We begin with the Chinese Revolution in 1930, after the nationalist party led by Chiang Kai Shek turned on the mass movement, slaughtered militant workers and peasants, and declared war on Communists. After the war, the struggle between the armies of Chiang Kai Shek and the Communists resumed, ending with Chiang's fleeing to Taiwan and the final victory of the Communist army in 1949.

How will anthropogenic climate disruption transform alter the world’s basic political arrangements? In their new book Climate Leviathan, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright warn that global warming will push capitalist elites toward an authoritarian imposition of “planetary sovereignty” to confront the crisis.

This reading group will undertake a close reading (over 10 weeks) of Costas Lapavitsas and Makoto Itoh’s book Political Economy of Money and Finance. The book attempts to offer a systematic theoretical examination of money and finance by re-examining the classical foundations of political economy and the creator of money and assessing all of the important theoretical schools since then, including Marxist, Keynesian, post-Keynesian and monetarist thinkers.

By unraveling the commoditized forms of our interactions with nature and each other, it provides tools to understand capitalism’s astounding innovativeness and productivity, intertwined with growing inequality and misery, alienation, stunting of human potential, and ecological destruction all over the globe. In this way, Capital offers the reader a methodology for doing our own analysis of current developments.