After the defeat of the 1848-50 revolutions in Europe, Marx acknowledged that he failed to provide an adequate analysis of the economic foundation of society and turned from a focus on organizing to an intense, life-long study of political economy. Catalyzed by the first global economic crisis in 1857 and after 10 years of concentrated study, he started the first of seven notebooks to self-clarify his work up to that point. Not published or available outside the USSR until 1953, Martin Nicolaus provided the first—and only —English translation of all seven notebooks in 1973 as the Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy.

The Invention of the White Race Volumes I & II, Theodore W. Allen's historical materialist analysis of racial slavery, documents how the plantation elite put in place this system of social control following Bacon's Rebellion of 1676. In the final stage of this uprising, an army of European and African chattel bond laborers burned Jamestown to the ground and temporarily drove Governor Berkeley into exile across the Chesapeake Bay.The terrified planter bourgeoisie, in a deliberate response to this display of labor solidarity, enacted a series of laws and practices in the late 17th and early 18th centuries which implanted a system of 'white' racial privileges that enabled the imposition of racial slavery and white male supremacy.

While Capital consists of three volumes, a basic familiarity with the key concepts and sections of Volume I offers many tools for understanding the mode of production we live under.

What is technology? Does technological change drive social change? Is technology independent of social relations? What are the consequences of “technological progress” under capitalism? What constraints does capitalism place on such progress?

Season 1: Changing Places in America

Herman Melville,  The Confidence-Man (1857). John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) Lisa Ko, The Leavers (2017)

In his 1970 essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction,” William Gass brought the term “metafiction” forward to the reading public as a way to characterize the work writers such as Borges, Barth, Flann O’Brien, as well as the type of novels Gass himself would write. He described metafiction as writing “in which the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed”. Does metafiction provide escape for the committed writer from the bourgeois strictures that the novel form imposes? As critical readers we need to check out all the angles. The metafiction form will over time become incorporated as yet another aspect of modern fiction as ultimately there is no way to over-ride what happens when ink is committed to paper, impulses to the interactive screen.

American fiction writers have lots to write about. We are introducing a four term look at writing by American authors who have novels appropriate to four themes important to critical thinkers of the broad American questions on nation, class, race and gender. Much of this fiction becomes part of what our unfolding reality is as a nation, group of nations, as aspiring internationalists. Many of the fictional works we will read are not as formally postmodern or would formally fall in the metafiction category as delineated by Barth.

Volume III integrates and completes the analysis of the process of capitalist production as a whole, enabling us to understand and make sense of how each of the appearances and processes we see occurring on the surface of society are related to the whole. When we do so all the laws of motion previously revealed in the first two volumes take on new dimensions. Internal dynamics and contradictions burst out and situate humanity withina historical process that calls us to figure out how to go beyond capital and develop the conditions that insure that the development of each is the precondition for the development of all.