“The world we inhabit today is unimaginable without capital but also without Capital,” wagers political theorist Wendy Brown. Karl Marx’s objective in the work was not to describe capitalism of the nineteenth century, which was itself a tumultuous time of change that witnessed revolutions in industry, politics and ideas. Rather, he wished to examine the fundamental laws of capitalism, and what is common to every capitalism. This makes Capital a highly abstract work with continuing relevance.

Capital is relevant to law students because it provides a foundational analysis of capitalist economic structures that underlie many legal systems and institutions. Marx’s work offers a theoretical framework that helps explain how laws, property rights, and legal institutions are shaped by economic forces and class relations within capitalist societies. It is a scientific work, so claims have to be both justified and be open to scrutiny.

This seminar course is based on the new translation in English by Paul Reitter of Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, and edited jointly with Paul North. It is designed as a close reading of one text, aided by the commentaries of David Harvey and Michael Heinrich. For students who have been introduced to Marx’s thought in sociology, and to the principles of economic systems, Capital Vol. 1 offers an opportunity to read a great, challenging book on key questions of value, money, commodity, labour and accumulation. Students are not required to have a specialised knowledge of economics. Moreover, Marx’s critique of political economy has been variously read as philosophy, social history, political theory, even satire.

The seminar will focus on learning to read Marx. We will learn that the work’s difficulty does not lie in complicated language, but in the interconnections within the argument, its abstract nature, and the need to think in ‘doubles’. In the company of our editors and commentators, we will pay close attention to Marx’s concepts and arguments, his presuppositions, justifications and expressions. We will figure out, together, how each section fits into the unity of the text and what its overall structure of reasoning is. We will test Marx’s arguments but we will not try to say what Capital is ‘actually’ about. We will privilege the text, so as to not cherry pick popular sections or use it to make political arguments (“Je ne suis pas marxiste,” an annoyed Marx once stated to his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, when he was informed of the activities of French “Marxists”). We will treat Capital, then, not as a dogmatic work but as an open-ended one.

We will also pay attention to Marx’s style and the linguistic economy of his reasoning. The Venezuelan poet Ludovico Silva noted the pleasure of reading Capital, “all great thinkers who are also great stylists tend to present their work not as the result of previous thought but as the process or act of thinking itself: their readers are always present at the creation of their thinking, and they benefit from it because, instead of being forced to digest hardened thoughts, they are prompted to think, to rethink and to recreate the very act of theoretical discovery. Someone wholly ignorant of economics reading the Critique with the proper attention would be obligated to reason economically and rethink the entire edifice of the economy from its most primitive and abstract foundations, from its very stem cells: the commodity and value.” It is hoped that students will enjoy the architectonics, jokes and the “mastery of metaphors as cognitive and poetic instruments.”