NY News and Letters invites you to a series of seven classes on

Alternatives to Capitalism

Beginning Sunday, March 21, from 7:00-9:15 p.m.

Continuing every other Sunday

Special speaker March 21: Peter Hudis,
National Co-Organizer of News and Letters Committees
39 West 14th Street, Rm. 205 (ring bell #3, Identity House), Manhattan
north side of 14th St., between 5th and 6th Aves.; take any train to 14th St. or Union Square

Free admission; free and open discussion. Most readings can be purchased from us.

Call (212) 663-3631 for more information, or e-mail nandl and ask about
New York classes. You can visit our website at News and Letters

"All negation is determination; all determination is negation." -- Karl Marx, draft of Vol. II of Capital

News and Letters' 2003-2004 Perspectives state: What distinguishes a Marxist-Humanist response to imperialist war and terrorism is not just that we oppose both sides of the conflict, but that we take responsibility for projecting a vision of a new society that transcends capitalism...Marx's humanism remains for us the measure of any effort to create a new society. Standing for a new society does not simply mean being for practical struggles for a new society once they arise. Standing for a new society also means theoretically discerning the elements for creating a new society before such struggles arise.In the manuscripts for Volume II, Marx cited Spinoza's phrase, "all determination is negation," and added, "and all negation is determination." He indicates that it is impossible to grasp the alternative to capitalism unless one understands its negation -- the specificity of the Marxian critique of capital. His critique has two dimensions: his critique of capital as a social relation, and his critique of leftist alternatives to capitalism. Both are of cardinal importance.
As Raya Duanyevskaya wrote, Marx's critique of leftwing alternatives to capitalism represented a concretization of Hegel's concept of absolute negativity.

Grasping the specificity of the Marxian critique of capital is the focus of these classes. The series draws from parts of Capital and other key works of Marx and Marxist-Humanism. We seek to explore these issues in relation to contemporary philosophic alternatives, as part of our effort to work out some of the many unresolved philosophic-theoretical problems of revolution.

NEWS AND LETTERS CLASS SERIES, Sundays at 7:00 p.m. at 39 West 14th Street,
Rm. 205 (ring bell #3, Identity House), Manhattan. Info (212) 663-3631; nandl

ALTERNATIVES TO CAPITALISM

Class 1: Capital, Alienation, and Humanism -- March 21
We begin with Marx's "Private Property and Communism" (which is the foundation of his critique of Proudhon) and "The Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic" from his 1844 Manuscripts. The reading from John Alan's "Dialectics of Black Freedom Struggles" spells out Marx's critique of the socialist "alternatives" of his day in terms of the crucial distinction that Marx made between political and human emancipation.

Readings:

* Marx: "Private Property & Communism" and "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic" in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

* Raya Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution, chapter 2, section 1 (pp. 47-60)

* John Alan, "Dialectics of Black Freedom Struggles" (pp. 67-71)

Class 2: Value, Exchange Value, and Freely Associated Labor -- April 4

"Socialism" is often posed in terms of whether "capital should be individual or common." Marx's rejection to this way of posing the issue is discussed in "The Poverty of Philosophy" and "Critique of the Gotha Program." Marx's view that, "It is totally impossible to reconstitute a society on the basis of what is merely an embellished shadow of it," permeates his 1875 "Critique," which is taken up in Dunayevskaya's "A New Revision of Marxian Economics."
We study the 1875 "Critique" before Capital in order to view Marx's critique of capital from the vantage point of his concept of its transcendence.


Readings:

* Marx: "Poverty of Philosophy," chapter 1, section 2 (pp. 120-44); "Critique of the Gotha Program."

* Raya Dunayevskaya: "A New Revision of Marxian Economics" in The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism (pp. 83-87); "The Power of Abstraction" in The Power of Negativity (pp. 309-313)

Class 3: Time, Labor, and Money -- April 18

This class focuses on Marx's critique of those who misconstrue the nature of commodity production by proposing solutions that fall short of its abolition. The selection from the "Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" is a crucial distillation of Marx's critique of
other tendencies and helps illuminate the content of chapter 1 of Capital. The selection from the Grundrisse details his critique of those who wish to abolish commodity exchange and money without uprooting socially necessary labor time -- issues that are also spoken to in the readings from Raya Dunayevskaya and Antonio Negri.


Readings:

* Marx: Grundrisse, pp. 136-65; "Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," pp. 83-86.

* Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, chapter 5 (pp. 81-91)

* Antonio Negri, "Money and Value," Marx Beyond Marx (pp. 21-40)

Class 4: Abstract and Concrete: The Dual Character of Labor -- May 2

This class begins the exploration of Vol. I of Marx's Capital. The focus is on Marx's discussion of the commodity form and the dual character of labor. To facilitate study of sections 1 and 2 of chapter 1 of Capital, we include a chapter of Dunayevskaya's Marxism
and Freedom and Andrew Kliman's pamphlet "Marx's Concept of Intrinsic Value."


Readings:

* Marx: Capital, Vol. I: chapter 1, sections 1 and 2

* Raya Dunayevskaya: Marxism and Freedom, chapter 7, section 1

* Andrew Kliman, "Marx's Concept of Intrinsic Value"

Class 5: The Fetishism of Commodities and its Transcendence -- May 16

This class continues the exploration of chapter 1 of Marx's Capital by studying section 3, "The Value-Form," and section 4, "The Fetishism of Commodities and its Secret." Sections 3 and 4 of chapter 1 are integral to each other. We take them up in relation to ongoing debates concerned the meaning of fetishism, as posed in Lukacs, Dunayevskaya and Holloway.


Readings: * Marx: Capital, Vol. I: Chapter 1, sections 3 and 4

* Raya Dunayevskaya: "Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Fanon, and The Dialectics of Liberation Today," The Power of Negativity (pp. 191-209)

* Georg Lukacs, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" in History and Class Consciousness (pp. 159-172)

* John Holloway: "Fetishism and Fetishization," Change the World Without Taking Power
(pp. 78-91)

Class 6: Money, Exchange, and Reification -- June 6

This class explores chapters 2 and 3 of Vol. I of Capital, where Marx deals with Exchange and Money, or the Circulation of Commodities. Marx's critique of such tendencies as Bray, Grey, Proudhon and Owen will be studied alongside such contemporary responses to the
dominance of exchange value by thinkers such as Theodor Adorno.


Readings:

* Marx: Capital, Vol. I: chapter 2; chapter 3, section 1 and part of section 2 (pp. 178-209)

* Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, chapter 2 (pp. 44-52)

* Theodor Adorno, selection from Negative Dialectics (pp. 306-308; pp. 321-323)

Class 7: Marx and the Non-Western World -- June 20

This class explores questions that especially preoccupied Marx in his last decade (1872-83): Are all societies fated to undergo capitalist industrialization? Is it possible to achieve a non-capitalist society on the basis of pre-capitalist and communal social relations? How deep must the uprooting of class society be in order for a new society to be achieved? These are addressed in Marx's "Draft Letters to Vera Zasulich" as well as in Dunayevskaya's and
Chattopadhyay's discussions of Marx's last decade.


Readings:

* Marx: Draft Letters to Vera Zasulich in Shanin's Late Marx and the Russian Road (pp. 97-126)

* Raya Dunayevskaya: "The Last Writings of Marx..." Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (pp. 175-95)

* Paresh Chattopadhyay: "Capital, the Progenitor of Socialism"