Recording available on YouTube
Marx for Cats with Leigh Claire La Berge
Recording available on YouTube“All history is the history of cat struggle.” In "Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary," our guest speaker Leigh Clare La Berge follows feline footprints through Western economic history to reveal an animality at the heart of Marxism. By asking what humans and animals owe each other in a moment of ecological crisis, La Berge joins current debates about the need for and possibility of eco-socialism.
Marxism and the Capitalist State
Recording available on YouTubeA video of this December 16, 2024, event is available on the MEP's YouTube channel. A lively discussion with the editors and several contributors to the just-released Marxism and the Capitalist State: Towards a New Debate. The collected essays combine general theoretical reappraisals with investigations of contemporary challenges, including new technologies, the climate crisis, the ... Read more
‘The Man Who Changed Colors’
Recording available on YouTubeVideo available at https://youtu.be/ABOczzUs8nQ
Bill Fletcher Jr's 'The Man Who Changed Colors' delves into the complicated relationships between Cape Verdean Americans and African Americans, Portuguese fascist gangs, and abusive shipyard working conditions. When a dockworker falls to his death under strange circumstances, investigative journalist David Gomes is on the case. His dogged pursuit of the truth puts his life in danger and upends the scrappy Cape Cod newspaper he works for.
The Fallout of War: Metonyms of Militarism
Recording available on YouTubeVideo available at https://youtu.be/h0dYxI2zDoY
In the second of two linked sessions, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture presents their collective research on a keyword of contemporary cultural studies - war - and investigates its many valences as lived reality and as metaphor. Taking account of war as constitutive of the present, the working group explores war's myriad meanings.
The Fallout of War: Chronologies of Conflict
Recording available on YouTubeIn the first of two linked sessions, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture presents their collective research on a keyword of contemporary cultural studies - war - and investigates its many valences as lived reality and as metaphor. Taking account of war as constitutive of the present, the working group explores war's myriad meanings.
Worn Out: Retail Workers vs. Digital Surveillance
Recording available on YouTubeBeneath 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.
The Paris Commune: A New History
Recording available on YouTubeCarolyn J. Eichner and Mitch Abidor discuss Eichner's new history of the Paris Commune. Her compelling account "makes a complicated event understandable and vivid. Eichner’s rich portraits bring to life the freedom and empowerment the Communards experienced, juxtaposed with the bloody repression of its final days." (Sarah Fishman)
Utopia and Modernity in China: Contradictions in Transition
Recording available on YouTubeEditors David Margolies and Qing Cao examine the contradictions inherent in China's attempt to achieve "socialism with Chinese characteristics" by promoting home-grown capitalism. Their book attempts to deconstruct the realities of this system in practice, focusing on the internal tensions between traditional Chinese values, neoliberal capitalism, and the CCP's vision of a transition to socialism in the 21st century.
Video available on YouTube at https://youtu.be/IMWTb07tBuk
Peru: Crisis and Uprising
Recording available on YouTubeA deepgoing political crisis is shaking Peru, with massive protests by working people in the countryside and cities, fierce repression by the armed forces and police, and desperate efforts to restore order by a widely hated right-wing Congress. Peruvian left activist and sociologist Nicolás Lynch reports on and analyzes these dramatic events direct from Lima. Video available at https://youtu.be/Go_iAP7gTII
Capital’s Terrorists in the Long Nineteenth Century
Recording available on YouTubeIn his new book Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century, Chad E. Pearson details how US employers at the turn of the twentieth century deployed a variety of tactics to secure their power in and out of workplaces, acting extralegally through the Ku Klux Klan, Law and Order Leagues, Stockgrowers' organizations, and Citizens' Alliances,
From Austerity to Fascism: The Capital Order
Recording available on YouTubeIn The Capital Order, Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital-and indeed capitalism - in times of social upheaval from below. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material from Britain and Italy, she offers a damning account of the rise of austerity - and of modern economics - at the levers of contemporary political power. Mattei reveals how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across societies.
Climate Justice and Socialist Strategy with Jason W. Moore
Recording available on YouTubeVideo available at https://youtu.be/2nZ9xgNn35A
Jason W. Moore addresses the missed opportunity for a program of planetary justice as the “Environmentalism of the Rich” came to the fore after 1968 and overshadowed Martin Luther King, Jr.’s appeal for radical action against capitalism’s “triple evils” of racism, militarism, and class exploitation. As King underscored in his final months, justice cannot be effectively pursued piece by piece. The “whole society” with and within the web of life must be reinvented, inasmuch as we are “all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.”
Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire
Recording available on YouTubeVideo available: https://youtu.be/C5YAw174E7s
Palm oil, found in half of supermarket products, has shaped our world. Max Haiven uncovers how the gears of capitalism are literally and metaphorically lubricated by this ubiquitous elixir.
The Working Class and the Middle Classes: Allies or Foes? with John Milios
Recording available on YouTubeA lecture by JOHN MILIOS, Professor of Political Economy at the National Technical University of Athens. The classical political economists defined three social classes on the basis of their forms of income: capitalists (profits), workers (wages), and landowners (rents). Marx, in his critique of political economy, developed a new, non-economistic and non-mechanistic "relational" class theory. On the basis of Marx's approach, we can tackle complex problems concerning the class structure of contemporary societies and the gray area between the working and middle classes.
Joyce, Marx, Lefebvre: Considerations for the 21st Century
Recording available on YouTubeA video of this August 20, 2022, event is available on the MEP's YouTube channel. Two days after Bloomsday 2022, Andy Merrifield joined us to consider how Karl Marx and Henri Lefebvre help shed new light on James Joyce - and vice versa. Capital circulated through Marx the same way the Liffey circulated through Joyce's Finnegan's Wake: ... Read more