Course description: The first volume of Karl Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, which was originally published in 1867, remains a key resource for understanding the logic of capitalism to this day. Marx wrote the book--which was the only volume of...
Class description: In Part 8 of the book, Marx turns to a brief historical analysis and critique of bourgeois political-economy's "origin story" of capital. Throughout the book so far, Marx has assumed that the conditions of...
Class description: Looking at chapter 25, where Marx synthesizes the previous sections of the book to articulate the general laws (or tendencies) of capitalist accumulation, this class...
Class description: This class covers chapters 16-24. We begin with a discussion of "productive labor," highlighting the ways in which capitalism views and changes labor and clarifying the role that this concept plays in...
Class description: In this class we get at the first definitions of capital, labor-power, and surplus-value. Picking up on the introduction of money into the exchange process and the contradictions between use-value and...
A 2020 report by the Institute for Policy Studies found that “Between 1990 and 2020, U.S. billionaire wealth soared 1,130 percent in 2020 dollars, an increase more than 200 times greater than the 5.37 percent growth of U.S. median wealth over this same period" [1]. In...
In January 2002, President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind. NCLB requires states to develop assessments (standardized testing) to measure skills in order to receive federal funding. No Child Left Behind began the hysteria of “high stakes testing.” The...
“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. ... From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social...
According to the most recent data released by the Federal Reserve, U.S. industrial production as measured by the Fed's manufacturing index (see chart), reached 101.2 in May, finally surpassing the previous peak of 101.0, reached in December 2007. Following that peak,...