Reading Marx’s Capital, Volume I

“Scornful neglect and intemperate hostility, haughty dismissal…, selective co-optation and … bowdlerization”: this is how Marcello Musto, author of The Marx Revival, describes responses to the ideas of Karl Marx by respectable pundits over the past century. To truly appreciate Marx’s thinking, there is no substitute for a close reading of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Marx’s sustained effort to describe and explain the origin and trajectory of modern society: of “capitalism,” a system of production that now dominates the most remote corners of the globe. Marx was arguably the first writer on the subject to immerse himself not only in theories of political economy but in concrete economic and sociological data (such as it was at the time). The study of Capital is at the core of the Marxist Education Project.

Participants in this class will closely read and discuss Marx’s Capital, volume 1, guided by Lisa Maya Knauer and other experienced students of Marx from the MEP. We will use a hybrid approach to cover the entire book. For key chapters or sections, we will do a line-by-line reading with commentary and occasional supplemental materials. Participants will read other sections on their own, and we will summarize and discuss when we meet. The course is offered in 11-week segments, recurring until we have read the entire book (however long that takes).

Lisa Maya Knauer has been involved with Marxist education in New York for her entire adult life, and has taught a variety of classes at the MEP and its predecessors. Her current activist work focuses on immigrant workers’ rights and indigenous struggles for land and water. In her day job, she is a tenured radical at a public university.

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