Eco 357k

Introduction to Marxian Economics

SYLLABUS

Fall 2011
Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 9:00-10:00am, PAR 201
Professor Harry Cleaver
Office: BRB 3.162
Office Hours: T:8:00-10:00am, MW:10:00-11:00 Email address: hmcleave@austin.utexas.edu

TA: Eric Slusser:
Office: BRB 4.126
Office Hours: T 1-3pm, W 12-1pm, F 1-2pm. Email address: esslusser@gmail.com

Warning! Although this is a writing component course, due to various circumstances, the recommended number of registered students has been exceeded. No comparable increase in teaching staff has been assigned. As a result, it is inevitable that both the quantity and quality of help with improving your writing you are likely to get will suffer.

Course Description: Content

Marxian economics is an analytical framework for studying the development and crises of modern capitalist societies. Within that framework it studies all the usual topics of economics: labor economics, macroeconomics, the behavior of the firm, technological change, commerce and trade and so on, at both the national and international levels. This course provides an introduction to this body of work through the reading of Volume I of Karl Marx's major work: Das Kapital, and through the application of that work to the analysis of contemporary society and its crises.

In the roughly one hundred and thirty years since Marx died (1883) his work has been used and abused by a wide variety of people and political groups. Rather than presenting a survey of the many and varied interpretations of Marx, I present my own interpretation which is typical of one of many different approaches. You are thus presented the opportunity of reading Marx in the original and then comparing that reading with the interpretation I present in class. Studying Marx himself gives you a basic point of reference for judging what I have to say as well as a chance to develop your own interpretation. This provides, I believe, a good beginning for anyone curious about Marx as well as for those interested in further study of the history and current uses of Marxism.

In this course Capital is studied primarily within the present. That is, the course is oriented toward the relevance of Marx's ideas today rather than an interpretation of the text within the mid-19th Century when it was written. This involves not only thinking the analytical categories in the present, but also extending them to new spheres of social relations which have developed since Marx wrote. Most importantly this means extending the analysis to those periods of time which workers have successfully liberated from factory and office work, but which have been subsequently colonized by capitalist relations, e.g., the time of children, of housewives and of peasants, as well as the so-called leisure time of workers in general. We will look at how the struggle over work in the factory and office is paralleled by a struggle over work in these spheres of life, over the degree to which these periods of time can be used by people for themselves and the degree to which they find themselves reduced to the work of reproducing current class relations.

Course Description: Form

You therefore have several obvious opportunities to study and think about the material in this course: in lectures you can listen and perhaps intervene, during office hours you have a chance for one-on-one discussion with the professor and/or the teaching assistant, through Blackboard forums you can discuss various issues with other class members and finally during the composition of your essays you can use the act of writing to clarify and organize your thinking. Beyond these opportunities, I would encourage you to take the initiative and create one more: study groups. Getting together with other students to discuss the material of the course on a regular basis (I am not talking here about "cram" sessions before tests) gives you opportunities not only to ask questions of your peers that you might hesitate to ask in class, but also to answer others' questions, or suggest alternative interpretations. It is often during such discusions that you find out just how well you really understand things by discovering how well, or how poorly, you can articulate what you think you know.

Study Materials

Along with the first volume of Capital, you should read my book, Reading Capital Politically (RCP), which spells out in some detail my views on Marx, on his interpretation and on others' views. The introduction situates my position among the various currents of Marxism, and the other chapters provide a detailed analysis of Marx's concepts of value in the first chapter of Capital. I have also included, on the course website, copies of several "prefaces" to the English editions and to various foreign language editions of RCP. These prefaces in some ways update my views in the book.

In the past, I have also asked students to supplement the sometimes dry, analytical material of Capital, by reading some social literature dealing with the kind of society and social problems Marx is talking about. The idea was to look at the class problems of capitalist society from another angle, a more human one where the emphasis is on the reality of individuals rather than on "social science". To facilitate this, I ordered two novels for the course: Elizabeth Gaskell's book Mary Barton, written in 1848 about working class life in Manchester and Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle, written in 1905 about the life of Lithuanian immigrants working and struggling in and around the meatpacking industry of Chicago. This semester, because of the writing component work required in this course, I have NOT ordered these books. I still recommend them, but their reading is not required. You will also find, in the study guide to Capital that is provided on the course website, a variety of passages taken from various works of fiction which both illustrate the issues at hand and make them more concrete. The "study guide" is made up of a set of chapter-by-chapter outlines, commentaries, and study questions (with possible answers to some of the questions), on Capital.

The text of Reading Capital Politically is also provided on the course website along with old tests and supplementary materials which are all designed to help you work your way through the books.

