Notes on Marxism

Ths is a big topic! We now have the marvellous Internet Archive which makes it easy to look at the actual writings in the main corpus, but there are volumes and volumes of them. If you have never read any actual Marx, you are in for a real treat because the style is superb. It is witty, sarcastic and passionate and very critical. It is also very learned, with asides in Greek and Latin, French, German, Italian and Russian -- luckily, the assiduous translators have explained most of the terms  and tracked down most of the literary allusions.

Anyway, here is a menu of  my own teaching material with my favourite bits, all of them picking up on the 'methodological' issues. See what you think:

Marxist critiques
On commodity fetishism
On the history of capitalism
On the origin of revenue
On surplus value
Marxist politics
Marx on value
Althusser on ideology		 (A rather too long piece with  my view of how it all fits. On ideology, economic determinism etc)
(Notes on the relevant section in Capital)
(an excellent intro to Marx's work, from Capital)
(Where does interest come from? Very instructive short piece from Theories of Surplus Value)
(Very brief account only)
(Another menu page on controversies raised by the problem of 'applying' marxism to current politics)
(Big argument between humanist and structuralist readings)
(One famous reading of how marxist notions work)