Registration ends 07.4.2026 at 23:59 h

“Understanding Culture and Society with Marx” starts from a mismatch: Many of Marx’s concepts—capital, labour, exploitation, fetishism, ideology, critique—are regularly invoked in debates about culture, economy, and politics and their interrelation, but common misunderstandings persist, not least because ‘critique’ is taken to mean moral evaluation and ‘political economy’ is taken to mean economics in the narrow sense
Against these common misreadings, Marx’s project is not primarily to describe markets, nor to offer a moral denunciation of ‘the economy.’ It is an analysis of the social forms through which modern societies organize and the mechanisms that make these mechanisms invisible. Rather than treating value, money, capital etc as features of an external sphere called ‘the economy,’ governed by timeless laws”, Marx treats them as products of social relations. He criticizes political economy as a form of knowledge. What economists (and everyday common sense) take to be objective and self-evident objects—money, capital, markets— according to him appear to us as relations between things, exerting objective constraints. The twist is that this appearance is not simply a cognitive error or an illusion that disappears once corrected. It is socially real, reproduced in practice, and therefore persistent.
Reading Marx’s Capital is an introduction to a theory of social forms: how labour becomes abstract and objective; how relations between people take the form of relations between things; how categories like “capital” or “profit” become common sense.
The course is a reading seminar. We begin with a small set of short texts on Marx’s notion of critique and his way of defining the object of political economy, and then proceed to a close reading of selected passages from Capital.

Students will thus acquire the conceptual backbone of a social theory that makes seemingly technical, neutral, or “natural” objects available for scrutiny as historically produced social forms. The aim is to understand abstraction, metamorphosis, and reification not as mere ideas, but as socially real processes through which relations of power are organized, stabilized, and made to appear objective—in other words, as media of doing society.

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