Political Economy
The relationship among production, markets, institutions, class, and political power.
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Material classified under Political Economy
Learning
Smith: Division of Labor, Value, and Wages
Module 1 of Capital and Political Economy: reconstruct Smith's account of specialization, exchange, value, and wages before examining the tensions Marx inherits.
Ricardo: Labor, Wages, Profit, and Trade
Module 2 of Capital and Political Economy: reconstruct Ricardo's labor account of value and examine how wages, profit, rent, and trade fit together.
The Commodity, Value, and Social Form
Module 3 of Capital and Political Economy: follow Marx from use value and exchange value to socially necessary labor time and commodity fetishism.
From Money to Capital and Surplus Value
Module 4 of Capital and Political Economy: reconstruct the movement from money to capital and locate surplus value in the purchase and use of labor power.
Constant Capital, Surplus Value, and the Working Day
Module 5 of Capital and Political Economy: distinguish constant and variable capital, calculate the rate of surplus value, and analyze the working day as a contested relation.
Machinery, Productivity, and Relative Surplus Value
Module 6 of Capital and Political Economy: distinguish machinery's technical capacities from its capitalist use and trace how productivity reorganizes necessary and surplus labor.
Accumulation, Surplus Population, and Expropriation
Module 7 of Capital and Political Economy: connect accumulation to the relative surplus population and recover the historical separation presupposed by wage labor.
Circuits, Turnover, and Social Reproduction
Module 8 of Capital and Political Economy: follow money, productive, and commodity capital through time and test the conditions of social reproduction.
Profit, Competition, Credit, and Crisis
Module 9 of Capital and Political Economy: follow surplus value into profit, competition, interest, and credit without losing its origin in production.
From Abstract Categories to a Concrete Analysis
Module 10 of Capital and Political Economy: use Marx's abstract-to-concrete method and the machine fragment to construct a cumulative industry analysis.
Labor Power, Wages, and the Wage Relation
Week 3 of Marxism Fundamentals: diagram the wage exchange, distinguish labor power from labor, and explain why wage labor and capital reproduce one another.
Surplus Value and the Wage Struggle
Week 4 of Marxism Fundamentals: connect value, labor power, surplus value, profit, and the strategic importance and limits of wage struggles.
Transition, Distribution, and Communist Society
Week 6 of Marxism Fundamentals: distinguish production from distribution, compare lower and higher phases of communist society, and integrate the pathway's concepts in a final a...
American Capitalism and the State
Study how constitutional institutions, corporations, infrastructure, public administration, and finance shaped American development.
Capital and Political Economy
Move from the commodity and money through exploitation, accumulation, circulation, competition, crisis, and finance.
Markets, Planning, and Socialist Democracy
Work through the calculation debate, information problems, institutional design, socialist experience, and democratic coordination.
Marxism Fundamentals
Learn the basic vocabulary and method of historical materialism, class analysis, value, exploitation, and political power.
Marxist Feminism: Social Reproduction Theory
Analyze how capitalism depends upon the unpaid reproduction of labor power, the 1970s domestic labor debate, and the development of unitary social reproduction theory.
Marxist-Leninist Core Curriculum
A 24-week intensive study of the primary texts that establish the Marxist-Leninist framework of materialism, political economy, state power, organization, imperialism, national ...
Library and reference
Capital, Volume I
Marx's systematic critique of capitalist production, from the commodity and value-form through exploitation, accumulation, and primitive accumulation.
Value, Price and Profit
Marx's compact explanation of value, labor power, surplus value, profit, wages, and the strategic importance and limits of trade-union struggle.
The Federalist Number 10
James Madison's primary-source discussion of faction, unequal property, political interests, and representative government.
Value, Price and Profit
Marx's compact explanation of value, labor power, surplus value, profit, wages, and the strategic importance and limits of trade-union struggle.
Capital, Volume I
Marx's systematic critique of capitalist production, from the commodity and value-form through exploitation, accumulation, and primitive accumulation.