Marx and its discontents: five constructive critiques to Marxian thought
Prerequisiti
The course is open to all students enrolled in the MA and PhD programs of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences. It is recommended to students who are interested in high-level theoretical engagement with social theory.
Programma
This course discusses five types of critiques and revisions of Karl Marx’s political philosophy, which are particularly relevant for contemporary social theory: 1) The cultural critique of Marxian economic determinism, the Gramscian notion of hegemony, and their application to the discursive reading of populism; 2) The feminist critique of the Marxian notion of productive labor and its influence on contemporary political theories of care and social reproduction; 3) the autonomist interpretation of the Marxian concept of the general intellect and its significance for the analysis of new forms of accumulation and division of labor in the age of AI; 4) the postcolonial critique of Marx’s supposed Eurocentrism; 5) and the political ecology critique of the nature-capitalism nexus in Marx’s writings. Taken all together, these five critiques will allow students who are interested in working in the (post-)Marxist tradition to refine their theoretical approaches and apply them to social and political research.
Obiettivi formativi
The course aims at bringing together a variety of scholarly debates inspired by Marxian thought that are usually held in separate academic disciplines and fields of study.
The course allows students who are interested in the Marxist or the post-Marxist tradition of scholarly research to assess the extent to which the work of a towering thinker in modern social thought has been challenged and renewed in contemporary social theory.
The course aims at providing master and PhD students in the fields of social movements studies, comparative politics, sociology of culture and communication, political economy, and sociology of work and the environment with a deeper theoretical understanding of the relationship between class struggles and feminist, decolonial, and environmental mobilizations.