Reading Groups
Sign up for Fall 2026 Reading Groups
Welcome! In Fall 2026, Metro DC DSA and its Political Education Working Group are excited to host 13 different reading groups on 13 different topics—and we’d love for you to join! Reading groups provide an opportunity to share learning and political education in a group setting, allowing members and supporters’ organizing and knowledge to develop alongside comrades.
Most (but not all) reading groups will be held in-person, and all groups have scheduled multiple in-person social meet ups and the option to meet online. Some groups are topic-driven and read a series of articles, while others are focused on a specific book. All meetings will be held in the evenings except where specified. No experience or knowledge is necessary before entering any group -and all readings and materials will be made available online or electronically for free!
See below for descriptions and links to various syllabi/calendars for upcoming reading groups. You can sign up for groups at the link below:
Reading Groups Listed by Meeting Day/Time
- Sundays
- Electoral Strategy Reading Group
- Gig Work and Service Work: Labor Reading Group
- Blue Power and Police Unions Reading Group
- Mondays
- New Magazine Essays: Metro DC DSA Discussion Club
- Organizing & Democracy Reading Group: Freedom Is an Endless Meeting
- Tuesdays
- Work, Prison, and Family Abolitions: Marxist Feminism Reading Group
- How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Reading Group
- Wednesdays
- Times in the Streets: Riots and Uprisings since 2010
- Global Poetry Reading Group
- The Violence of Borders: Community Defense Reading Group
- Thursdays
- Leftist Graphic Novel and Comics Reading Group
- Internationalism Reading Group: The Jakarta Method
- Saturdays
- Political Economy Reading Group: History of the American and Global Working Class
Sundays
Electoral Strategy Reading Group (online)
The Electoral Strategy for the 21st Century Reading Group will read a collection of essays, reports, and blog posts unpacking DSA’s electoral strategy in the wake of recent victories by DSA member candidates in DC and NYC. We will compare different chapters’ approaches to electoral politics and explore questions such as: Why do we engage in elections in the first place? How can we make strategic decisions about candidates we work with to advance our goals? What lessons can we learn from past electoral involvement both in our chapter and other chapters? This is a great group to join if you feel like there is never enough time during endorsement season to dive deep on these questions. The group will meet 5 times from September to November, with four virtual meetings and one in-person meeting.
Gig Work and Service Work: Labor Reading Group (in person with some meetings online, biweekly)
The Gig Work and Service Work: Labor Reading Group will meet every other week to read and discuss Annie McClanahan new book Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work. The book theorizes the foundations of our current economy in the system of global capitalism, connecting the crisis of profitability to the rise of the service sector and gig work. Members of the group will connect their experience with gig work and the service sector with the broader picture of racial and gender exploitation and the sector’s placement outside of traditional forms of regulation and labor organizing. The group is sponsored by the Labor Working Group and will meet in person on Sunday evenings every other week, often at restaurant and service sector locations -and sometimes will hold meetings online.
Blue Power and Police Unions Reading Group (online)
On Sunday nights, the Abolition Working Group will be reading, analyzing, and discussing Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves by Stuart Schrader, a fascinating book that covers how American law enforcement developed a political machine that made cops unaccountable. We will go into the guts of the American policing and legal systems, getting to the core of how cops have made civilians of all races and backgrounds (though some more than others) second class citizens in the United States. We’ll have 10 meetings starting on Sunday 9/13 and our final one on Sunday 11/15. Meetings will take place on Zoom every Sunday from 6-7:30 PM with a few in-person. Please join us to gain a critical understanding of why abolition matters and to discuss Metro DC DSA’s organizing to fight this lobby’s control over working conditions, impunity from oversight, and insulation from lean budgets.
Mondays
New Magazine Essays: Metro DC DSA Discussion Club (in person, monthly)
The New Magazine Essays Discussion Club meets in person in DC to discuss new essays from some of the Left’s most thought-provoking magazines. This is not like the rest of the reading groups—it’s a ~monthly club that has held meetings already and will continue meeting after the semester. 📚 During each meeting, the Club will discuss 3 essays from the latest issue of a featured magazine (like n+1, The Drift, Parapraxis, and more) that produces thought-provoking radical work regularly. 👋 All are welcome, and there are no requirements to attend! We’ll provide digital copies of all readings. 🗓️ The group doesn’t have a fixed schedule, but we’ll try to meet about once a month. 📬 Join our email list to hear about upcoming meetings and readings!
Organizing & Democracy Reading Group: Freedom Is an Endless Meeting (in person)
For new and experienced socialists, we often ask: how can democracy build our political strategy and socialism itself? When do we need deliberation, and when do we need action? To answer these questions, we will read Francesca Polletta’s classic work on participatory democracy in US social movements, Freedom Is An Endless Meeting. Continuing last summer’s reading group, After Accountability, we will cover the various formations of democracy in early labor struggles, pre-World War II pacifism, the movements of the 1960s and 1970s towards civil rights, the new left, women’s liberation movements, and in the early 2000s faith-based organizing and anti-corporate globalization campaigns. The reading group will connect the experiences and models for democracy and organization in those social movements to those of today.
