About us
This is a group for anyone, regardless of their beliefs, who is interested in politics, economics, Marxist or Marxist-influenced philosophy, feminist theory, societal change, social and economic history and the history of ideas. You don't have to be a partisan for any particular philosophy to participate, but you do have to be willing to engage with the material critically and participate in discussions with an open mind. We meet for an assigned text or set of texts at least once a month, and have frequent informal coffee meetups as well.
We will sample ideas widely, reading some core Marxist thinkers as well as numerous others from diverse backgrounds and strands of critical thought. Our goal is to expand the thinking of every participant and stimulate vigorous, if structured and respectful, debate on serious topics.
Upcoming events
4
China Study Group: Chuang Collective, "Sorghum & Steel" - Part 3
The Cock Tavern, 23 Phoenix Road, NW1 1HB, London, GBThis is a the third chapter of our longform Tuesday-night reading group on China. If you didn't get to the first meetings, don't worry - come along anyway!
This time, we're reading chapter 3, Ossification. Find the text here: https://chuangcn.org/journal/one/sorghum-and-steel/3-ossification/
----About the China Study Group:
What can we learn from the Chinese Revolution? That's the question we'll seek to answer as LMRG brings the heat to you once again, now on Tuesday nights, with our all-new China Study Group. In this long-form reading series, we'll meet monthly for in-depth discussion of a series of texts on China, its revolution, the socialist market economy, and more. As the New Cold War heats up, it's never been more important to learn what we can about the country which the US, UK and EU have all described - following the American phrasebook - as a "systemic rival".
For the first set of meetups within this series, we'll be tackling Sorghum and Steel: The Socialist Developmental Regime and the Forging of China by the Chuang collective. Chuang is an independent, autonomous collective of anti-authoritarian Chinese communists and labour activists whose work provides a rare opportunity for English readers to get vital detail on historical and contemporary dynamics within Chinese society from a materialist, communist, and crucially - balanced perspective. Sorghum and Steel will provide our Study Group with an essential foundation in Chinese history to equip us going forward.
Throughout this series, we'll give equal space to a wide variety of sources, from anti-authoritarian Chinese communists opposed to the contemporary Politburo to members of Xi Jinping's own ideological brain-trust. We'll dig deep into elements of the Chinese revolutionary experience such as the CPC's localist co-operative economics of the Civil War period, the forgotten grass roots of the Cultural Revolution, the Boulan Fazheng period and China's rejection of "shock therapy" as seen in the USSR, and the theory underpinning China's recent turn away from the liberal economics of the 2000s.
Take care everyone and happy reading!
4 attendees
CIVIL WAR USA: International Cafe Friday the 13th Special
·OnlineOnlineCivil war in the US: is it about to begin? Some experts think so: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/21/ice-minnesota-trump
Five years on from the nationwide uprising against white supremacy and the US police state triggered by the murder of George Floyd and sustained by the further killing of Breonna Taylor and many others, Minnesota - where Floyd was killed - has once again seen events that, according to many, have drawn the great American settler-colony closer towards another violent civil conflict.
Against a backdrop of Trump-loyal National Guard units being sent in like occupying armies to cities across the US, from Chicago to Portland, Oregon, recent months have seen huge mobilisations against deployments of the Department of Homeland Security's ICE agency in its war to re-establish America's increasingly tenuous "white" identity. All immigrants, documented or undocumented, have become the targets of ICE stormtroopers as the President announces plans to strip naturalised citizens of their citizenship under blatantly racist pretexts. Bullets have begun to fly this way and that as political violence - with the killing of Charlie Kirk a spectacular example - becomes increasingly normalised in what was already one of the world's most violent societies. People, including many of the MAGA movement's own loyalists, are increasingly fed up with a government and political economy that transparently serves the rich and offers the poor nothing but spectacular distractions (war with Iran, Venezuela, Denmark, whoever).
As most are now aware, it was amid all this that, just blocks from where George Floyd was murdered in 2020, two brave martyrs for the cause of freedom were made: Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The backlash to the unprovoked murder of these two protestors has galvanised millions more to demand the end of ICE. Perhaps most notably, Minnesota has been on the verge of complete social and economic shutdown as anti-ICE forces dust off that oldest, most powerful tool in the peoples' arsenal, the general strike.
