April 2021
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg: A Six Part Series
This six-part seminar series explores some of her signal contributions—her argument that imperialism and primitive accumulation are endemic to capitalism; her prescient attention to racist super-exploitation in southern Africa; her insistence that socialism had to be created in and through the widest form of participatory democracy, including the mass strike; her reflections, with attention to the other-than-human world and incarceration, on transformative subjectivities—through putting them in conversation with Global Southern thinkers past and present.
Find out more »Introducing Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg with Drucilla Cornell and Jane Gordon
Rosa Luxemburg offered reflections that can usefully be taken up and reworked by writers facing continuous and new challenges to undo relations of exploitation through radical economic and social transformation Luxemburg touches on all aspects of what constitutes revolution in her work; the authors of this volume show us that, by creolizing Luxemburg, we can open up new understanding of the complexities of revolution.
Find out more »Capital, Volume 1, Part 3
Chapters 15 through 25, will trace this development and reveals new dynamics and contradictions inherent to the logic of capitalist accumulation, culminating in Chapter 25, The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation. These developmental processes continue to be played out to this day and are witnessed in the immensity of wealth for a few at one pole of humanity, poverty at another, ruthless misuse and degradation of nature, and reduction of the human subject, the producing masses of real individuals, to an alienated object for capitalist exploitation.
Find out more »Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly with Editor Peter Cole
In the early twentieth century, when many US unions disgracefully excluded black and Asian workers, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) warmly welcomed people of color, in keeping with their emphasis on class solidarity and their bold motto: “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All!” Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly tells the story of one of the greatest heroes of the American working class. A brilliant union organizer and a humorous orator, Benjamin Fletcher…
Find out more »4 Month Pass Offering Through August 15
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, July 31.
Find out more »Capitalism and the Sea
While sea beds are drilled for their fossil fuels and minerals, and coastlines developed for real estate and leisure, the oceans continue to absorb the toxic discharges of carbon civilization – warming, expanding, and acidifying the blue water part of the planet in ways that will bring unpredictable but irreversible consequences for the rest of the biosphere.
Find out more »Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (a close reading group)
Empire's Endgame maps the complex relations between empire, racist culture, political economy, and the practices of a security-oriented state seeking legitimacy in times of unbearable economic uncertainty. While the book's story unfolds in Britain, its lessons and warnings may well apply to the United States and many other crisis-ridden imperialist polities.
Find out more »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 »The MEP Bookstore, Winter/Spring 2021—Books with shipping included (US and Puerto Rico only)
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 »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 »Matters of State: Literature & Espionage
The MEP Literature Reading Group takes on four spy novels Why Spy Novels? Spy novels emerged as a distinct genre around the time of World War I, coinciding with the creation of formal intelligence agencies in many countries. This was a period characterized by heightened concern on the part of rulers about national security, imperial strength, and the impending conflict of the Great War. Spy novels from the early twentieth century reflect these concerns, and generally feature secret agents and…
Find out more »Victor Serge: Notebooks 1936 to 1947 a close reading
In this session, we will read Notebooks 1936-1947 written during the last ten years of Serge’s life while in exile in Mexico. The Notebooks document not only the personal and political costs of Serge’s commitment to the truth of the 1917 Revolution, but the deep and rewarding insights of Serge’s intellect that had been freed by creative and radical political thought.
Find out more »Grundrisse
In the Grundrisse Marx arguably bridges his early writings on philosophy and Hegel, and the writing and revisions of Capital that dominated much of the rest of his life. We will undertake a close, word by word reading of the text with a view to understanding the concepts that evolve within it. This first term will begin with the chapter on money.
Find out more »Reinventing the Welfare State with Ursula Huws (Pluto FireWorks Series)
In “Reinventing the Welfare State: Digital Platforms and Public Policies” Ursula Huws proposes a welfare state infused with social justice and equality, including a redistributive UBI (Universal Basic Income), decommodification of platforms and also universal workers' rights. With positivity and rigour, she outlines a ‘digital welfare state’ for the 21st century, which would involve a repurposing of online platform technologies under public control to modernize and expand public services, and improve accessibility.
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 »Start Early, Stay Late: Planning for Care in Old Age
Covid-19 has exposed too many weaknesses in the neoliberal capitalist system to count, especially when it comes to the most vulnerable. For 10 years our international, interdisciplinary research team has been documenting the profound weaknesses in nursing home care within Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the US. The lines between for-profit and not have become increasingly blurred by various neoliberal strategies. One of these involves non-profit and state-owned homes contracting out services to for-profit firms as – in denial of the literature on the determinants of health – services such as food, housekeeping, and laundry have been defined out of care and dismissed as ancillary. This contracting out has not only undermined teamwork, but has also resulted in poor food, inadequate cleaning, and limited laundry – all of which threaten health.
Find out more »Socialist Register 2021: Beyond Digital Capitalism (the entire series)
Beyond Digital Capitalism: New Ways of Living Continues on April 20, with 4 more (and maybe 5 more) sessions after that on Sundays or Tuesdays until May 2 There are tickets for each session for those who are unable to be present for this series. The series tickets provide entrance to the remaining 6 presentations with discussions. “In addressing how far digital technology has become integral to the capitalist market dystopia of the first decades the 21st century, we were…
Find out more »The Hour of the Furnaces: A film screening with discussion
The Hour of the Furnaces isa three-part film which analyzes the severe neocolonial situation of 1960s Argentina, radical wings of Peronism, and the role of violence in the national liberation process. Part 1, Notes and Testimonies on Neocolonialism focuses on the everyday violence of the Argentine, employing a Marxist analysis between quotes from Martí, Fanon, Césaire, Che, Mariátegui, and other revolutionary figures.
Find out more »Friedrich Engels with Terrell Carver, Kaan Kangal and Kohei Saito
All three author/editors celebrate the recent 200th birthday of Engels looking at his youthful works, his early relationship with Karl Marx, address controversy surrounding his Dialectics of Nature and give a broad reassessment of the importance of Engels pithing Marxisms, working class movements, science, philosophy and more.
Find out more »Health Care, Technology, and Socialized Medicine
While the immediate task of controlling the current pandemic determines the actions of states, medical institutions, and research laboratories, several critical microbiologists, virologists, and political economists have done well to ask the structural question about the metabolic and ecological rifts that have unleashed new dangers for humanity. But for the ecological crisis to become a ground to rethink structural transformation, it is not enough to locate it in the wreckage that capitalism accumulates. It must be understood as constitutive to capitalist social relations, having an intimate connection to the robbery of labor. It is in this sense that the particularization of these crises in the form of pathogens and impending diseases becomes crucial. This helps us to understand the ecological rift as central to everyday life and struggle in capitalism, and also to imagine a transformational class politics.
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