To help you work on your writing, I have ordered William Strunk & E. B. White, Elements of Style, 4th Edition, New York: Longman, 1999. This is a short but classic work on how to write clear English prose and essays. You will probably find it very useful in reading the book to make note of things you need to work on. When you get your essays back with commentaries and suggestions you will also find it useful to add to your list problems that have been pointed out to you. As the semester progresses, such a list can become a "check-list" of things to watch for and correct in your own new compositions. There are obviously many ways to write well; the "elements of style" recommended by Strunk & White are just one set of "elements". But they do provide, I think, a useful point of departure in developing your own "elements" of your own style.

Finally, in general, my lectures will be accompanied by Powerpoint slides. I suggest printing-out the slides (you can do this with 3-6 to a page) before each class and bringing them with you so you will not have to take many notes, but can think and engage in in-class discussion instead.

Suggested Study Method

• Your own notes summarizing Marx's arguments (chapter by chapter, section by section) and also integrating them (across chapters, etc.),
• Class notes on my lectures and class discussions, and finally, most importantly,
• Your own comments on Marx, critiques of my comments and your own interpretations of the subject matter.

The notebook could be designed as follows: a spiral or loose-leaf notebook with notes spread across two opposing pages. The left page divided in two vertically with the left column for notes on Marx and the right column for class lecture notes, the right page for your own commentaries. I strongly recommend that you keep your reading and note taking ahead of class lectures. If you have read, studied and taken notes on material before it is covered in class, then when you listen to the lectures, you will be in a much better position to understand and evaluate what is being said, to ask questions or to offer your own interpretations. If you get behind in this class, you are in real trouble! The notebook can provide you with a unified, compact instrument for studying and thinking about the materials. It would also be - along with study groups - your best preparation for tests.

Prerequisites

This said, it is also true that the more background you have in English history (from which Marx draws most of his examples), European philosophy (especially Hegel), 19th Century European politics (within which Marx was operating) and 20-21th Century American social history and class politics (from which I draw most of my examples in lectures), the more you are going to be able to absorb and critically evaluate the material in readings and lectures. In terms of the economics department you must have upper division status.

Requirements

The Writing Assignments

1. The course must include at least three writing assignments per semester, exclusive of exams and quizzes.

Three writing assignments: a) an essay early in the course dealing with your personal experience of learning and appropriation – especially, but not limited to your experience with economics and Marxism.(25% of your grade) b) one short essay on course content (10% of your grade) and c) a final essay towards the end of the course on what you have appropriated (or not) from the course content. (25% of your grade) The first and last essays are to be submitted directly to the professor (see below). At least one of these assignments must be revised and resubmitted for final grading.

2. The three or more writing assignments must total approximately 16 typewritten, double-spaced pages (about 4,000 words.)

The first and last essay assignments on appropriation should be approximately 6 pages each; the shorter essay should be approximately 4 pages.

The last, five page essay on appropriation will amount to a major rewriting of the first essay in the light of the material studied during the semester.

With respect to the short essay posted to Blackboard, you are invited to provide at least one other person with feedback – both with respect to substance and quality of writing. After you have written and submitted your own short essay, read someone else’s and tell them what you think. With respect to the two essays on appropriation, this is the tough part, given the large number of students registered for the course and the limited time and energy of both the professor and teaching assistant. We’ll do the best we can.

As indicated, the grades given on writing assignments will count for 60% of your final grade. The grades you receive will reflect our judgement of the “quality of your written expression.”

The “Appropriation” Essays

The first essay should be submitted by end of the third week of classes, i.e., for Fall 2011 that would be Wednesday, September 14, 2011. It will be graded and will be returned to you with comments, ASAP. The second essay must be submitted by November 23, 2011 - the last class day before Thanksgiving Break. In both cases, the essay should be about six pages long and e-mailed – as digital attachments – in MSWord or a format openable by MSWord (do NOT send pdf’s) – to both the professor and the teaching assistant. More detailed formatting instructions will be provided in a Blackboard forum.

Repeatedly, I have discovered that many students, never having done anything like this before, find this assignment difficult both to understand and to execute. To clarify what I am asking for I have written an essay on "Learning, Understanding and Appropriating" - that you can find among the other supplementary materials on this website - that includes some examples, including my own.

Tests

The other 40 per cent of your grade will derive from your scores on two tests, each worth 20 per cent of your final grade and each covering about one half of the material in the course. The second test will be given on the last day of class and will only cover the second half of the course. The tests generally consist of essay questions and require not only knowledge of Marx's writings and my comments on them, but also the abilities to analyze, to synthesize, to critique and to offer alternative interpretations. In short, the tests (like the essays) require you to think and not simply to regurgitate the material. Several old tests, complete with answers, are provided on the course web page to give you an idea of the kinds of questions you might be asked and the kinds of answers expected.

The short essay, to be posted to a Blackboard forum, will be due on October 20.

NB: Students with disabilities may request appropriate academic accomodations from the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, Services for Students with Disabilities, 471-6259.

