The class initiates what I hope will be a collective research and discussion about what could be a “new” critique of political economy (as a theory and activity) in the post-Marxian age. It will, understandably, involve a great deal of reading or revisiting of crucial passages in Marx’s work (essentially taken in the four volumes of Das Kapital), but also comparisons with later Marxist and Non-Marxist writings. It will try to identify essential conceptual connections and their possibilities of variations, as well as limits and “points of stress” (in the terminology of David Harvey) which call for a reformulation, if not a new foundation.
This year is devoted to discussing the correlative functions that the categories of “labour” and “labour-power” receive in Marx’s understanding of the critique. Special attention will be paid to the problematic distinction of “productive” and “unproductive” labour, the postulates of the “reproduction” of the labour-force as a “commodity”, and the intervention of class-antagonism into the contradiction of the “essential relationship” (wage-labour).
