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 political economy? If any of these apply to you, you should join our Intro to Political Economy, which is the foundational course in our political education program.

The purpose of this group is to gain familiarity with the basic concepts of political economy, material and class politics, and a better understanding of contemporary 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
  • The Struggle between Capital and Labour, and its Results
• [Optional] Karl Marx: Excerpts on Capital (M-C-M’)

3. Political Economy III

• Karl Marx:
  • Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (1867/72):
    • Preface to the First Edition (89-93).
    • Chapter 4: The General Formula for Capital (247-57).
    • Chapter 23: Simple Reproduction (709-24).
    • Chapter 15: Machinery and Large-Scale Industry (567 & 575-588).
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: [Excerpt]: Ten Points.
• [Optional:] Karl Marx and Frederic Engels: Manifesto
  • In: The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 473-91.
  • Contents:
    • Preface
    • Preamble
    • I:   Bourgeois and Proletarians
    • II: Proletarians and Communists
• [Optional:] Frederick Engels: “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” [audio]
  • In: The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 700-727; also at marxists.org: Part III: [Historical Materialism]

4. Political Economy IV

• Michal Kalecki: “Political Aspects of Full Employment” (1943)
• Oskar Lange: “The Political Economy of Socialism” (1957)

5. The “Middle Class” and “Elites”

• Karl Marx:  Excerpts on the Middle Class
• Barbara and John Ehrenreich: [study guide]
  • “The Professional Managerial Class”
• 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”
• William Domhoff:
  • Excerpt from Who Rules America? (2002)

6. Industrial and Financial Capital: Profits and Rents

• Michael Hudson and Dirk Bezemer: “Finance is not the Economy: Reviving the Conceptual Distinction”
• Bret Christophers: “Rentier Capitalism”
• [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] Thorstein Veblen, “Bolshevism is a Menace to Whom?“

7. The “New Left” and “Identity Politics“

• Barbara and John Ehrenreich: [study guide]
  • “The New Left: A Case Study in Professional-Managerial Class Radicalism”
• Walter Benn Michaels: “The Political Economy of Anti-Racism” [study guide]
• [Optional] Walter Benn Michaels: “Let them Eat Diversity”
• [Optional] Adolph Reed Jr: Race, Class, Crisis: The Discourse of Racial Disparity and Its Analytical Discontents

8. Financial Capitalism and the End

• Michael Hudson: “Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism—The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover“
• Wolfgang Streeck: “How Will Capitalism End” (2014)
• [Optional] Costas Lapavitsas: “The Financialization of Capitalism: Profiting without Producing”
• [Optional] Costas Lapavitsas: “Financialized Capitalism: Crisis and Expropriation”
• [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)
• [Optional] Sarah Knuth, “Rentiers of the low-carbon economy? Renewable energy’s extractive fiscal geographies”