POLS 6060.3/SPTH 6200A.3 Winter 2017 David McNally Appropriating Marx’s Capital

Final Essay Questions Due date: April 6 Length: 4000 words

All topics dealing with issues raised by Marx’s Capital are acceptable. It is recommended that you discuss topic and secondary readings in advance with the course director.

General topics include the following:

1. “Primitive Accumulation” and any of the following related problems: violence; dispossession; colonialism; the commons. Other readings:  Massimo De Angelis in Historical Materialism 12.2  John Saville, “Primitive Accumulation and Early Industrialization in Britain,” Socialist Register 1969  David Harvey, The New Imperialism and responses in Historical Materialism 14.4 (2006)  Stefano Liberti, Land Grabbing: Journeys in the New Imperialism  For readings on gender and primitive accumulation, please consult me. For a start see Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch

2. Capitalism and Time  Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination  Stavros Tombazos, Time in Marx  Jonathan Martineau, Time, Capitalism, and Alienation

3. The Capitalist Labour Process – including machinery and mechanization; relative surplus value; the collective labourer. Other readings:  Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital  Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production  Nick Dyer-Witherford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High TechnologyCapitalism  Tony Smith, Technology and Capital in the Age of Lean Production

4. The Law of Value and Value Form Analysis. Other readings:  I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value  Diane Elson, ed., Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism  Ben Fine, ed., The Value Dimension  Chris Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (and the symposium on this book in Historical Materialism 13.2)  Recent debates in Historical Materialism (Kicillof and Starosta, 2011) and Capital and Class (Bonefeld 2010, 2011; Kicillof and Starosta, 2011)

5. “The Negation of the Negation” – revolutionary consciousness and the post capitalist alternative. Other readings:  Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution  Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness

1  David McNally, Against the Market  Bertell Ollman, ed., Market Socialism: The Debate Among Socialists

6. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation. Other readings:  Simon Clarke, Marx’s Theory of Crisis  Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital

7. Capital Accumulation, Labour Power and Household Labour  Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women (with Introduction by Ferguson and McNally)  Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale  Special issue of Science and Society (v. 69, n. 1, 2005) on Marxism and Feminism Today  Sue Ferguson and David McNally, “Precarious Migrants: Gender, Race and the Social Reproduction of a Global Working Class,” Socialist Register 2015

8. Capitalism and Slavery  Jairus Banaji, “Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History,” Capital and Class 3 (1978)  Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery  Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism  Walter Johnson, “The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question,” Journal of the Early Republic, 24 (Summer 2004)  John Clegg, “Capitalism and Slavery,” Critical Historical Studies (Spring 2016)

9. Fetishism, Alienation, Reification. Other readings:  Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness  Bertell Ollman, Alienation  Istvan Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation  Louis Althusser, For Marx  Norman Geras, “Essence and Appearance: Aspects of Fetishism in Marx’s ‘Capital’,” New Left Review n. 65, 1971  Karl Marx, Early Writings (especially the 1844 manuscripts)

8, Capitalism and the Environment. Other Readings:  Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature  John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology  Ted Benton, ed., The Greening of Marxism

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