Courses
History, ideological debates, and the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, learned chapter by chapter through quizzes.
History
History of the French Revolution
Trace the Revolution from the impact of the American War to Brumaire in 1799, connecting foreign war, the Terror, liberty, and equality. Each lesson also reads the period’s declarations, constitutions, speeches, and decrees themselves, clause by clause.
The Russian Revolution 1903–1937: Decision Points
Instead of memorizing a timeline, stand at 27 forks in the road, from the party split of 1903 to the Great Terror of 1937.
The Soviet Union 1941–1991: Decision Points
Why did a workers’ state dismantle itself? Stand at 15 forks in the road, from the eve of the German invasion in 1941 to the tank crews of August 1991.
Debates in theory
Socialist Debates: A Short Course
From Owen and the International Workingmen’s Association to the Left communist debate of 1920, compare where socialists divided over agency, the state, programmes, reform, party organisation, the character of the revolution, the mass strike, the land, the national and colonial questions, war, democracy and the councils, and the party and mass organisations, using the participants’ own writings.
Socialist Debates, Part 2
From the social-fascism line of 1928 to the reform socialism of the 1980s, compare where socialists divided over unity against fascism, the nature of the Soviet state, revolution and war, strategy in the West, national roads, councils and party, peaceful coexistence, incentives and planning, the parliamentary road, and market and plan, using the participants’ own documents.
Marxism and Theories of Sex and Gender
From Engels and Bebel, Kollontai and Lenin, Beauvoir and Mitchell, through Firestone, Hartmann and Vogel, Reich, Marcuse and Foucault, to Butler and Fraser, compare where socialists and their critics divided over the origin of women's oppression, the politics of sex and love, economic change and women's liberation, biology and history, capitalism and patriarchy, sexual liberation and power, and the materiality of sexual oppression, using the participants' own writings, in seven lessons. Lessons 8-12 then read Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, volume 1, The Will to Knowledge (1976), part by part.
Karl Marx
Marx: Wage Labour and Capital
What wages are and what determines them, what capital is, and what happens to the workers when capital grows: read the lectures Marx gave to workers in 1849, with Engels's introduction of 1891.
Marx: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
From the February Revolution of 1848 to the coup of December 1851: read Marx's account of how the class struggle in France made a mediocre and grotesque figure play the hero.
Marx: Value, Price and Profit
Read the address Marx gave to the General Council of the International in 1865, answering Weston's claim that higher wages only raise prices: value and labour power, surplus value, and the place and limits of the struggle over wages.
Capital Volume I
Study commodities, money, and value; surplus-value and exploitation; the working day and wages; and the accumulation of capital.
Capital Volume II
Study capital circulation, turnover, and reproduction of aggregate social capital.
Capital Volume III
Study capitalist production as a whole: profit, interest, rent, and classes.
Marx: The Civil War in France
Read the two Addresses on the Franco-Prussian War, The Civil War in France on the Paris Commune, and Engels's 1891 introduction in the text itself.
Marx: Critique of the Gotha Programme
"The undiminished proceeds of labour", "fair distribution", "the free state": read the marginal notes Marx wrote in 1875 on the draft unity programme of the German workers' party, as far as the two phases of communist society and the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Friedrich Engels
Engels: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
The two kinds of production, the family from group marriage to monogamy, the overthrow of mother-right, the Iroquois gens without classes or state, and the rise of the state in Athens, Rome and among the Germans: read Engels's book in a complete translation from the German.
Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
From Hegel's system and method through thinking and being, the great basic question of philosophy, and the point where Feuerbach stopped, to the forces that move history: read the book in which Engels set out the philosophical starting point of Marxism.
Vladimir Lenin
Lenin: Imperialism
From the concentration of production and monopoly, the new role of the banks, finance capital and the financial oligarchy, the export of capital and the division of the world, to parasitism and decay and the polemic with Kautsky: read Lenin's Imperialism of 1916.
Lenin: The State and Revolution
From the state as the product of irreconcilable class antagonisms, the smashing of the state machine and the new state the Paris Commune showed, through Engels's further explanations and the two phases of communist society with the withering away of the state, to the critique of Plekhanov and Kautsky: read the book Lenin wrote in the midst of the 1917 revolution.
Lenin: Materialism and Empirio-criticism
Follow Lenin’s critique of Machism through sensation and the thing-in-itself, objective, relative and absolute truth, the criterion of practice, the crisis in physics and idealism, and materialism in the study of society.