This is the reading schedule for the winter and into spring 2016.
As always, all are welcome!
- 6th November Critical Pedagogy and the Academy I: the politics of academic work
Frederick Moten and Stefano Harney – “The Academic Speed-up” in Workplace: the Journal for Academic Labour. Abstract: http://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/workplace/article/view/184003
Stefano Harney and Frederick Moten – “Doing Academic Work” in Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University. Description: https://www.dukeupress.edu/Chalk-Lines
- Friday 27th November Dialectical Materialism
12.30-1.30
Muirhead 431
Ernst Bloch – Commentary on ‘Theses on Feuerbach’
Following on from last session’s reading and discussion, Ernst Bloch provides an extended commentary of this piece by Karl Marx.
Herbert Marcuse – “The History of Dialectics” in Herbert Marcuse: Marxism, Revolution and Utopia (Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume 6)
Marcuse recounts the history of dialectics in an accessible way.
- Friday 11th December Critical Pedagogy and the Academy II: the political economy of academic work
12.30 – 1.30
Muirhead 431
Ian Pirie – “The Political Economy of Academic Publishing” in Historical Materialism. Abstract: HERE
Massimo De Angelis and David Harvie – “Cognitive Capital and the Rat-Race: How Capital Measures Immaterial Labour in British Universities” in Historical Materialism. Abstract: HERE
Reading over the break: David Lodge – Nice Work (single chapter)
A novel based on campus and in the city of Birmingham by notable English Literature professor David Lodge. This novel follows an English literature academic who is forced to take part in an exchange programme which puts her at the heart of declining local British industry.
- Friday 15th January Marxism and Value
12.30 – 1.30
Muirhead 431
Karl Marx – “Fragment on Machines” in Grundrisse
This short section of the Grundrisse sees Marx analysing the role of technology in capitalist development. The arguments featured in these pages have notably served as the theoretical basis of developments in autonomous Marxism.
Robert Kurz – The Substance of Capital (single chapter)
This book, from which we would like to select a chapter, is an important contribution to Marxism from the German Wertkritik, or value-form critique. It has recently been translated and is about to be published in English.
- Friday 5th February Critical Pedagogy and the Academy III: the abolition of academia and independent working class education
12.30-1.30
Muirhead 431
Richard Hall – “On the Abolition of Academic Labour: The Relationship Between Intellectual Workers and Mass Intellectuality” in Triple C. Abstract: HERE
Colin Waugh – PLEBS (pamphlet)
This pamphlet is a strong account of how public education was mobilised in Britain to undermine autonomous working class education. It also tells a tale of how the British working class proceeded to resist and defeat this attempt at co-optation.
- Friday 26th February The Local State and the Management of Public Money
12.30-1.30
Muirhead 431
CSE State Group – Struggle Over the State (pamphlet)
This is a rare pamphlet by the CSE State Group – featuring a Marxist examination of changes in the British state in the midst of capitalist crisis in the 1970s.
Cynthia Cockburn – The Local State
This is a short but very good book from which we would like to select a chapter. In it, Cockburn theorises the local state from a Marxist perspective on the basis of empirical studies of working class communities in Britain.
Simon Clarke – “State, Class Struggle, and the Reproduction of Capital” in The State Debate
This book chapter is arguably the best contribution of a seminal collection of open Marxist and Marxist-inspired writings on the state. It surveys all preceding literature and summarises the findings of Marxist state theory to date.
- Friday 18th March – Ways of Seeing
12.30-1.30
Muirhead 431
Boaventura de Sousa-Santos – Epistemologies of the South (single chapter). Description: HERE
John Holloway – “Read Capital: The First Sentence” in Historical Materialism. Abstract: “Contrary to received opinion, Marx’s analysis in Capital does not start from the commodity, it starts from wealth. This has enormous theoretical and political implications”. SEE HERE
- Friday 25th March – Spring and Summer Group organisational meeting
12.30-1.30
Muirhead 431
All welcome!
CSE/Capital and Class Midlands 
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