Marx & Engels: Adept

Capital — the anatomy of the system

A course on the thought of Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels.

Course outline

1. The Commodity and Its Secret — Capital opens not with banks or bosses but with the humblest thing — a single commodity — and finds it bewitched: a social relation between people wearing the mask of a relation between things.
2. Labour-Power and Surplus Value — The riddle at the heart of Capital: if every exchange is fair, where does profit come from? The answer is one peculiar commodity — the worker's capacity to labour — which produces more than it costs.
3. The Working Day — Once profit is unpaid time, every hour is contested. The working day becomes open class war — capital pressing the hours outward with a werewolf hunger, the workers fighting them back by force of law.
4. Machines and the Reserve Army — The machine, sold as the worker's liberation, becomes his rival and his master — throwing him into the streets to form an army of the unemployed that disciplines everyone still inside the gates.
5. Crisis and the Falling Rate of Profit — Capitalism's crises are not accidents or bad luck but its own machinery working — the rate of profit tending to fall, gluts breaking out amid want. The system, Marx argues, is its own true barrier.
6. The Unfinished Cathedral — Marx died with Capital a cathedral half-built — Volumes II and III a heap of manuscripts in a hand only Engels could read. Engels gave his last decade to completing it, and to drawing, in plain…

Part of the Simposeum course library.