ZKF-Arbeitsgespräche im Sommersemester 22
Marx in Texas: Slavery, "Capital", and the Revolutionary 1860s
Referent:
Prof. Dr. Eric Lott, City University of New York
Moderation:
Dr. Jacob Bloomfield
Datum: 2022-05-04
Inhalt
In Kooperation mit dem Zukunftskolleg
Karl Marx followed the progress of the U.S. Civil War closely and wrote about it extensively in his dispatches for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and the Viennese newspaper Die Presse. Too few have recognized, however, that the war and Marx’s dispatches not only coincide with but also enter quite broadly into the composition and text of Das Kapital, published not long after the war’s conclusion, in 1867. I will raise the specter of an American Marx: U.S. conceptions of labor (slave and free), politics, and (not least) territory suffuse Marx’s complex figurations of wage work, capitalism, modes of production, and revolution itself. America’s revolutionary 1860s may well be fundamental to the plot of Marx’s great Victorian masterwork.