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Course Description

Summary

“I, at least, am not a Marxist”&�Բ�����;Karl Marx

This course introduces students to Karl Marx’s magnum opus, Capital, through a careful reading of the original text and an exploration of all the places the book’s insights have travelled over the past 150 years. 

Admittedly, Capital is a difficult text. But its reading has become somewhat easier due to the incorporation of Capital as an organizing principle of twentieth century political economy, whether for or against. We live in a world deliberately made (and remade) in relation to Marx. Within that sweeping influence, there is a more tricky shadow cast: the constitution of the social sciences themselves. As Derrida once quipped, any science of the social is “haunted by Marx.” Indeed, the modern development of the social sciences – anthropology, economics, history, politics, psychology, and sociology – can be productively approached as an extended argument with Marx. And that’s exactly what we will do. Our reading of Capital will be a critical introduction to the social sciences themselves.

Over the course of the semester, we will make our way through Marx’s trenchant analysis of the emergence of capitalism and its consequence. With some detours through the intellectual context and spirited biography of Marx himself, our aim will be to grasp: 1) the philosophical kernel of the commodity in the making of capitalist society; 2) the ideological architecture and social contradictions of capitalism; 3) the historical agencies and endpoints unleashed by capitalism; 4) and the social world(s) that capitalism generates. Capital, however, is more than just a critical lens: it has become an influence in itself. Our aim will be less to deduce any singular backbone to Marxism than to take stock of the wealth of insight, boldness of analysis, and generosity of concepts forged in Capital. We will pause our reading of Capital several times to trace out specific insights that have become productive in their own right: commodity fetishism, means of production, surplus value, primitive accumulation, reserve army of labor, metabolic rift, and revolution.