Tuesdays
Work, Prison, and Family Abolitions: Marxist Feminism Reading Group (online)
The Work, Prison, and Family Abolitions Reading Group will read and discuss Kathi Weeks’ new book Abolition Archives, Feminist Futures. The book considers the archive of three iconic feminist thinkers—Angela Davis, Shulamith Firestone, and Donna Haraway—to ask how each author’s vision of work, the family, and the carceral state “scale up” marxist feminist interventions to meet the urgency of the moment. Additional readings burrow deeper into family abolition, eco- and xeno-feminism, and more. The reading group will meet virtually on Tuesdays, 7-8pm ET, starting mid-September.
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Reading Group (online)
The How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Reading Group will read and discuss Walter Rodney’s classic work detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. The group will read Rodney’s connection between Africa’s development and the direct imperial extraction from the continent on railways built for foreign markets. The group will meet in a virtual setting on Tuesday nights and will have occasional socials.
Wednesdays
Times in the Streets: Riots and Uprisings since 2010 (in person)
The Times in the Streets Reading Group is a new venture formed based on ad-hoc conversations on the youth-centered uprisings in the past year. We will now turn these discussions into a review of riots and uprisings emanating from the expanding world crisis since the 2008 Recession. We will focus on three periods of time: 1) 2019 into Covid, 2) the post-Covid Moment, and 3) the Risings in the past year. Each week we will discuss a new mass protest such as those in the Chilean anti-austerity protests and the Nahel riots in France. We will investigate the Why, What, and How of the people who rose up and what the enemies and challenges they faced. We will keep an internationalist perspective, focusing on semi-periphery and periphery areas of the World. But the Third World and First are not disconnected. So we will ask participants to think upon protests and uprisings since 2011, from Occupy to the Minneapolis resistance to ICE when learning about how people struggled in other parts of the planet.
Global Poetry Reading Group (online, monthly)
The Global Poetry Reading Group will read and discuss selections from around the world by anti-colonial, Leftist, and socialist poets. At times, poets will virtually join us to enlighten us about their works. Each month, we will explore a different region, group of people, or a specific poet. Participants can expect to read poems from the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico; Indigenous Americans; Sudanese people; murdered Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer; and disabled people, among others. This Reading Group is ongoing and will continue to meet when fall reading groups end. Poems will be provided ahead of our monthly meetings which are typically scheduled for the last Wednesday of the month from 7-8:30 pm. We will periodically meet in person to celebrate poetry and the hope of a better world.
The Violence of Borders: Community Defense Reading Group (in person)
The Violence of Borders reading group, sponsored by the Community Defense Working Group will read and discuss Against Borders: The Case for Abolition by Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha. This group is for anyone interested in the struggle for migrant justice and the political systems that gave rise to the Department of Homeland Security and more specifically, ICE. The group is for anyone who are brand new to these issues, people who are active in patrolling and agitating against ICE and the federal occupation, and those who are already well versed in border politics. The book focuses on the work borders do: divide workers and families, fuel racial division, and reinforce global disparities and encourage the expansion of technologies of surveillance and control far beyond border walls. We will supplement the book with a few additional readings that will be provided. The group will be held in-person.
Thursdays
Leftist Graphic Novel and Comics Reading Group (location TBD)
The Leftist Graphic Novel and Comics Reading Group will meet on Thursdays to discuss comics and graphics novels. Starting with The Hard Tomorrow, Radical – My Year With A Socialist Senator, and some selections of work from cartoonist Michael Deforge. The Group will continue with other notable works in the genre, with participants encouraged to share their own favorites with the group. The reading group will be a perfect place for fans of comics and graphic novels to connect with other lovers, and for those new to socialism to encounter ideas in these literary works.
Internationalism Reading Group: The Jakarta Method (online with some in person meetings)
The Internationalism Reading Group will read and discuss The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anti-Communist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins, a core contemporary work on how the US’s Cold War foreign policy led to genocide and dashed the dreams of radicals around the world. The book focuses on Indonesia but expands its scope around the world to see how brutal killings and repression “won” the Cold War for the US at the expense of blood and human rights. The group will meet online on Thursday nights.
Saturdays
Political Economy Reading Group: History of the American and Global Working Class (in person)
The Political Economy Reading Group will examine 2 classic works by Mike Davis on the American and global working class: Prisoners of the American Dream and Planet of Slums. Mike Davis is often considered one of the great American Marxist intellectuals of the late 20th century. We will confirm this by reading Davis’s bracing history of the American working class up to Reaganism. We will consider his analysis of why the American working class failed to construct an independent worker party.
We will then follow up by going global, reading Planet of Slums on the global defeat of the international peasantry in the 1980s. Davis will guide us through the migration of large parts of the global population into urban and semi-urban areas to birth an international informal labor mass in the slums. A mass in various stages of action in the past 10+ years. We will meet in person on Saturday evenings.
If you’re interested in what we’ve read previously or are looking for facilitation or community guideline resources for your own reading group, you can check out our resources page. If you have any questions about MDC DSA political education you can email us at politicaleducation@mdcdsa.org.