building work in order to broaden opposition to capital locally, nationally and internationally.
Introduction to Marxism
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYIn this course we will be concerned with some of the main ideas of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, focusing on the materialist understanding of history, and the theory of surplus value.
Highlights of Capital, Volume 1
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYCAPITAL is the indispensable sourcebook on Marx’s method for analyzing the economy, politics and struggles. Many of us have less time to study it because, as Marx predicted, we have to work longer hours— and often more than one job—in order to survive. Fortunately, even a basic familiarity with the key concepts of Volume I offers many tools for understanding capitalism’s dynamics.
Popular Struggles in South Africa
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynWhat began as a discussion about wage increases between two workers in the changing rooms at one mine became a rallying cry for economic freedom and basic dignity.
African Literature: Post-Colonial Struggles
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynDuring this term we will begin with Egypt with Mahfouz, visit West Africa with Chris Abani then travel south to South Africa with Zakes Mda then conclude in June with NoViolet Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. Again we examine four different areas of Africa as the peoples there emerge first from European colonization, then face the forces of global domination in the long late-capitalist neoliberal phase we are living through.
Women’s Liberation Movement: The Power of History
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYThis class will analyze what made the 1960s Women’s Liberation Movement spread fast and win victories, and also what made it vulnerable to watering down and liberal takeover. National Women’s Liberation is a feminist group for women who want to fight back against male supremacy and win more freedom for women.
Five Explicit and Implicit Notions of Revolution in Capital, Volume I
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynIt is often said that Capital, Volume I is concerned with the enfoldment of the capital form, with many dialectical twists and turns, but not with revolution. However, such a picture severs Marx the revolutionary from Marx the social theorist. In fact, Capital I can be connected to five different notions of revolution.
Prague Spring: 50 Years Later
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYAlthough reformers within the Communist Party sought significant reforms to the overly centralized system copied from the Soviet Union, including advocacy of workers’ councils, there were significant differences between the more modest reforms put forth by Czechoslovak economists and the more thorough-going concepts of activists and workers themselves.
Introduction to Marxism for Women Only
We’ll explore some key concepts about human beings, society and history, and our relationship to the rest of nature. Readings will be short and accessible excerpts from writings by Marx and Engels or later Marxists. In a continuing attempt to increase access for those who have been historically excluded, turned off or silenced by the way this theory is often taught and discussed, we are offering this intro class for women only. Everyone who identifies as a woman is welcome.
Can the Working Class Change the World?
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYMarx argued, because capitalism is the apotheosis of class society, it must be the last class society: it must, therefore, be destroyed. And only the working class, said Marx, is capable of doing that.
The State and Strategies for Socialism
Stephen Maher and Rafael Khachaturian’s essay Socialist Strategy and the Democratic Capitalist State examines the the state in its liberal-democratic form, arguing that we should move beyond both vanguardist and social democratic models toward a view of the state as a contradictory site of class and social struggles. Paul Christoher Gray’s article on Socialist Project is taken from his recently published From the Streets to the State: Changing the World by Taking Power, where he takes on the limitations of dual power and extra-parliamentarism and the flaws inherent in the electoralist approaches and where there can be some reconciliation of the best aspects of these tendencies.
Six Month Pass through November 30, 2022
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWe are now offering a six month pass for the prices of the previous 4 month passes. If you are paying for yourself and any additional person, you are now able to have two people attend all events, classes or film showings (post-pandemic) that The MEP offers.
Climate Justice and Socialist Strategy with Jason W. Moore
Video available on YouTubeVideo available at https://youtu.be/2nZ9xgNn35A
Jason W. Moore addresses the missed opportunity for a program of planetary justice as the “Environmentalism of the Rich” came to the fore after 1968 and overshadowed Martin Luther King, Jr.’s appeal for radical action against capitalism’s “triple evils” of racism, militarism, and class exploitation. As King underscored in his final months, justice cannot be effectively pursued piece by piece. The “whole society” with and within the web of life must be reinvented, inasmuch as we are “all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.”