Please fill out this application form in detail if you are interested in being a committed student in this collective reading of the second volume of Marx’s Capital.
Instructor: Derek Ford
Applications are due on Dec 23. You’ll be notified of your placement in the course via e-mail on Dec 24.
Apply soon! This virtual 5-week course is of limited capacity.
COURSE DATES
Thursdays, January 6 to February 3, 2022 | 6-8pm ET
ABOUT THE COURSE: This course is a collective, close reading of the second volume of Marx’s Capital: A critique of political economy. Whereas the first volume focuses on the production (and reproduction) of capital, this volume analyzes the circulation of capital. Having entered the “hidden abode of production” in volume 1, we now explicitly enter the realm of the reproduction and exchange of value (and surplus-value) and examine the complicated and intensely contradictory process of realizing values within the capitalist mode of production. Through such an examination, we’ll learn about a whole new host of crises within capitalism and their relation to the socialist struggle and the communist project.
We begin by analyzing the circulation process from the perspectives of three distinct kinds of capital: financial capital, productive capital, and merchant capital, discovering the potential for crises within and between each circuit. This helps to more precisely analyze the competing interests of different kinds of capitalists. We then turn to the requirements and barriers circulation, uncovering how and why capital has transformed the spatial and temporal organization of our world, before looking at the production and reproduction of circulating, fixed, and variable capital. At the end, we’ll spend time with Marx’s reproduction schemas.
Throughout the course, we’ll pay attention to the context of Marx’s writings and how that context relates to our own conjuncture, some of the secondary debates in Marxist theory on the book, and how its insights can help us better understand the process of socialist construction and advance our class’ position in the class struggle that is capitalism.
