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COURSE SUMMARY |
This course covers Capital volume 1 in 11 weeks. The basic reading is Otto Rühle's abridgement of 'Capital', copies of which are available from the AWL, or you can read / download the document in ten parts from this website. The more you can read beyond that, the better, of course. The parts of Rühle's abridgement correspond roughly, but not exactly, to Marx's chapters, so under each week below both the relevant parts of Rühle and the relevant chapters from Marx are indicated.
Each of the eleven sessions links to discussion points. A session will start with a brief introduction to the issues under study, and how they relate to previous and later sessions. Then time can be given for reading: in every session except week 8 the basic reading is short enough to be done then and there. The class is then divided into small groups - of two, three, or four - to study the discussion points and write responses with felt-tip pens on large sheets of paper. Finally, the different responses are stuck up on the wall, and the whole class comes together to discuss them.
Week 1: The value problem
What relations between people lie behind the relations between things
in the marketplace?
Reading: Rühle chapter 1 sections 1 and 2; Marx chapter 1 sections 1 and 2
Extra reading: "A dialogue with the future"
Week 2: Communism and commodity fetishism
Marx's critique of bourgeois ideology and bourgeois socialism
Reading: Rühle chapter 1 section 4; Marx chapter 1 section 4
Week 3: The value form and money
What is money? How do prices represent labour-time?
Reading: Rühle chapter 1 section 3 and chapters 2 and 3; Marx chapter 1 section3 and chapters 2 and 3
Extra reading: Marx on Aristotle on value
Week 4: The transformation of money into capital
Where do profits come from? How can workers be paid a 'fair wage' and
yet be exploited? What is capital?
Reading: Rühle chapter 4; Marx, chapters 4, 5 and 6
Extra reading: Marx on the 'abstinence theory'
Extra reading: Summary of weeks 1 to 4, chapters 1 to 6
Week 5: The production of absolute surplus value
Exploitation and the struggle over the length of the working day
Reading: Rühle chapters 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9; Marx chapters 7 to 11
Week 6: Interlude: "Wages, Price and Profit"
The struggle over wages
Reading: Marx, "Wages, Price, and Profits"
Week 7: The production of relative surplus
value: cooperation and manufacture
How capital develops production into a socialised, cooperative
process; how it makes 'abstract labour' a social reality.
Reading: Rühle chapters 10 to 12; Marx chapters 12 to 14
Week 8: The production of relative surplus
value: the capitalist factory
How capital makes science and technology a means for intensifying
rather than lightening labour; and how it creates a many-faceted,
diverse, and yet collective working class capable of transforming
society into a free association of producers.
Reading: Rühle chapter 13; Marx chapter 15
Week 9: Productive and unproductive labour.
Wages. Accumulation of capital
Productive and unproductive labour for capital. The wages struggle.
Why capitalism breeds unemployment. Concentration and centralisation
of capital. The workers' struggle against capital.
Reading: Rühle chapters 14 to 20, 21 to 23, and end of 24; Marx chapters 16 to 25, and 32.
Week 10: Primitive accumulation of capital
Capitalist production has not always existed; how did it come into being?
Reading: Rühle chapter 24; Marx chapters 26 to 31.
Week 11: Marx's analysis vs. bourgeois
alternatives and critiques
Essential reading: Stanley Jevons on value, wages
and profit
Re-reading: summary of 'Capital' chapters 1 to 6
Extra
reading: Marx on the 'Trinity Formula'
From the discussion point there are links to crib-sheets offering help to tutors. The comments offered in these crib-sheets are not 'the right' answers to the questions posed. Much more can be said on these questions, what is said can be said in different ways, and on some of them there is argument among Marxists. These are offered as some answers which may be useful.
Queries, corrections, criticisms, objections, or suggestions to Martin Thomas.