Course Website for Sociology 621

Class, State and Ideology: an introduction to Marxist social science

Fall semester 2009

Full syllabus for course                                

END OF SEMESTER WORKSHOP OF soCIALISM & rEAL uTOPIAS

Lecture Notes and Audio recordings of class

[Note: as lectures get revised, they will be moved from Spring 2008 to Fall 2009]

Fall 2009 Lectures

   Lecture 1        Setting the Agenda: Marxism as a Critical Emancipatory Social Science   Audio I  Audio II

   Lecture 2        The Three Nodes of the Marxist Tradition    Audio I  Audio II

   Lecture 3        What is Class?    Audio I  Audio II

   Lecture 4-5     The Concept of Exploitation   LECTURE 4: Audio I  Audio II  Lecture 5: Audio (entire class)

   Lecture 6        Rethinking the Class Structure of Capitalism  Audio I  Audio II

   Lecture 7        The Death of Class   Audio I  Audio II

   Lecture 8-9     Class and Gender: Marxism and feminism   Lecture 8: Audio I  Audio II  Lecture 9: Audio I  Audio II 

   Lecture 10      Class and Race   Audio I  Audio II 

   Lecture 11      Basic Concepts of class formation  Audio I  Audio II   

   Lecture 12      Rationality, solidarity and class struggle Audio I  Audio II

   Lecture 13      Dilemmas of Working Class Collective Action  Audio I  Audio II

   Lecture 14      Class Compromise    Audio I  Audio II

   Lecture 15      What is “Politics”? What is “the state”?  Audio I  Audio II

   Lecture 16      What, if anything, makes the capitalist state a capitalist state? Is the state a patriarchal state?  Audio (second half only)

   Lecture 17      The State & Accumulation: functionality and contradiction    Audio I  Audio II

   Lecture 18      The State and the Working Class: The democratic capitalist state and social Stability  Audio

   Lecture 19      What is Ideology?   Audio I  Audio II

   Lecture 20      Mystification: ideology as false consciousness  Audio I  Audio II

   Lecture 21      Ideological Hegemony and Legitimation  Audio I  Audio II

   Lecture 22      Microfoundations of the theory of Ideology   Audio I  Audio II

    Lecture 23-4   The Classical Marxist Theory of History   Audio I  Audio II 

    Lecture 25      Critiques and Reconstructions Audio I 

    Lecture 26       The Classical Marxist theory of the history of capitalism's future  Audio I  Audio II  Audio III

    Lecture 27-8.   Capitalist Dynamics: a sketch of a theory of capitalist trajectory   Audio I  Audio II 

Spring 2008 Lectures [Note: these lectures have been renumbered to correspond to the 2009 syllabus]  

    Lecture 29a.    What is Socialism?

    Lecture 29b.    Envisioning Real Utopias: New Models of Emancipatory Futures

    Lecture 29c.    Strategic Logics of Transformation: ruptural, interstitial, symbiotic

    Lecture*          Ideology and Exploitation: the problem of consent

*This lecture was dropped from the 2009 course.