Dr Sara Salem

This course is available on the MSc in Human Rights, MSc in Human Rights and Politics, MSc in Inequalities and Social Science and MSc in Political Sociology. This course is freely available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. It does not require permission. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

This course has a limited number of places. For information on how to apply for a place on this course, please see Courses offered and related information.

This is a course about the rise and expansion of capitalism, and the many thinkers and movements that have sought to understand and resist it. The course aims to use social theory as a lens into the workings of capitalism past and present, primarily by focusing on its critics: scholars, writers, artists, and activists. As such, the various struggles against capitalism—from working class struggles to anticolonial struggles—are read as forms of theory that have much to tell us about how capitalism operates and how we might create a world free from capitalist exploitation.

The course begins with some of the most important theoretical texts about capitalism, including by Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Rodney and Raya Dunayevskaya, in order to sketch out its historical origins and expansion. The second part of the course turns to working class theorising about and struggle against capitalism, including texts by Antonio Gramsci, Kristin Ross, Kristin Ghodsee and Claudia Jones. The third part looks at capitalism through an international lens, where we read texts by Frantz Fanon, Samir Amin, Steve Biko, Alex La Guma, David Scott and the Wages for Housework movement. The final part of the course turns to explorations of capitalism through culture, focusing on texts by Stuart Hall, Arwa Salih, and the films of Patricio Guzman.

The course thus engages with a wide range of geographies and temporalities, and looks at theory produced by both academics as well as artists, writers, movements, and revolutionaries/activists, across gender, sexuality, class, race, and nation. The course furthermore includes a range of materials, from academic texts to pamphlets, films, photography, poetry and music, in order to broaden what we consider theoretical knowledge.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

This course is usually delivered through seminars. There will be two hours or more of teaching each week in WT.

Presentation.

• Karl Marx, Capital volumes 1-3
• Karl Marx, the 18th Brumaire
• Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
• Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks
• Arwa Salih, The Stillborn
• Stuart Hall, Selected Writings on Marxism
• Claudia Jones, Left of Karl Marx
• Samir Amin, The Law of Worldwide Value
• Raya Dunayevskaya, Philosophy of Revolution
• Kristin Ghodsee, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism
• Alex La Guma, A Soviet Journey
• Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

Essay (85%, 4000 words) in May.

Critical evaluation (15%, 800 words).

The critical evaluation, in the form of a reading response, to be submitted one week after the formative in-class presentation during the Winter Term.

The essay will be due in May.