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.