Course Schedule

• First day of class, general overview of course, requirements. We will dive directly into the material with the eighth section of Capital and then, once you have seen something of Marx, I'll explain in more detail my particular approach to his work.
• Capital, Pt. VIII: On Primitive Accumulation; and RCP, Chapter 2. These chapters in Capital present Marx's most detailed analysis of the emergence of capitalism. They concentrate on the origins of the two classes, the rise of the bourgeoisie to power and the methods it used to coerce much of the population into working for it. The second chapter of Reading Capital Politically (RCP) gives an interpretation of the nature of the changing forms of the class relationships of struggle that emerged and continue within capitalist society. One emphasis will be on the way the new relations were imposed and the resistance to that imposition.
• RCP, Introduction. This introduction contains numerous references to all kinds of political groups and writers with whom you may not be familiar. Instead of being overwhelmed, concentrate on the analysis of different kinds of Marxism and on what characterizes my "political" reading of Marx.
• Capital, Pt. I: On Commodities and Money; and RCP, Chapters 3-5 (the rest of the book). Given some familiarity with Marx's political views and his analysis of the emergence of capitalist society that places commodity exchange at the center of social relations, we now turn to an examination of his most methodically developed analysis of the class relations of capitalist society: Capital, Pts. I - VII. In Part I, we find a very abstract and dense analysis of commodity exchange in terms of "value." Much debated among Marxists, and between Marxists and non-Marxists, the category of value is understood in RCP as a concept which designates both the imposed work which is at the core of the capital-labor relationship, and the form of that imposition (exchange). Most students find this section the hardest in the course - because of the abstractness of the discussion - and the interrelated reading of Capital, Pt. I and RCP is suggested. Lectures will provide a verbal exposition of the interpretation of RCP, that is they will show how the categories developed in this part are those of the class relations whose emergence was analyzed in Pt. VIII.

• First Test

• Capital, Pt. II: On Money and Capital. These chapters make the formal transition from the analysis of commodities and money in the abstract to their role in the class relation. Because we will have already discussed those class relations some of this material will be obvious. On the other hand, much of the discussion of the roles of money will be new and important in understanding money in class terms.
• Capital, Pt. III: Absolute Surplus Value and the Struggle over Time. In this section Marx elaborates his analyses of exploitation and surplus value under capitalism. He begins with the most fundamental form of exploitation: the way capitalists during the height of their power forced people to work longer and longer hours in order to generate more and more profits, which, we will discover later in Pt. VII, could be used to put ever more people to work. At the same time we also find his analysis of how people resisted this reduction of the entirety of their lives to labor and their "degradation to mere worker." Thus the story of absolute surplus value is the story of the struggle over how much time people would be forced to give up to business and how much time they would be able to preserve for themselves. We will extend this analysis into the domain of non-factory, unwaged work --in the home, in the school, in culture and in the countryside.
• Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Mary Barton: Although I suggest that you start reading this novel at the beginning of the course, you will not be tested on it, and the material related to it, until the second test. (NB: this novel is not required in Fall 2011.)
• Capital, Pt. IV: Relative Surplus Value and the Struggle over Productivity and the Appendix. With workers' successes in blocking the expansion of the working day, and ultimately in reducing it, capital has been forced to become more subtle, to learn how to harness workers' imagination rather than just putting their muscles to work. It has had to throw its resources into developing technology and productivity. In these chapters we find Marx focusing on the structure and social relations of work and production -- a subject which today has been jettisoned by the economics profession and adopted by other fields, such as sociology and psychology. Here we also find Marx's discussion of the cruelest paradox of capitalism: that the accumulation of workers' imagination and creativity in ever new, more productive technology is used, under capitalism, not to free them from labor but to further enslave them.
• Capital, Pt. VI: On Wages. In part, this is a continuation of the analysis of the labor market begun in Chapter 6 and developed more fully in Pts. III and IV, but it deals mainly with the various forms of the money wage and how capital tries to manipulate them to extort more work from people. We will see how Marx's analysis of the wage form can be applied to a variety of non-wage situations including school-work and house-work.
• Capital, Pt. VII: On Accumulation and Crisis. These chapters deal with the investment process and how profits are used to recreate the class relation on an ever larger scale. Here profits appear not simply as an end in themselves, desired by greedy bosses, but rather as the means to the more general end of the expanded reproduction of the system itself. Marx also shows how the accumulation of capital involves the accumulation not only of waged workers but also of unwaged workers: the "unemployed" reserve army. We will extend this discussion to other categories of the unwaged. Finally, in this discussion of the aggregate process of growth, Marx analyses the periodic crises of capitalism which we will examine in terms of cycles of struggle, working class power and crises in class relations.
• Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle: Although I suggest that you start reading this novel, and the material that goes with it, as soon as you have finished reading Mary Barton, you will only be tested on it at the end of the course, in your third test. (NB: this novel is not required in Fall 2011.)

• Second (and last!) test, (this test will be given on the last day of classes, December 2, 2010).