January 2021
M.A.D. Lit 101: American Fiction and the Cold War
A reading and discussion of three substantive novels that explain the context of anti-communism as it raged in the years immediately following World War II, has continued throughout the decades since then, and remains strong throughout American culture and popular consciousness today.
Find out more »Capital, Volume 1, Part 2: 9 more weeks
Session 2 will complete the analysis of Part I: Commodities and Money, starting with Chapter 2: The Process of Exchange followed by the historical development of the money form in the circulation of commodities. This in turn leads to the Transformation of Money into Capital, positioning the reader to analyze the specific social relations of capitalist production (wage labor and owners of capital) in relation to the forces of production, the means of production.
Find out more »A People’s Guide to Capitalism
Despite the efforts of mainstream commentators to convince us otherwise, many are asking questions about why the capitalist system has produced such vast inequality and wanton disregard for its own environmental destruction. This book offers answers to exactly these questions on their own terms: in the form of a radical economic theory. The 14-week class which begins in early January will feature a close reading and discussion of the entire book with explication and references to additional materials related to this study.
Find out more »Socialist Register 2021: Ursula Huws on Reaping the Whirlwind
Greg Albo and Steve Maher will introduce Socialist Register 2021—Beyond Digital Capitalism followed by Ursula Huws presenting on her essay, “Reaping the Whirlwind: Digitization, Restructuring, and Moblization in the Covid Crisis”
Find out more »February 2021
New 4 Month Pass Offering Through May 31
The four month pass is now $50 less than it was in 2020. All events, classes and more for stated sliding scale fees until end of day, May 31.
Find out more »The MEP Bookstore, Winter/Spring 2021—Books with shipping included
Books that will be used during the Winter of 2021 sessions—good for a lifetime of learning. The Pluto FireWorks series and The Brutish Museums have just been added.
Find out more »Blood and Money
The birth and development of capitalism since its origins in the fifteenth century is entirely bound up with the subordination of racialized peoples. Even before capitalism arose – in a process Marx termed the “so-called primitive accumulation” – money and markets were implicated in the rise and fall of states and empires that conquered and enslaved vast numbers of human bodies. This group will address these histories and their persisting consequences. We will read and discuss David McNally’s Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire and Jairus Banaji’s The History of Commercial Capitalism among other works.
Find out more »The Last Years of Karl Marx: A five-week reading group
With The Last Years of Karl Marx, Marcello Musto claims a renewed relevance for the late work of Marx, highlighting unpublished or previously neglected writings, many of which remain unavailable in English. Readers are invited to reconsider Marx’s critique of European colonialism, his ideas on non-Western societies, and his theories on the possibility of revolution in non-capitalist countries. From Marx’s late manuscripts, notebooks, and letters emerge an author markedly different from the one represented by many of his contemporary critics and followers alike.
Find out more »Engels and the Dialectics of Nature
This class will journey into quantum physics and 21st-century cosmology as background for a study of dialectics in natural science and philosophy. Readings include Engels’ Dialectics of Nature and excerpts from other philosophers and scientists writing since Engels.
Find out more »The Pluto FireWorks Series: 3 more sessions
All four books and entrance to the remaining three events for $70 inclusive of shipping provides further discounts from The MEP's already discounted pricing.
Find out more »Anitra Nelson and Vincent Liegey: Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide
As a sense of urgency pervades global environmentalism and the Left, the degrowth movement has burst into the mainstream. As growth driven climate catastrophe looms, degrowth is a political response based on changing how we live, countering persistent growth with a demand to slow down with a reorientation around provision of basic needs for all.
Find out more »The Time of Our Lives with Bryan Palmer
At the current historical conjuncture, time has become the challenge for socialists to address, not only because it defines what does and does not constitute the working day, but because it is increasingly obvious that time and its organization defines life itself. Will time continue to be compressed into capital’s needs, or will it be reimagined as liberation, struggled through and over in ways that enhance the project of human emancipation?
Find out more »Heterodox Socialism: Michael Brie, Jean-Numa Ducange, Kieran Durkin
Author Jean-Numa Ducange, and editors Michael Brie and Kieran Durkin present on editions they have put together on Jules Guesde, Rosa Luxemburg and Raya Dunayevskaya.
Find out more »The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution
The story of the Benin Bronzes — carried off by the British in 1897 — sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonization of museums. In “The Brutish Museums”, Dan Hicks makes a powerful case for the urgent return of such objects, as part of a wider project of addressing the outstanding debt of colonialism.
Find out more »The Sinking Middle Class with David Roediger
Roediger demonstrates that an obsession with a “middle class” is relatively new in US politics, starting with Bill Clinton's attempt to win back the so-called Reagan Democrats. The efforts by the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party remain marked by covert appeals to white racism and the avoidance of wealth redistribution.
Find out more »Towards a Revolution in Labor History: White Supremacism and Bourgeois Social Control
Why is the US working class unorganized and suffering to a far greater extent than in other advanced capitalist societies?
Find out more »Reinventing the Welfare State: Book + talk special
With positivity and rigor, Ursula Huws will outline a ‘digital welfare state’ for the 21st century, which would involve a repurposing of online platform technologies under public control to modernise and expand public services, and improve accessibility.
Find out more »March 2021
Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois
Black Reconstruction 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.”
Find out more »Empire’s Endgame: Pluto FireWorks series book + talk special
Bringing to the fore broad political and economic contexts, the authors trace ways in which empire’s legacies have been reshaped by global capitalism, the digital environment and instability in the nation-state. Engaging with Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall movements, Empire's Endgame offers an original perspective on race, media, the state and criminalisation, and a political vision that includes — rather than expels — in the face of crisis.
Find out more »Working Class Cinema in the Age of Digital Capitalism
Why does the story of cinema begin with the end of work? Is it because, as has been suggested, it is impossible to represent work from the perspective of labor but only from the point of view of capital, because the revolutionary horizon of the working class coincides with the end of work? After all, the early revolutionary art avant-garde had an ambiguous relationship with capitalism: it provided both a critique of commodification while also reproducing the commodity form.
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