Intro to Political Economy
STUDY BLOCK: POLITICAL ECONOMY
Image: “Capitalism is Theft” by Abhipsa China. From the Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibition
Study Materials.
Chapter 1: Commodities from Capital, Vol 1 by Karl Marx
Marx’s major and most developed work is Capital, where he attempts to develop a scientific understanding of capitalism. Marx begins by discussing the commodity, highlighting that its existence is specific to capitalism. In this chapter Marx introduces the concepts of use value and exchange value, which are essential for our understanding of the production process as well as our understanding as to the roots of inequality in capitalist society.
A Tale of Three Cities, by David Harvey
During the past twenty years many cities have entered what is often referred to as a housing crisis as increasingly more people and families are unable to secure stable housing. In this short article Harvey discusses housing in the neoliberal age, underscoring the way that its exchange value is privileged over its use value.
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.”
"Questions Must be Raised: Who are the poor? Why are We Poor," by Willie Baptist and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
This is a chapter from a book organized by the Kairos Center, about the call for the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. This chapter looks at the questions of who's poor and why we're poor, digging beneath the surface appearance to look at the social structures that produce poverty and wealth.
"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.
Wage Labor and Capital by Karl Marx
This text was written in 1847 and published as articles in a magazine two years later. It discusses the specificity of the wage relation or wage situation in capitalism, as compared to feudalism. Marx will demonstrate that under capitalism labor is a commodity and that this is a new feature of capitalism. The text will also discuss the division of labor under capitalism and labor alienation, a key concept in Marxist thought.