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Please join us for the fourth session of the Otago Socialist Society's 2026 Introduction to Marxism reading group! If you couldn't make previous sessions, it's not too late to hop on board.Our generous OSS member and reading group leader Dr Berkay Koçak has provided the following guide for our second session:
Capitalism is a particular form of class society. This session examines the relationship between capital and labour, exploitation and surplus value, while considering how class relations are reproduced through the everyday organisation of production. It also asks whether class should be understood purely as an economic relationship or as a broader social and political relation.
CORE READINGS
• Karl Marx – Capital, Volume I (selected passages)
Link: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/
o Part II, Ch. 6: “The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power”
o Part III, Ch. 7: “The Labour-Process and the Valorisation Process”
o Part III, Ch. 9: “The Rate of Surplus-Value”
o Part III, Ch. 10: “The Working Day”
• Karl Marx – The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (selected chapters)
Link: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/
o Chapter I: the opening section on class struggle and history
o Chapter VII: the smallholding peasantry and class formation
SUPPLEMENTARY READINGS - please email us at [email protected] for copies of these
• Erik Olin Wright – Classes (2nd ed., London: Verso, 1998)
o Chapter 2 – The Biography of a Concept, pp. 19-64
• Søren Mau – Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (London: Verso, 2023)
o Chapter 6: “Transcendental Class Domination”, pp. 127–133 and 137–140
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Event venue
The Valley Project, 264 North Rd, North East Valley, Dunedin 9010, New Zealand, Dunedin
Tickets
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