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

"Alternatives to Capitalism" Classes

Sundays in Spring, 2004, New York City

39 West 14th Street, Rm. 205 (Ring bell #3, Identity House), Manhattan

Free admission; free and open discussion. Most readings can be purchased from us. Call (212) 663-3631 for more information, or e-mail nandl@ igc.org and ask about
New York classes. You can visit our website at www.newsandletters.org. Classes continue every other Sunday.

Class 2: Value, Exchange Value, and Freely Associated Labor? — April 4
Speaker: Andrew Kliman, 7:00-9:15 p.m. (Daylight Savings Time)

"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"