Analyzing Marx's Arguments: Capital Vol 1
In this class we're going to read 'Capital Vol. 1' by Karl Marx. The book has eight sections so we'll be going through one a week. How much of each you get read every week is between you and the dialectics of history--we all have busy lives--but of course the more you read the richer the resulting class discussions will be!
Class will meet on Zoom on Sundays from 1-3 PM EST, since that's a time that works for students in a variety of time zones. Students wishing to take the course asynchronously will have access to recordings of the Zoom sessions as soon as they're over, but for students who can attend it's going to be a mixture of lecture and freewheeling interactive discussion.
What differentiates this from other classes and reading groups on Marx is the emphasis in our class sessions on reconstructing the (implicit or explicit) arguments in Marx's book, examining the premises, seeing if they adequately support the conclusions, and thinking about how they could be bolstered. Given the amount of material being covered, we'll obviously have to be quite selective in what we focus on for each of the eight sections, but we should still cover quite a bit of ground in the eight weeks and it should be a lot of fun.
Your Instructor
Ben Burgis is a philosophy instructor, a Jacobin columnist, and the author of "Give Them An Argument: Logic for the Left." He's taught a variety of formal and informal logic classes at the college level, and he's publicly debated centrists like Twitch streamer "Destiny" and Bloomberg Opinion's Noah Smith as well as libertarians and right-wingers like Stefan Molyneux, Gavin McGinness, Adam Kokesh, Gene Epstein, Dave Smith, and Yaron Brook.