Category: Undergraduate Courses

Having been wrongly identified with the Soviet Union and ‘actually existing socialism’, Marx was almost unanimously written off after the fall of the Berlin Wall and consigned to oblivion. Yet, since the outbreak of the current international economic crisis, his thought has again been attracting major attention: the study of his work is reviving almost everywhere, and university courses on Marx are again in vogue.

This course will centre on the critical interpretation of some of Marx’s main writings. It will examine various phases of his intellectual output: early philosophical and political writings, studies of political economy, historical and political works from 1848-1852, journalistic pieces from the 1850s, the drafting of Capital, political activity in the International Workingmen’s Association, the last decade of his life and work. The study of his intellectual biography will, it is hoped, bring out the theoretical gains that were decisive for the development of his thought. Reconstruction of the period and of his personal circumstances will always place the texts in their historical context, and a close examination of the drafts and preparatory materials will show the influence of certain predecessors and contemporaries in the formation of his own ideas. Close attention will also be paid to philological insights contained in recent German volumes of the historical-critical Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (many of which are still unknown in the English-speaking world), and the resulting new interpretations of Marx’s unfinished manuscripts (for example, the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology and Volumes Two and Three of Capital) will be compared with the erroneous readings of these texts by the main twentieth-century variants of Marxism.

The final part of the course will look critically at some characteristics of the main schools of Marxism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and consider the most important works published in recent years on the continuing relevance of Marx’s thought for an understanding of the contemporary world and its problems.

The course will centre on the principal European conceptions of Socialism between 1789 and 1989. Its first part will be dedicated to some of the most important Socialist thinkers of the Nineteenth Century (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, Proudhon, Lassalle, Marx, Bakunin, and the Fabians), while the second part will focus on the analysis of the main Marxist controversies and Socialist political experiences of the Twentieth Century (especially the Bernstein Debate of the Second International, and the so-called “actually existing socialism” in Soviet Union expressed in the works of Lenin and Stalin).

Goal of the course is to examine the characteristics and distinguishing features of the varied Socialisms articulated by the authors above. The selection of readings will focus on the writings in which these thinkers developed their theories of how a Socialist society should be economically and politically organized.

Special attention will be dedicated to Marx’s Socialism and to his critique of other Socialisms, including Anarchism. Though he never composed a single text specifically on Socialism and post-capitalist society, through his critique of capitalism Marx pointed to some of the key social features and relations of production in the “society of free producers” which would replace the capitalist social formation. The course will explore the originality of Marx’s theories in comparison with those of his socialist predecessors, as well as the differences between his ideas and the historical record of “actually existing Socialism”.

The last class will review the course and examine the most relevant contemporary Socialist theoretical and political interventions (such as those offered by Latin American socialist governments, the European Communist parties, the Socialist International, the so-called ‘Socialism of the XXI Century’, and the Alter-globalization movement).

Having been wrongly identified with the Soviet Union and ‘actually existing socialism’, Marx was almost unanimously written off after the fall of the Berlin Wall and consigned to oblivion. Yet, since the outbreak of the current international economic crisis, his thought has again been attracting major attention: the study of his work is reviving almost everywhere, and university courses on Marx are again in vogue.

This course will centre on the critical interpretation of some of Marx’s main writings. It will examine various phases of his intellectual output: early philosophical and political writings, studies of political economy, historical and political works from 1848-1852, journalistic pieces from the 1850s, the drafting of Capital, political activity in the International Workingmen’s Association, the last decade of his life and work. The study of his intellectual biography will, it is hoped, bring out the theoretical gains that were decisive for the development of his thought. Reconstruction of the period and of his personal circumstances will always place the texts in their historical context, and a close examination of the drafts and preparatory materials will show the influence of certain predecessors and contemporaries in the formation of his own ideas. Close attention will also be paid to philological insights contained in recent German volumes of the historical-critical Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (many of which are still unknown in the English-speaking world), and the resulting new interpretations of Marx’s unfinished manuscripts (for example, the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology and Volumes Two and Three of Capital) will be compared with the erroneous readings of these texts by the main twentieth-century variants of Marxism.

The final part of the course will look critically at some characteristics of the main schools of Marxism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and consider the most important works published in recent years on the continuing relevance of Marx’s thought for an understanding of the contemporary world and its problems.