Introduction Hearing or reading about the “contradictions of capitalism” in an article or at a rally might be intimidating, like a foreign language or a term only a certain group can understand. While the contradictions of capitalism are complicated, working and...
Introduction Every working person is keenly aware that prices are up. Nasty surprises and disbelief keep turning up at the register. People are being forced to forgo even the most minor and seemingly harmless comfort purchases, adding to the accumulation of the...
Introduction In August 1619, enslaved Africans touched foot in the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States. The centuries since witnessed the development of a racial system more violent, extractive, and deeply entrenched than any other in...
Introduction In the preface to the first edition of volume one of Capital, dated July 25, 1867, Marx introduces the book’s “ultimate aim": “to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society” [1]. Looking back 155 years later, it’s clear the book not only...
Course description: The first volume of Karl Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, which was originally published in 1867, remains a key resource for understanding the logic of capitalism to this day. Marx wrote the book--which was the only volume of...
Class description: In Part 8 of the book, Marx turns to a brief historical analysis and critique of bourgeois political-economy's "origin story" of capital. Throughout the book so far, Marx has assumed that the conditions of...
Class description: Looking at chapter 25, where Marx synthesizes the previous sections of the book to articulate the general laws (or tendencies) of capitalist accumulation, this class...
Class description: This class covers chapters 16-24. We begin with a discussion of "productive labor," highlighting the ways in which capitalism views and changes labor and clarifying the role that this concept plays in...
Class description: In this class we get at the first definitions of capital, labor-power, and surplus-value. Picking up on the introduction of money into the exchange process and the contradictions between use-value and...