Marx’s Capital

Catalog description

This course will be focused on the first volume of Marx’s Capital, the only volume of the “magnum opus” that Marx published in his own lifetime. It will not provide a general overview of Marx’s thought or life. Nor will we engage in an extensive survey of the impossibly voluminous secondary literature, whether interpretive or biographical. Instead, we will focus on his formulation of the “forms of existence” (Daseinsformen) that characterized what he called “bourgeois” or “civil society” (bürgerliche Gesellschaft), and of the “critique of political economy” out of which his argument was built. We will begin reading a few selections from earlier writings that will help us to think about the problems, questions and methods of inquiry and presentation that Marx brought to the critique of capital – as well as to identify possible discontinuities and reversals in the development of his thinking about these issues.