Reading Karl Marx I

For those of you who haven't read Marx before, Simon's Introduction, together with Therborn's chapter, will help you get started. Those familiar with some of Marx's work or with other secondary sources, will find them useful to refresh their memory and, perhaps, a challenge to some of their currently held views on Marx. This will particularly true of Therborn's chapter. I am critical of some of Simon's interpretations, but I will save my comments for the seminar. In the meantime, read both primary and secondary sources carefully, writing down everything you don't fully understand. I will explain in the seminar.

INTRODUCTION

Historical Materialism

1. Critique of Hegel How do men make history? What is the key to understanding history?
2. Important concepts material conditions/means of production/social relations of production/mode of production
3. Relationship between ownership of means of production, power, and the theory of class and class relations
4. Superstructure/ elements of the superstructure/relationship with the base/direction of causality
5. Ideology

The Analysis and Critique of Capitalism

1. Alienation/the different forms of alienation
2. Marx's philosophical anthropology/the significance of labor
3. Capital-labor relations at the level of market exchange relations and at the level of production relations
4. The meaning of exploitation
5. Necessary product/labor/Surplus product/labor

Communism

1. Conditions for revolutionary activity
2. Characteristics of post-revolutionary society
3. Problems of the transitional/socialist stage
4. Distribution principle under socialism and under communism
5. Relationship between Marx's philosophical anthropology and his characterization of communism