It is often said that Capital, Volume I is concerned with the enfoldment of the capital form, with many dialectical twists and turns, but not with revolution. However, such a picture severs Marx the revolutionary from Marx the social theorist. In fact, Capital I can be connected to five different notions of revolution.
If we don’t do something real soon, I think you’ll have to agree that we’re going to be forced either to use the ballot or the bullet. It’s one or the other in 1964. It isn’t that time is running out—time has run out! —Malcolm X, 1964
In this course we will be concerned with some of the main ideas of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, focusing on the materialist understanding of history, and the theory of surplus value.
That the results of uprisings as diverse as the October Revolution, the Prague Spring and the Sandinista Revolution did not meet the revolutionaries’ expectations is a tragedy that requires explanation, but does not require us to deem those revolutionaries as failures.
The book’s historical focus is on the Russian Revolution, the failed German Revolution, the early years of the Soviet Union, the Prague Spring, the Sandinista Revolution and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.