When Marx first turns explicitly to the commodity’s “value-form”, he introduces it through a contrast to the commodity’s “natural-form.” I propose to read the passages that follow this first introduction to the value-form from the vantage point of the suppressed theory of the natural-form—from which standpoint a rather different sense of the significance of use-value, of “matter” (Stoff) and of “nature” becomes possible.

Matt Shafer (mshafer@fiu.edu)

Chapter 1/ 15, “commodity”:

“A commodity, is in the first place, an object outside of us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another”, which is Marx’s broad definition of commodities. Building on Marx, Appadurai reads the commodity as a thing with a particular type of social potential. Which potential is this nowadays?

Oliver Arellano Padilla (oarellanopad@umass.edu)

Chapter 4, “(political) economy”:

Briefly before introducing M-C-M’ as the “general formula of capital”, Marx discusses Aristotle’s distinction between economics and chrematistics, marking the difference between the treasure-creator, hoarder (Schatzbildner) and the capitalist. How are these categories (that which has a measure and that which has not) understood and utilized? They seem to lend themselves to the differentiation between certain types of capitalists (a distinction Marx mockingly employs in chapter 22). What does such a distinction imply for a contemporary critique of political economy?

Gabriel Wartinger (gabriel.wartinger.21@ucl.ac.uk)

Chapter 8, “the working-day”:

The history of the law of the restriction of the working day to ten hours cannot be written without irony and pretext (Ironie, Vorwand). It is an ironic law, a law whose enunciation is ironic in that it produces a Vorwand, which is one of the words by which Marx approaches the conceptual crux that in Volume 3 he will call mystification. That is why the revolution must be relentlessly self-critical – or shouldn’t we write, self-mocking. How is such self-criticism to be envisioned?

Simon Horn (simon_horn@brown.edu)

Chapter 13, “industrial agriculture”:

At the end of the machinery chapter, we find theories of history alongside considerations of industrial agriculture as the “most revolutionary” outcome of modern industry. This stage is conceived as perhaps a microsite of “Vollendung” or “Synthese”. How do these transformations reflect broader historical shifts? Can they guide an understanding of synthesis and culmination in the current technological and economical landscape?

Aida Feng (aida.feng@yale.edu)

Chapter 14, “necessities of nature/necessities of production”:

Marx sketches a transformation of necessities of nature to necessities of production. The human dominion over nature not only forms the basis of economic power but establishes the power over societies as well (footnotes 5 and 6 in chapter 14). The manifold of power, production, and nature (φύσις) promises valuable tools for the critique and analysis of contemporary challenges, making it an exemplary passage for questions about how to read and teach Marx today.

Christian Schlenker (christian.schlenker@uni-tuebingen.de)

Chapter 17, “Real Subsumption”:

Capital has no extended treatment of subsumption of labor under capital, although in a way the whole book is about this important concept. From mentions in Ch. 17, I will reconstruct how the system needs to incorporate workers more and more into its logic. Subsumption, I will argue, is the new and improved “ideology.”

Paul North (paul.a.north@yale.edu)

Chapter 23, “capitalist accumulation/accumulation of surplus populations”:

“The accumulation of capital,” Marx writes, “is therefore the propagation of the proletariat” in the form of wage laborers and “relative surplus populations.” This portion of the teach-in addresses Marx’s argument that the production of wealth entails the accumulation of labor, which is to say “the accumulation of misery, tortuous labor, slavery, ignorance, and moral degradation.” After reconstructing this climactic moment in Capital, I will turn to the ways in which the concept of surplus populations has been developed by figures like Frantz Fanon (lumpenproletariat), James Boggs (industrial reserve army), Silvia Federici (“The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women”) and Michael Denning (“Wageless Life”).

Peter Raccuglia (peterraccuglia@shanghaitech.edu.cn)

Chapter 33, “original accumulation”:

Although there have been several efforts from anti-colonial scholars to explain the close relation of the capitalist world-system and contemporary forms of colonialism, this urgent problem of our present has not been central when teaching this work. There are two contemporary examples to teach the dynamics of primitive accumulation and neocolonialism in the present day. The first example will be about the water crisis in Latin America and the second one will be about domestic primitive accumulation in the United States.

Ever Esther Osorio Ruiz (ever.osorioruiz@yale.edu)