The world is beset with questions, and technology presumes to have answers. The potential for new kinds of automation using language models and other techniques in machine learning dominates the public discourse regarding the future of work. Some, optimistic in the transformative effects of these technologies, believe that work might not have a future at all. Categories of white-collar knowledge work such as management consulting, software development, law, and medicine that it has been all but unthinkable to imagine as automatable are now arguably just as much on the chopping block as blue-collar manual labor such as mining, bricklaying, and truck-driving. Will artificial intelligence really transform our world of work as some claim it will? If it does, will it be for the better or the worse?

The aim of this course is twofold:

1. to understand Marx's 1867–1894 text Capital on its own terms.
2. to consider the extent to which Marx's critique in this work travels to the contemporary context and conundrum of technology companies and our practice, white- and blue-collar alike, as a part of them: as technologists, users, engineers, custodians, product managers, data cleaners, marketers, and even as founders and investors.

It is designed with those who are actively engaged in the operational edifice of 'big tech' in mind, as a structured and socially involved way to reflect on the ethics and politics of working in the world of software. A tried and tested way to create space for this kind of difficult conceptual labor is to read and re-read Capital, a fact to which a century and a half of political struggle attests. The following questions spur and are indicative of the tone of our enquiry:

• Are tech giants such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon 'politically neutral', as they claim to be? Are there any lines of ethical acceptability that we should draw between them (say, between Apple and Palantir? Between Github and Jane Street?)
• Is it politically productive to consider software engineers as 'workers'? Many political struggles in the 20th century used this term to hew together disparate persons– in working class unions, for example– in order to cohere their actions as class struggle. Is class struggle of this kind still possible today? If so, what are the contours through which we should understand class in tech?
• Why has Nvidia become worth so much? Is there a basis for this value? What philosophical sense is there to valuation in the tech world in general (i.e. seed rounds, Series A, mergers, and so on)?

Reading Capital is not a simple undertaking. The first volume alone is over 800 pages, and the commentary and criticism that has accumulated on it over the years stretches into (we are sure, though we have not strictly done the math) into the hundreds of thousands if not millions of pages. When we read, we do not consume a text's information in a vacuum. Reading is a social and political act, and it is affected by our context.

In this course, we will read Capital in 2025, from the vantage of currently working or having worked in software (broadly defined), in an electoral political climate that is hostile to reason as it is usually understood and more openly racist and xenophobic than its preceding versions. We welcome anyone who wants to learn, and invite you to bring personal reflections regarding your role in the tech sector with you.

Logistics

• The course is free for all participants!
• Asynchronous discussion takes place on our Zulip instance, where we will also post specific weeks' reading and all other details.
• Seminars take place every second Sunday online at 12PM EST / 9AM PST / 6PM CET. The seminar runs two hours.
• The course's first session is on Sunday 15th June, 2025. The course runs for approximately 12 weeks (6 sessions), during which period we will cover Capital, Volume I in introductory detail.

Materials

We will work from the new translation of Capital, Volume I. A PDF will be made available to students on request, meaning that there are no costs involved in taking the course beyond having an Internet connection and a video conferencing device. All other supplementary materials will also be made available as PDFs.

• Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right
• Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital
• David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital: The Complete Edition

Schedule (2025)

Session I: June 15th

• [optional] Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (Preface, pp.1-27).

Session II: June 29th

• Capital, Preface to the 1867 Edition (pp.5-8) and Chapter 1: The Commodity (pp.13-59).
• Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital (pp.7-80).

Session III: July 13th

• Capital, Chapters 2-4.

Session IV: July 27th

• Capital, Chapters 5-6

Session V: August 24th

• Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital, (selections).

Session VI: September 7th

• Capital, Chapters 7-8