Trump may have withdrawn National Guard units from Portland and has made noises about "de-escalating a bit" in Minnesota. But what does the future hold? Trump has suggested he may soon invoke the Insurrection Act to bypass laws forbidding the deployment of regular US military forces within the borders of the country in order to achieve his aims. Were he to do so, an official state of civil war could be said to exist. All this amid increasing tensions with Canada to the north of the border, with Trump threatening that US F-35s could be sent to control Canadian airspace.
North America appears to be on a precipice - what is real and what is bluster? How can the people of the US and the world prepare to take advantage of the situation and advance the class struggle to a higher level? One thing is clear from all this: the old grey forces of liberalism and right-wing reaction that brought us to this impasse won't get us past it. What's a worker to do?
Join us from anywhere for this open-ended online discussion! We'll have an official meeting link posted very soon. Take care and watch your back!
4 attendees
Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
London Action Resource Centre, 62 Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel, E1 1ES, London, GB"The age of mass protest ushered in by the Arab Spring is hardly over, but that record of failures, setbacks, and cataclysms has been dispiriting even to many of the agitators and demonstrators who shaped the movements in question and whom Bevins has spent the last 10 years or so following and interviewing in search of answers. 'The point was not just to notice that the mass protest decade hasn’t really worked out,' he muses toward the end of the book. 'The idea was to understand why.' Fortunately, he comes away from his globe-trotting search with critical lessons for activists both here and abroad. Setting the world afire, it turns out, is easier than one might expect. Tending to the flames is harder."
New Republic, The Mass Disappointment of a Decade of Mass Protest
Hello readers and welcome back! This time, we're continuing last year's theme of analysing the class struggle histories, successes and failures of the century's first twenty-five years with a deep dive into the 2010s-early 2020s' global protest movement, courtesy of Vincent Bevins' (known for The Jakarta Method) seminal historical analysis of the period, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. Thanks to one of our readers for the recommendation!
Not to put too fine a point on it: even before "world leaders" like Putin, Trump, and Netanyahu brought industrial-scale murder and militarised mayhem back to the front of westerners' minds, we were already - as predicted by many - living through one of the most politically turbulent periods in history, with more people out on the street in more countries than at any time before. In this text, Bevins takes a global sweep of protest movements from Brazil to the so-called Middle East to Hong Kong and beyond.
Think back for a moment: at the start of the "Arab Spring" and the Occupy movements, spooked-up deep state maniac Paul Mason once wrote a blog article entitled "Why it's kicking off everywhere"; as even a stopped watch is right twice a day, we can look back and agree that it really did kick off, everywhere.
So why, at the start of 2026, does it seem that the peoples of the world, in living memory never more dissatisfied with their ruling class, have never in living memory been more cowed, broken, scattered and disempowered?
We'll discuss whether Bevins' thoughtful analysis, which does not shy away from offering assessment and recommendation, provides some of the material for an answer to this question. We'll also discuss to what extent the seeds sown by protest movements in the past, including the very recent past, may be about to bear fruit in the present, and what role new forces and generations might play.
We'll read the introduction and chapters 19 and 20.
Do pick up the book if you can! The author has a purchasing guide here: https://vincentbevins.com/book2/
If not, here's an online copy:
https://dn721908.ca.archive.org/0/items/if-we-burn-the-mass-protest-decade-and-the-missing-vincent-bevins-2023-public-af/If%20We%20Burn_%20The%20Mass%20Protest%20Decade%20and%20the%20Missing%20--%20Vincent%20Bevins%20--%202023%20--%20Public%20Affairs%20--%209781541788978%20--%20b99d524e13d6a73d192760ac0207b4e0%20--%20Anna%E2%80%99s%20Archive.pdf
Take care and see you on the barricades!
3 attendees
![SINISTER FORCES: A Closer Look at Anti-Protest Technologies [INTERNATIONAL]](https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/3/5/3/a/highres_532513626.jpeg)
Past events
111
![Georgi Dimitrov, "The Unity of the Working Class Against Fascism" [1935]](https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/9/a/c/9/highres_532239625.jpeg)
