Intro to Political Economy
STUDY BLOCK: POLITICAL ECONOMY
Image: “Capitalism is Theft” by Abhipsa China. From the Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibition
Study Materials.
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Written in 1848 for the Communist League, an international political party founded in London, the Manifesto is a call for workers everywhere to organize and build the political force necessary to overthrow capitalism. It is in this period that the idea of democracy and the participation in the people in political matters is beginning to take off. The predominant ideologies are liberalism and idealism, which Marx and Engels are arguing against in the manifesto. The manifesto seeks to explain to working people how capitalism, a system that is inherently exploitative to workers, is not natural but is a project of the bourgeoisie, and that only the organized working class can and should overthrow it.
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[MUSIC VIDEO] Blood Guns And Revolutions - Msaki
Suggested Material:
The Rate of Exploitation: The Case of the of the iPhone by The Tricontinental
From Tricontinental: “Our second Notebook analyses the contemporary production process that results in Apple’s iPhone. We move from a look at the iPhone’s production to the inner workings of profit and exploitation. We are interested not only in Apple and the iPhone, but more particularly in the Marxist analysis of the rate of exploitation at play in the production of such sophisticated electronic devices. It is necessary, we believe, to learn how to measure the rate of exploitation so that we know precisely how much workers deliver into the total social wealth produced each year.”
"Value, Price, and Profit," by Karl Marx
This is a written version of a series of lectures that Marx gave to the International Workingmen's Association (also known as the "First International"), a revolutionary political organization he and Engels helped to found and lead. It summarizes some of the key points of Marx's understanding of what capitalism is and how it develops, and of the relationship between work, wealth and poverty, which are discussed at much greater length in Capital, Vol. 1.