Sundays starting February 2nd 2025 at 12 PM PST / 1 PM MST / 2 PM CST / 3 PM EST

If these dates and times of the upcoming session don’t work for you, keep your eyes on this page. We’ll hold this course in the future at different points in the week.

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Are you a new member of Class Unity? Are you considering joining? Do you just want to learn more about us? If any of these apply to you, you should come to our Introduction to Class Unity Reading Group.

The purpose of this group is to gain familiarity with basic concepts of materialist, socialist, and Marxist politics and economics—and to develop a common vocabulary with which we can better understand contemporary capitalist society. 

The group will meet weekly on Zoom to discuss important ideas. The only requirement is openness to new ideas, discussion, and undogmatic debate. All are welcome. All texts will be made available. Register HERE. (You may need a google-associated email to register.)

If you are interested in more material that isn’t associated with a reading group, please check out the New Member Reading List.

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1. Political Economy I

• Karl Marx: “Preface” to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
• Karl Marx: Wage Labor and Capital [audio] [study guide] 
  • Introduction
  • Preliminary
  • What are wages?
  • By what is the price of a commodity determined?
  • By what are wages determined?
  • The nature and growth of capital

2. Political Economy II

• Karl Marx: Wage Labor and Capital [audio] [study guide]
  • Relation of wage-labor to capital
  • The general law that determines the rise and fall of wages and profit
  • The interests of capital and wage-labor are diametrically opposed
  • Effect of capitalist competition on the capitalist class, middle class and working class
• Karl Marx: Value, Price, and Profit
  • The different Parts into which Surplus Value is Decomposed
• [Optional] Karl Marx: Excerpts on Capital (M-C-M’)

3. Political Economy III

• Karl Marx & Frederic Engels: Manifesto
  • In: The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 473-91.
  • Contents:
    • Preface
    • Preamble
    • I:   Bourgeois and Proletarians
    • II: Proletarians and Communists
• Frederick Engels: “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” [audio]
  • In: The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 700-727.
  Also at marxists.org
  • Part III: [Historical Materialism]
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: [Excerpt]: Ten Points

4. Anti-Racism and Class-Politics

• Walter Benn Michaels: “The Political Economy of Anti-Racism” [study guide]
• Adaner Usmani & David Zachariah: “The Class Path to Racial Liberation”
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels [Excerpt]: On Bourgeois Rights
• [Optional] Walter Benn Michaels [Interview]: “Let them Eat Diversity”

5. The so-called Middle Class and New Left

• Barbara and John Ehrenreich: [study guide]
  • “The Professional Managerial Class”
  • “The New Left: A Case Study in Professional-Managerial Class Radicalism”
• Karl Marx: Excerpts on the Middle Class
• [Optional background] Paul Sweezy & Paul Baran, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order
• [Optional background] Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

6. Class and Power

• C. Wright Mills,
  • Power, Politics, and People, chapter 1: “The Structure of Power in American Society”
  • [Optional] The Power Elite, chapter 1: “The Higher Circles”
  • [Optional] The Power Elite, chapter 12: “The Power Elite”
• Paul Sweezy, The Present as History, “The American Ruling Class”
• [Optional] Thorstein Veblen, “Bolshevism is a Menace to Whom?“

7. Finance Capital and Financialized Capitalism

• Michael Hudson: “Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism—The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover”
• Bret Christophers: “Rentier Capitalism”
• Costas Lapavitsas: “The Financialization of Capitalism: Profiting without Producing”
• [Optional] Sarah Knuth, “Rentiers of the low-carbon economy? Renewable energy’s extractive fiscal geographies”
• [Optional] Costas Lapavitsas: “Financialized Capitalism: Crisis and Expropriation”
• [Optional] Michael Hudson and Dirk Bezemer: “Finance is not the Economy: Reviving the Conceptual Distinction”
• [Optional] Karl Marx: Excerpts on Class, Capital, Sectors of Capital and Unproductive Labor
• [Optional] Marx, Hilferding, Lenin, and Trotsky: Excerpts on Finance Capital and Imperialism
• [Optional] Wolfgang Streeck: “How Will Capitalism End” (2014)
• [Optional] Jan Fichtner, Eelke M. Heemskerk and Javier Garcia-Bernardo, “Hidden power of the Big Three? Passive index funds, re-concentration of corporate ownership, and new financial risk” (2017)

8. Political Economy of Capitalism and Socialism

• Michal Kalecki: “Political Aspects of Full Employment”
• Oskar Lange: “The Political Economy of Socialism”