| 01 | -T-R--- | 1:00P-2:20P | Rudolph / 102 | Koziolek | No Final | 17 | 14 | 0 |
| Desc: | The subtitle of Marx's great work Capital is A Critique of Political Economy. But, curiously, the work itself takes the form of an ordinary political-economic treatise, of the sort written by Marx's predecessors, including, most famously, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. So in what sense is Capital a critique of political economy? This question will guide our reading of Capital (and other of Marx's writings) and our investigation of the nature and significance of the central concepts of its analysis of the capitalist mode of production, including, centrally, the concept of the commodity, the concept of labor, and the distinction between use value, value, and exchange value-as well, of course, as the concept of capital itself. Our first aim, in reading Marx, will be to understand how his analysis of capitalism could also serve as a critique of political economy-and so, implicitly, of its own method of analysis. Our second aim will be to develop, in conversation with Marx, our own answers to the questions (i) What is capitalism? (ii) What distinguishes it from other (actual or possible) social-political-economic systems? and (iii) What does it take to develop an adequate understanding of the workings of one's own social-political-economic system? |
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