“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.
The 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.
“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.
A 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 … Read more
While 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 … Read more
Join 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.’
“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.
“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.
The ongoing 2026 Gramsci Study Sessions meet on Sundays at 11 am ET. We are reading and exploring ‘Selections from the Prison Notebooks’, ‘Selections from Cultural Writings’, ‘Selections from Political Writings’, and Gramsci’s writings on international politics, as they relate to contemporary issues and conflicts.
Matt Huber highlights the relevance to the climate crisis of key concepts from Marx’s ‘Capital’ such as value, the hidden abode of production, surplus-value, the accumulation of capital, primitive accumulation, and the expropriation of the expropriators.