The purpose of this course is to enable students to understand the development of Marxist theory and practice during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
1. Pre-Marxian socialism: utopian political thought.
2. Marx's view of history and class structure. The rejection of Hegel and Feuerbach.
3. Marxian political morality: alienation and commodity fetishism.
4. Marx's interpretation of the logic of capitalism, the technical weakness, the presumed collapse and creation of a dictatorship of the proletariat.
5. Marx's concept of political power and rejection of the anarchists.
6. Orthodox Marxism and parliamentary socialism (Kautsky and Bernstein).
7. Revolutionary Marxism in the twentieth century: Leninism and the one-party State.
8. Marxism as a theory of economic development: the Soviet and European systems of "state socialism."
9. Marxism as a revolutionary argument in developing countries: China and Cuba.
10. Marxism as a failed political system, but remaining a source of political and scientific argument for critics of liberalism.