Some Reflections on the Marxist Education Project Literature Group
By Jacqueline Cantwell
December 18, 2025
When Mary Larsen called me early in 2023 to revive the Marxist Education Literature Group series after MEP founder and organizer Michael Lardner died, I knew I had big shoes to fill. Michael’s flair in selecting topical themes for reading and guiding discussion relied upon his wide-ranging intellectual interests and formidable organizational skills. I was not his equal. Still, I wanted to take on the task.
The Literature Group had been an important part of my life for several years and I did not want to lose it. It was the only place where I could talk freely about the political ideas and creative works important to me. The MEP’s focus on education had introduced me to contemporary left-wing intellectuals who were scarily intelligent and accomplished. Conversations had not closed off questioning by quoting Trotsky (that was so refreshing) The MEP had renewed my hope for creative leftist thought. Continuing the Literature Group also was a way to honor Michael. His friendship had been important to me and I did not want to lose even more of his spirit by not contributing to the MEP.
I first met the MEP and Michael Lardner at a Victor Serge event hosted by Richard Greeman. Victor Serge had been a part of my life for over twenty years and I could not miss the chance to attend that lecture and the subsequent reading series moderated by Richard Greeman. That meeting was the beginning of my friendship with Michael Lardner and involvement with the MEP Literature Group.
I had always been hesitant to join a fiction reading group because of their reputation for disintegrating into wine-fueled gossip sessions. The MEP Literature Group avoided that alcoholic chit-chat (while still being great fun) by emphasizing two themes: How does a Marxist education group justify reading fiction? How does reading fiction promote greater understanding and solidarity?
After I took on responsibility for the Literature Group, I tried to continue those two themes by selecting novels, often translations, whose authors had assigned themselves the tasks of interpreting national events within the lives of individuals. The insights of fellow participants taught me to be a more sensitive reader. What for me in a story seemed distant and exotic, was for another reader a realistic descriptive narration of lived experience. A discussion in the session on Iranian women writers, during the Woman, Life, and Freedom movement in Iran, brought this out. An attendee, originally from Iran, shared how Solmaz Sharif’s “Personal Effects” in Look, a 31-page elegy for Sharif’s uncle, brought her to tears. The attendee had lived through the Iraq-Iran war and had family members suffering from PTSD. She told us that Tehran was a city of widows and orphans after ten years of war. The poem for her was more than an exercise in style; it was a vivid and appropriate remembrance.
The Literature Group has humbled me while giving me a larger world. Before I took on the task of selecting novels, I had used reading to escape personal dissatisfactions, but for the past two years, I have tried to select novels on themes important to leftists. Our sessions have covered Italy’s “years of lead,” the lives of children growing up in post-Pinochet Chile, and the history of Iran from World War I to the present day. We have read Palestinian writings about the Nakba. We have read about the Vietnam War from the viewpoint of a North Vietnamese soldier writing about the American War.
For me the most significant work that we have completed was Human Acts by Han Kang, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2024. While the book vividly described how the South Korean army’s tortures devastated lives and bodies, what I found most interesting was how each chapter focused upon a representative of the social groups that organized after the May 18, 1980, revolt and eventually reformed the government. If I had not been a part of this Literature Group, I would not have done the background reading that made me see the book as more than an exercise in style, but as a reckoning to honor the individuals who had worked in solidarity to challenge injustice.