Workers' Liberty week school: Marx's Capital

This week school will help students equip themselves to inspire and lead Capital reading groups, using Otto Rühle's abridgement, in the months to come.

The writer Edmund Wilson, never a Marxist but for a time a socialist and a fascinated admirer of Trotsky, called Marx the "Poet of Commodities", and wrote: "there went into the creation of Das Kapital as much of art as of science. The book is a welding-together of several quite diverse points of view, of several quite distinct techniques of thought. It contains a treatise on economics, a history of industrial development and an inspired tract for the times..."

To study Capital thoroughly, to understand it, and to equip oneself to help others to understand it, is to understand the fundamental logic of capitalism as a developing system and the passions and forces generated within which provide the basis for a new society.

"In competing with the pundits of economics, Marx has written something in the nature of a parody ; and, once we have read Das Kapital, the conventional works on economics never seem the same to us again: we can always see through their arguments and figures the realities of the crude human relations which it is their purpose or effect to mask".

Session 1, Tuesday 11 to 1 - The value problem

Chapter 1 sections 1 and 2.

Session 2, Tuesday 1.30 to 3:30 - Commodity fetishism

Chapter 1, section 4

Session 3, Tuesday 4 to 6 - Value-forms and money

Chapter 1, section 3, and chapters 2 and 3

Session 4, Wednesday 11 to 1 - Capital and labour-power

Chapters 4 to 6

Session 5, Wednesday 1:30 to 3:30 - Interlude: Wages, Price, and Profit

Session 6, Wednesday 4 to 6 - The working day

Capital chapters 7-11

Session 7, Thursday 11 to 1 - The capitalist workplace

Capital chapters 12-14

Session 8, Thursday 1:30 to 3:30 - Developed capitalist industry

Capital chapter 15

Session 9, Thursday 4 to 6 - Productive and unproductive labour. Forms of wages.

Chapters 16-23

Session 10, Friday 11 to 1 - How capitalist production reproduces capitalist class relations

Chapters 24-25 and 32

Session 11, Friday 1:30 to 3:30 - The origins of capitalism

Chapters 26-31 and 33

Session 12, Friday 4 to 6 - Marx's political economy vs orthodox economics

You are asked to bring a copy of Otto Rühle's abridged edition of Capital. Preferably also a copy of the full book: copies are available cheap second-hand on the web, and any of the current English translations will do. And preferably also a copy of Marx's small pamphlet Wages, Price, and Profit, which dates from the same time as Capital.

If you need to have accommodation arranged for you in London, we can fix that. Cheap food will be available at the school at lunchtime and at 6pm each day, and tea, coffee, and snacks in the afternoon break and before the start of each day's session.

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To book, please email the information requested below to office@workersliberty.org, and click on the button below to pay £5 as a contribution to the costs of organising the school.

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