We continue to study selected passages from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. We delve into key themes and concepts related to civil society and state: politics and the arts, racism, class and gender, religion, linguistics, and other methods of analysis, critical theory, mass media, and cinema, hegemony, and subaltern studies, as well as the role of intellectuals and activists in discovering new methods and languages to be transformative.

Discussion of texts by Marx and Engels on India, China, and European colonialism; essays on the Civil War in the United States; documents related to the International Workingmen's Association; Marx's classic The Civil War in France and related essays; polemics against Bakunin; and Marx's correspondence about the rise of the workers' political party in Germany, including his Critique of the Gotha Program.

Second series in our close reading and discussion of Marx's magnum opus, with Lisa Maya Knauer and other facilitators from the MEP's Capital Studies Group. This series covers parts 3 and 4 of Capital I, on the production of absolute and relative surplus-value.

The Science and Visionary Fiction Reading Group spring season takes on three of the most richly inventive and deeply challenging novels of our time. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness Cixin Liu, Three-Body Problem Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time All three create and adapt new worlds to explore themes of existential species ... Read more

A close reading over 10 weeks of W.E.B. Du Bois's classic work, Black Reconstruction, with Sean Ahern. The book provides a basis for a much overdue revolution in US labor history. As Du Bois so eloquently and bluntly put in in 1935: “The South, after the war, presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see again for many decades. Yet, the labor movement, with but few exceptions, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction, the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.”

A discussion and reading group on the central role of human and nonhuman animal labor in the capitalist economy, both historically and today. What are the anthropocentric premises underlying mainstream understandings of labor in Marxist theory? How might we expand our thinking to include the multiple forms of nonhuman labor necessary for capitalism? What kinds of labor do nonhuman animals provide in production, and on what cultural, ideological and economic bases is work divided among people, nonhuman animals and machines?

The Mexican Revolution catalyzed international radicals in unexpected sites and struggles. Christina Heatherton's book Arise! reveals how activists around the world found inspiration and solidarity in revolutionary Mexico.

The spring 2023 series of the MEP Literature Group continues to focus on Iranian women writing since the 1978-79 Revolution whose stories are set inside Iran.

An ongoing group conducting a page-by-page reading of Karl Marx's Grundrisse, a work that can be seen as a veritable "laboratory" in which we can observe Marx in the very process of unfolding his dialectical investigation of the movement of capitalist social and economic forms. In 2023 we will be working our way through Notebook VII, the final part of the book that includes the widely discussed "Fragment on Machines."

Beneath the success of fast fashion, a grimmer story is told by Madison Van Oort in Worn Out: How Retailers Surveil and Exploit Workers in the Digital Age and How Workers Are Fighting Back. Going undercover in two of the world's largest fast fashion stores in New York City, she observed firsthand how data and surveillance shape the lives of the people who do the actual producing and selling.

A continuation of the Fall 2022 series in which we introduced Hegel’s mysterious book, The Phenomenology of Spirit.  We will make the Phenomenology less mysterious as we go along and try to tease out the revolutionary implications in the thought of Hegel and explain their significance for our time.