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 … Continue reading Science and Visionary Fiction Reading Group–New Spring Season Selections

A reading of Theodore W. Allen's unpublished manuscript, "Towards a Revolution in Labor History," convened with Sean Ahern. According to Allen, "the original sin of 'white' labor historiography lies in the misbegotten concept that excludes the Black bond-laborers from the 'working class.'”

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 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."

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. 

This group is reading and discussing original texts by Marx and Engels about their theory of class struggles as the motive force of human social evolution and the modern working class as the political antagonist of the capitalist system. The primary text is the anthology 'Karl Marx: The Political Writings,' recently published by Verso. In this part 2, we will be reading the "Surveys From Exile" section, which begins with "The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850" and takes us through Marx's articles on the Civil War in the United States.

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.

Close reading and discussion of Marx's magnum opus with Lisa Maya Knauer and other facilitators from the MEP's Capital Studies Group.