CCM213 | Capital and the Making of Modern Life

“There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”- Karl Marx, Capital Volume I

For Marx, Political economy was never something that referred to abstract workings of the unknowable economic forces. Political Economy, put simply is an ‘order of things’ that defines our relationship with the material world. Fields like taxation law and economic policy work precisely on organising and reorganising this relationship. This course is an attempt to pry open this open to ask a few fundamental questions that question the assumptions some of these fields of expertise work with. To what extent does the material world of things and resources gets governed by human needs and to what extent does our lives get determined by the ever elusive, unknowable forces of the economy?

It takes on concepts like work and asks counterintuitive questions- what is it about hard work that makes it so moral? How did attributes like “motivated”, “self-driven” and passionate” have become the dominant way in which we define ourselves? What makes labour marked by caste or even gender? What changes when acknowledge labour beyond the body? What does the rise of populism have to do with changing nature of political economy across the world? And if financialised economy defines the minutiae of everyday life, what are the ways in which people resist it? It draws primarily from Marxist political economy but also attempts to push its limits. The course also takes a historical approach to show not just what changes radically in the time of capitalism but also what makes our current epoch of “late capitalism” so different from the times before. This course is driven significantly by theoretical readings which are considered classical political economy texts. But it also attempts to bring these questions into the contemporary and how these perspectives have evolved over time.