Left Educational Project

The first course offering of the Left Educational Project is entitled “Critically Understanding Capitalism.” It is a four-week, four-session online course designed to help participants develop a more in-depth understanding of capitalism. It is led by Professors Richard Wolff (New School University), Shahram Azhar (Bucknell University), and Clara Mattei (University of Tulsa). Classes will be held via Zoom on four consecutive Mondays beginning on September 15th, 2025. Each class will last two hours and be recorded via Zoom for participants to view at their leisure should a class be missed. Below you will find an overview of each session’s topic, a link to register for the course, and links to suggested course reading materials.

Upcoming Course: “Critically Understanding Capitalism”

Introduction and defining production, surplus, class struggle & capitalism as a system, then an examination of slavery, feudalism, socialism, feform, fascism, revolution and system transition.
The State and The Economy: The Relationship between austerity, capitalism and fascism
An examination of digital capitalism and the ideologies of techno-feudalism.
The last class will be a roundtable discussion on the crisis of capitalism today, with topics including the global north and the global south, the end of empires, and what is going to come after capitalism.

A Degree Worthy Course Taught By

College-Level Economics Professors

Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and currently a Visiting Professor of economics at the New School University, New York. Recent publications include Understanding Capitalism (2024), Understanding Socialism (2020), Understanding Marxism (2019), Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian and Marxian [with Stephen Resnick] (MIT Press, 2012), Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Haymarket, 2016). Wolff produces/hosts the weekly program, “Economic Update” broadcast on over 100 radio stations and to millions globally via TV networks, Substack and YouTube. All his work is available at www.democracyatwork.info and www.rdwolff.com.

Clara E. Mattei is a Professor of Economics at The University of Tulsa and the Founding President of FREE: Forum for Real Economic Emancipation. You can follow all our activities through our Substack @ freefreeforum.org Clara was previously Associate Professor at The New School for Social Research Economics Department and has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton. Her research contributes to the history of capitalism, exploring the critical relation between economic ideas and technocratic policy making. She recently published her first book, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (University of Chicago Press 2022).

Shahram Azhar is Associate Professor of Economics at Bucknell University, where he teaches courses in political economy and development economics. He has a PhD. Economics from UMass-Amherst and a Masters in Economics from the University of Warwick, in England. His research on digital capitalism, which has been published in numerous journals, seeks to understand how contemporary digital firms (such as Facebook, Amazon etc) exploit the global working class using elaborate supply chains. He serves on the editorial board of the preeminent journal Rethinking Marxism.

Suggested Readings

In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital--and indeed capitalism--in times of social upheaval from below. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material from Britain and Italy, much of it translated for the first time, The Capital Order offers a damning and essential new account of the rise of austerity—and of modern economics—at the levers of contemporary political power.

In The State in Capitalist Society, Ralph Miliband argues that the state in capitalist societies, despite claims of neutrality, ultimately serves the interests of the dominant economic class. He challenges the liberal-pluralist view that power is diffused and shared, asserting that the state elite are closely connected to and drawn from the dominant class. Miliband's work explores how the state, through its institutions and actions, helps maintain and reproduce capitalist social relations.

Understanding Capitalism aims to answer the question: "Why capitalism fails us"?. It explores the different definitions of what capitalism is and is not – showing why definitions matter. It dissolves the many myths that make it hard to understand the system. Readers acquire tools needed to engage basic economic and social issues of our time by showing precisely how they depend upon the capitalist system. Then the book shows how and where we can go beyond capitalism to specific alternative systems. Doing that, we argue, can and should be part of solving today’s great issues, of making the world better than we found it. (Also available in paperback here)

This book shows in-depth, for the first time, how Palestine has become the perfect laboratory for the Israeli military-techno complex: surveillance, home demolitions, indefinite incarceration, and brutality to the hi-tech tools that drive the 'Start-up Nation'. From the Pegasus software that hacked Jeff Bezos' and Jamal Khashoggi's phones, the weapons sold to the Myanmar army that have murdered thousands of Rohingyas, and drones used by the European Union to monitor refugees in the Mediterranean who are left to drown. Israel has become a global leader in spying technology and defence hardware that fuels the globe's most brutal conflicts.

Jul

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Sunday, July 14, 2024
7:30 PM 8:30 PM
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