Marx & Engels: Adept

Capital — the anatomy of the system

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

What you will learn

• Distinguish use-value from exchange-value, and grasp the labour theory of value.
• Understand commodity fetishism — why value seems to belong to things rather than to human labour.
• Understand labour-power as the commodity whose use-value is to create value.
• Grasp surplus value — unpaid labour-time — as the source of profit, extracted lawfully.
• Understand absolute surplus value — extending the working day to extract more unpaid labour.
• See the length of the working day as decided by class struggle, not by justice or contract.
• Understand relative surplus value — raising productivity to cheapen labour-power.
• Grasp the industrial reserve army and how accumulation produces wealth and misery together.

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…

Works read in this course

• Capital, Volume I — Marx's 1867 masterwork — the only volume he saw published; the commodity, surplus value, the working day, machinery, accumulation.
• Capital, Volume II — Edited by Engels from Marx's manuscripts (1885) — the circulation of capital, how value moves and reproduces.
• Capital, Volume III — Edited by Engels (1894) — the rate of profit, its tendency to fall, crisis, and how surplus value is shared out as profit, interest, and rent.
• A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy — Marx's 1859 first reckoning with the economists, and the famous Preface on base and superstructure.
• Socialism, Utopian and Scientific — Engels' 1880 popular distillation — the doorway through which most readers first met the theory.

Part of the Simposeum course library.