Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants
Marxism and Planetary Crises: New Works, New Debates
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe MEP's Ecosocialist Study Group resumes consideration of capitalism's catastrophic impact on the Earth's climate and other critical systems, and ecosocialist strategies to challenge it. In eight weekly sessions beginning April 24, we will address important new work in ecological Marxism and environmental justice.
The Circulation of Capital: Reading Volume II of Marx’s Capital
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA weekly study group covering Marx's Capital, Volume II, The Process of Circulation of Capital. In this volume, Marx addresses the question: How can the reproduction of society as a whole take place, if there is no conscious social planning that ensures that all needs are met, in the necessary proportions, such that life can persist and the capitalist relations of production be sustained? We discover the answer, but we also learn of new contradictions and sources of crisis inherent to capitalist society.
Hegel for Radicals: The Science of Logic II
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe MEP's recurring series Hegel for Radicals continues our reading of Hegel's magnum opus, The Science of Logic, Part II. Familiarity with this work greatly aids any reading of Marx's Capital. Alex Steinberg guides participants past the legendary obstacles to understanding this unsurpassed presentation of dialectics. Its depth and systematic structure is without parallel in any other of Hegel's works.
Palestine: Celebrating 75 Years of Literature
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsRead Palestinian fiction, poetry, and related literature in weekly meetings with the MEP's Literature Group. The ongoing catastrophe in the Middle East breaks our hearts daily. As part of our mission to explore creative political resistance to oppression, we will read several novels and poems by Palestinian authors.
Chile’s 9/11: Fifty Years of Literary Resistance
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsReading group in progress, ending 2/8/24. September 2023 marked fifty years since the overthrow of Salvador Allende's socialist government on September 11, 1973. To honor the struggles and sufferings of the Chilean people, the MEP's Literature Group is reading Chilean writers active before, during, and since the Pinochet dictatorship.
Multispecies Marxism: Reading and Reflecting on Animals and Capital
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAn eight-session discussion and reading group on the central role of nonhuman animals in the capitalist economy, historically and today. We will be looking through a multispecies lens at key concepts of Marxism, such as 'value', 'primitive accumulation', 'species being', 'circulation', and 'resistance.'
Oppression and Resistance in New Chinese and Chinese-American Science Fiction
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBefore Theodore W. Allen turned to his magnum opus, The Invention of the White Race, he drafted an essay "The Kernel and Meaning: A Contribution to a Proletarian Critique of U.S. Historiography." In it, he assessed how the industrial bourgeoisie successfully overturned plantation capital's rule while assuring its own ascendancy over the proletariat. Allen reviewed six commonly held explanations as to why, despite favorable objective conditions, the U.S. left and workers movements failed to establish socialism or even a permanent working-class party. Participants in this group will read and discuss the original, 160-page typescript of Allen's unpublished essay.
Blood and Fire: The Violent Origins of Capitalism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsJoin the MEP's Capital Study Group in a four-week study of the concluding section of volume I of Marx's Capital, which discloses the widespread violence and dispossession - in both Europe and colonized areas - that accompanied the emergence of capitalism.
Reading Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWe continue to study selected passages from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. We delve into key themes and concepts related to civil society and state: politics and the arts, racism, class and gender, religion, linguistics, and other methods of analysis, critical theory, mass media, and cinema, hegemony, and subaltern studies, as well as the role of intellectuals and activists in discovering new methods and languages to be transformative.
Hegel for Radicals: The Science of Logic
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe MEP's recurring series Hegel for Radicals continues this fall with a reading of Hegel's magnum opus, The Science of Logic. Familiarity with this work greatly aids any reading of Marx's Capital. Alex Steinberg will guide participants past the legendary obstacles to understanding this unsurpassed presentation of dialectics. Its depth and systematic structure is without parallel in any other of Hegel's works.
Hegel for Radicals: The Science of Logic
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe MEP's recurring series Hegel for Radicals continues this fall with a reading of Hegel's magnum opus, The Science of Logic. Familiarity with this work greatly aids any reading of Marx's Capital. Alex Steinberg will guide participants past the legendary obstacles to understanding this unsurpassed presentation of dialectics. Its depth and systematic structure is without parallel in any other of Hegel's works.
The Spectre Still Haunting: Introducing the Revolutionary Politics of Marx and Engels
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAn introductory reading group for those just getting acquainted with Marxist ideas, based on Marx and Engels' elegant and rousing classic The Manifesto of the Communist Party. We will be guided by China Miéville's thoughtful, provocative meditations on the Manifesto, A Spectre Haunting.
Hegel for Radicals: The Science of Logic
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe MEP's recurring series Hegel for Radicals continues this fall with a reading of Hegel's magnum opus, The Science of Logic. Familiarity with this work greatly aids any reading of Marx's Capital. Alex Steinberg will guide participants past the legendary obstacles to understanding this unsurpassed presentation of dialectics. Its depth and systematic structure is without parallel in any other of Hegel's works.
Commons, Commoning, Communism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBefore the advent of capitalism, much of humanity produced their immediate livelihoods on lands and with tools to which they either had rights of use or held as individual property. All that came to a violent end with what Marx preferred to call the "original expropriation" (often misleadingly termed "primitive accumulation"). This reading group will explore the historical roots and persistence of such crimes and the resistance they evoke by reading together Ian Angus's recently published The War Against the Commons, Peter Linebaugh's Stop Thief! and related texts.
Hegel for Radicals: The Science of Logic
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe MEP's recurring series Hegel for Radicals continues this fall with a reading of Hegel's magnum opus, The Science of Logic. Familiarity with this work greatly aids any reading of Marx's Capital. Alex Steinberg will guide participants past the legendary obstacles to understanding this unsurpassed presentation of dialectics. Its depth and systematic structure is without parallel in any other of Hegel's works.