Reading Marx’s Capital Volume I

We resume April 6 for a second 10-week series, beginning with Chapter 6, “The Sale and Purchase of Labor Power.”

Participants in this class are closely reading and discussing Volume I of Karl Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Marx wrote and published Capital during the critical years following the European Revolutions of 1848 and leading up to the Paris Commune. In this crucible of organizing and strategizing, Marx sought to provide “not a flimsy platform of rhetorical invective or wishful thinking, but the rock-like foundation of scientific truth” (Ernest Mandel, Introduction to Volume I).

The study of Capital has been at the core of the Marxist Education Project since its inception. Every generation involved in struggle since Marx’s time has rediscovered Marx’s sustained effort to describe and explain the origin and trajectory of modern society.

For key chapters or sections, we do a line-by-line reading with commentary and occasional supplemental materials. Participants read other sections on their own, and we summarize and discuss when we meet. We offer this course in 10-week segments, moving at a pace that accords with the interests and experience of the group. In line with Marx’s own approach in Capital, we both take it all very seriously and make it fun as well. If you have read Capital before – or if you have never read it – studying it together with us will deepen your understanding of the world today and refresh your political commitments.

Lisa Maya Knauer guides this group, along with other experienced MEP teachers. 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.

The second session runs for 10 weeks starting April 6. Participants may re-enroll for further sessions that will cover the remainder of the book.