Reading Marx Historically

The historical significance of Marx lies not only in his reception in Germany or Europe, but across the world. But Marx’s thought emerged from a highly specific intellectual context of European thought. Therefore, reading Marx must have a contextual, German and European side, and, equally, a global reception side. The purpose of this course will be to read Marx’s texts closely, and to follow the trajectory of his ideas historically and therefore globally. In one sense, we understand what ‘doing’ political theory means more clearly in studying the struggles of Marx’s readers in addressing the question: how can reading Marx illuminate the historical analysis of very different societies – societies which were not in Europe, societies which were not based on a capitalist economy, societies that were not yet ‘modern’ in their economy, politics and culture. A part of the course will be about the Marxism of the ‘others’: American Black thinkers, and thinkers in China, India, Africa, the Middle East. To follow Marx’s thought historically is to read his thought globally.

The course will be in three parts. The first part will read some texts of Western social theory from which the central questions of Marx’s theoretical reflections were drawn. Following a method of Indian philosophy in which philosophic arguments are always read in relation to its purvapaksha (arguments in response to which the philosophical doctrine was conceived and elaborated), we shall start with questions first introduced in Hobbes (individual) Locke (property and its relation to government) and Adam Smith (capitalism) in the British tradition, and Hegel (on history and capitalism) and Feuerbach (religion and estrangement) in the German tradition. We shall explore the central arguments from these thinkers which Marx contends with – at times accepting and elaborating them, or modifying them, or directly questioning and rejecting them.

In the second part of the course, we shall closely read some texts from Marx, but also pair them with some of the major readings of their meanings from the Marxist tradition. Texts read will include the early journalistic writings, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Communist Manifesto, the Grundrisse, political writings, Capital and Theories of Surplus Value, reflections on non-European history on the basis of his notes on ‘pre-capitalist formations’ and ethnological manuscripts.

In the final part of t