Marx and the Marxist Method of Analysis: A Primer for All Disciplines

What do you know about Marxism? Public discourse and academia in the U.S. often dismiss Marx and the Marxist method: economic determinism at its worst; simplistically teleological; Marxists ignore race, gender, culture, and the environment; the Communist Manifesto sums it all up; Soviet totalitarianism proved its utopian failure. Is all this true? Let's test it. Let's take Marxism seriously. This course begins with fundamental works by Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Preobrazhensky, Trotsky, and Lenin and then expands to study how the social and natural sciences have used the method to explain key processes in their domains.