Beyond Capitalism

'Beyond Capitalism: Socialist Thought in the Heart of Empire' is a class about 'futures past' - about lost visions of a different world, and what we can do with them today. Britain was Marx's 'locus classicus' for capitalist production and a destination for migrant radicals from around the world. From the early nineteenth century to the present, we will trace a winding debate in this engine-room of capital and empire, between socialism's two souls. Those who built today's socialist vocabulary often saw capitalism as an anarchic economic system, to be beaten by imperial and then national state planning. Others, though, once saw in capitalism a form of global social domination. Against it, they sought transnational popular power. We will map these conflicting experiences of Kojin Karatani's capitalist trinity: capital, state, nation. We will read from well beyond the canonical history of British socialist thought, incorporating the central contributions of revolutionaries from across the Empire and rescuing militant workers and intellectuals from the condescension of posterity. We will navigate the rise of industrial capitalism, its first critics and then its twentieth century transformations – Fordist-Keynesian and neoliberal worlds – while treating questions of gender, race, culture, power and national identity as formative in the shifting horizon of a political project now too often forgotten: the end of capitalist society. What is capitalism? What's wrong with it? How does it change? How can it be beaten? Is the alternative to it equality, or freedom? Lastly: how can a genealogy of changing socialist thinking in a declining hegemon inform politics in America now? These are the questions we will explore. This class has no prerequisites.