The New SPACE                                                                                

http://new-space.mahost.org  

Spring 2005

Instructor:  Andrew Kliman

Capital, Volume I

Tuesdays, 6-7:30 pm, March 1 – June 14

Fusion Arts Museum, 57 Stanton Street, NYC (corner of Eldridge & Stanton Streets;

1 block south of Houston and 1 block south of the 2^nd Ave. stop on the F and V trains)

Tuition:  $150–$180, sliding scale

Instructor’s e-mail:  Andrew_Kliman@msn.com . 

I am always happy to try to answer specific questions about the text.  The more specific the question, the more likely it is that I’ll have the time, and be able to, answer the question.

Course Description:  This 15-week course is devoted to Volume I of Karl Marx's Capital:  A critique of political economy. Marx analyzes the capital relation as a process of “self-expanding value.”  Throughout the course, we will stress the relevance of this concept to the contemporary expansionism of the capitalist system and the new movements against global capitalism.  The specific character of Marx's critique of capital, and its differences from others' critiques, will also be highlighted.

We will go through most of the text fairly carefully, but proceed quickly through some lengthy discussions of factual material – on struggles over the length of the workday, “machinofacture,” and the historical origins of the capitalist system – in order to have more time to devote to more difficult portions of the work.  The instructor will provide study questions to assist students as they work through the text. 

There will be no class on March 22.

Main Text:  Karl Marx, Capital:  A critique of political economy. Vol. I, “The Process of Production of Capital.”  Translated by Ben Fowkes.  Published in London by Penguin Books, and in New York by Vintage Books.  Various dates.

Students are strongly encouraged to obtain the Penguin (or Vintage) edition of Capital, since this is what will be cited in class.  The translation is more readable than the original one, and it will help a lot if we’re all on the same page – literally.  (The Penguin and Vintage editions are identical in terms of translation and page numbers.)

Supplementary Texts by Marx:  Students who have read Volume I before may benefit from the following.  I do not recommend that 1^st-time readers of Capital read these texts, since you have more than enough to read without them.

• Marx’s critique of Samuel Bailey and the “Verbal Observer,” in Part 3 of Marx’s Theories of Surplus-Value (Book 4 of Capital).  This material is invaluable for an understanding of the opening section of Chapter 1 of Vol. I.

• “The Form of Value”; Marx’s Appendix to the first (1867 German) edition of Vol. I.  In subsequent editions, this material is no longer in an appendix.  Much of it appears, in revised form, in Section 3 of Chapter 1. 

• Marx’s “Notes on Wagner.”  This are Marx’s marginal notes on the critique of Capital in a book by Adolph Wagner, a German economist.  Key issues include the methodology of Capital (especially Marx’s starting point) and its value theory.  Marx’s clarifications are often very illuminating, since Wagner’s (mis)interpretations of Capital are far from unique.

• “Results of the Immediate Process of Production” (included as an Appendix to the Penguin and Vintage editions of Vol. I).  A draft of the original ending of “Book I” of Capital, this text is helpful for an understanding of Chapters 7-15 (which deal with the immediate process of production), and of Marx’s brief remarks, in Chapter 16, on productive and unproductive labor and on the “formal” vs. the “real” subsumption of labor under capital.

• Marx’s draft manuscripts of Capital (the Grundrisse [1857-58], the 1861-63 manuscripts [including the Theories of Surplus-Value] and the 1864-65 manuscripts).

• A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).  This deals with commodities and money.

• Chapter 1 of the original 1867 German ed. of Vol. I, which is rather different from what we are reading, has been translated into English.

Secondary Literature:  I strongly urge everyone reading Capital for the first time (or for the first time in a long time) to refrain from reading others’ introductions to and primers on Capital, for now at least.  They make it harder, not easier, to understand the actual text.  It is almost impossible not to impose the secondary author’s apparently clear and simple “explanation” on the text one is reading.  That distances you from the text.  Please also bear in mind that every “explanation” is actually an interpretation, and generally a contested one. 

There is an enormous secondary literature on Capital from which seasoned readers can benefit.  I’ll be happy to make recommendations.

Reading Capital:  I think one understands Capital much better by engaging in a serious, careful reading of the text than by reading what others say about it.  The book is certainly hard, but you (yes, you) can understand the text itself.  What is needed is hard work, perseverance, and attention to detail.  By “attention to detail,” I do not mean focusing on a word or phrase and running with it.  On the contrary, it is essential to actively employ the hermeneutic method; that is, to understand the whole of the text by means of its parts and to understand the parts by means of the whole.  In other words, one must try to understand it in a way such that it becomes a coherent whole. 

I have been asked “how to read Capital.”  I do not think that a “master key” exists, because the aims and structure of the work are complex.  That is, the work addresses many different questions and it is made up of many different elements.  Thus my key piece of advice on how to read Capital is to focus on the specific problem Marx is tackling at a specific point and to read the text at each point as an argument meant to solve that problem.

I encourage interested students to form a study group.  Mastery of the text requires a good deal of study time out of class, and study groups have often proven to be quite helpful.  Class time will be made available in order to set up such a group.

Instructor:  I teach economics at a local university.  I have published extensively on Capital, crisis theory, and value theory, and am co-editor of The New Value Controversy and the Foundations of Economics (2004).   Currently, I am finishing a book that reclaims Capital from the myth of internal inconsistency, and I am working on a book-length study guide to Volumes II and III. 

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