Thursdays, 5:30pm, Kresge Library/Study Center Rm. 356 (upstairs)
Week 1. What is the Left? I. Capital in history | Oct. 6, 2016
• epigraphs on modern history and freedom by Louis Menand (on Marx and Engels) and Karl Marx, on “becoming” (from the Grundrisse, 1857–58)
• Chris Cutrone, “Capital in history” (2008)
• Cutrone, “The Marxist hypothesis” (2010)
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Week 2. What is the Left? II. Bourgeois society | Oct. 13, 2016
• Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view” and “What is Enlightenment?” (1784)
• Benjamin Constant, “The liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns” (1819)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the origin of inequality (1754)
Rousseau, selection from On the social contract (1762)
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Week 3. What is the Left? III. Failure of Marxism | Oct. 20, 2016
• Max Horkheimer, selections from Dämmerung (1926–31)
• Adorno, “Imaginative Excesses” (1944–47)
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Week 4. What is the Left? IV. Utopia and critique | Oct. 27, 2016
• Leszek Kolakowski, “The concept of the Left” (1968)
• Marx, To make the world philosophical (from Marx’s dissertation, 1839–41), pp. 9–11
• Marx, For the ruthless criticism of everything existing (letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843), pp. 12–15
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Week 5. What is Marxism? I. Socialism | Nov. 3, 2016
• Marx, selections from Economic and philosophic manuscripts (1844), pp. 70–101
• Marx and Friedrich Engels, selections from the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), pp. 469-500
• Marx, Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League (1850), pp. 501–511
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Week 6. What is Marxism? II. Revolution in 1848 | Nov. 10, 2016
• Marx, The coming upheaval (from The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847) and Class struggle and mode of production (letter to Weydemeyer, 1852), pp. 218-220
• Engels, The tactics of social democracy (Engels’s 1895 introduction to Marx, The Class Struggles in France), pp. 556–573
• Marx, selections from The Class Struggles in France 1848–50 (1850), pp. 586–593
• Marx, selections from The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), pp. 594–617
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Week 7. What is Marxism? III. Bonapartism | Nov. 17, 2016
- Karl Korsch, “The Marxism of the First International” (1924)
• Marx, Inaugural address to the First International (1864), pp. 512–519
• Marx, selections from The Civil War in France (1871, including Engels’s 1891 Introduction), pp. 618–652
- Korsch, Introduction to Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1922)
• Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, pp. 525–541
• Marx, Programme of the Parti Ouvrier (1880)
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Week 8. What is Marxism? IV. Critique of political economy | Nov. 24, 2015
• Marx, selections from the Grundrisse (1857–61), pp. 222–226, 236–244, 247–250, 276–293 ME Reader pp. 276-281
• Marx, Capital Vol. I, Ch. 1 Sec. 4 “The fetishism of commodities” (1867), pp. 319–329
[]Winter break readings
Richard Appignanesi and Oscar Zarate / A&Z, Introducing Lenin and the Russian Revolution / Lenin for Beginners (1977)
Sebastian Haffner, Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918–19 (1968)
Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940), Part II. Ch. (1–4,) 5–10, 12–16; Part III. Ch. 1–6
Tariq Ali and Phil Evans, Introducing Trotsky and Marxism / Trotsky for Beginners
James Joll, The Second International 1889–1914 (1966)