This is the King's College Reading Capital Society - welcome to all those new to the list and welcome back to those who were with us last year!
The Reading Capital Society is a discussion group organised (usually fortnightly) by students discussing the main issues & themes raised in Karl Marx’s work Das Kapital. It brings together students from across a range of subjects and with a range of backgrounds to introduce and debates ideas around the work. The group is open to anyone with an interest in finding out more about Marx's thought.
The King's Capital reading group has been running over the last year and a half. Building on the successes of last year, we intend to continue running activities in the upcoming academic year. We are interested in all of your thoughts on the sessions we should run.
First off, we are lucky to have John Weeks (author of the seminal book Capital & Exploitation) to introducing a meeting for the group entitled 'Capital, Exploitation and Economic Crises'. This is going to be the opening event on Monday October 11th. A poster for the event is available at:
The current economic crisis is the worst since the depression of the 1930s. Mainstream economics has failed to account for this disastrous collapse of financial assets, which required massive state intervention throughout the capitalist world. Karl Marx did anticipate this type of financial collapse, arguing that it was a product of the ‘fetishism of commodities’ inherent in the capitalist mode of production.
'Capital, Exploitation & Economic Crises'
a talk by John Weeks, author of seminal book 'Capital and Exploitation' (re-written and soon to be republished as 'Capital, Exploitation & Economic Crises'), who will trace a path from Marx’s analysis of commodities to the capitalist crisis of the twenty-first century.
Mon 11th Oct 2010
6.30pm
Room K4U.12, Strand Campus
3) Capital Volume II:
We are also intending runnning regular sessions with a group reading Volume II of Capital, and we'd like to know if anyone is interested in being involved. Obviously Volume II is an often neglected text, and therefore would be all the more useful for those who really want to get to grips with issues around the sphere of circulation, debates about the reproduction schemas, etc.
4) Further Events:
Finally, last year we organised a few very successful events like the 'Future of Capitalism' debate between Martin Wolf (Financial Times) and Alex Callinicos (Author Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx) and the very popular talk by David Harvey on the Enigma of Capital, and we hope to organise more of these in the future. If you missed out please watch the video and listen to the recordings on the blog.
Hope you all enjoyed your summers and look forward to seeing you soon.
