If you want to know why there is so much scarcity and suffering amid extreme abundance, if you want to know why technology determines your daily life ever more profoundly, if you want to know how our clock got divided into hours, our years into weeks and weekends, and our lives into productive and unproductive sides, if you wonder when the climate disaster got as bad as it did, or why Europeans stole human beings in africa and sold them in the new world, if you are asking how the division of labor in a bourgeois household got established such that women, for centuries and in many places in the world still, and also still in many cases in the US, do the unpaid labor required to reproduce life - all these questions too are raised and answered, in particular ways.

Understanding this book means finding answers to these questions, among many others. The mysteries are: why social classes struggle against one another, why people are enthralled by things, how a certain quantity of money turns into more money without adding anything, why some people have to work and the more they work the less they make, and finally, what prevents the world from changing for the better. The book identifies five basic mysteries that shape us and our social world. In the seminar we will study Marx’s powerful analysis, Capital: Toward a critique of political economy, Volume 1, which gives a compelling picture of an international economic and social system, the system, you might argue, within which we live. A more influential book written in the last 200 years would be hard to find. It has taught workers to understand their place in the economy, started (and ended) revolutions, fundamentally changed social forms and discourse about social forms, and illuminated the political thinking of philosophers, politicians, artists, students, and oppressed groups of all kinds in Latin America, Africa, the East, the West, and wherever else you place the global meridians. The book, Capital, has arguably accomplished in the last couple centuries more than any other book has.

Capital by Karl Marx