Franke Lectures in the Humanities

Anne Applebaum, staff writer for The Atlantic and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian
Tuesday, September 14, 2021 | 5:30 pm

The Gulag: What We Know Now and Why It Matters

The Soviet Gulag system was established in 1918 after the Russian Revolution, expanded under Stalin across the 1930s and into the war years, and did not reach its height until the early 1950s. Some 18 million people passed through this system and an estimated 4.5 million did not survive it. We now understand far better what the Gulag was, how it evolved, what purposes it served, how many people lived and died within it. Yet what do we really remember of the camp system? What do Russians remember? And how does that memory, or the lack of it, affect Russian politics today?

Anne Applebaum is a journalist, prize-winning historian, staff writer for The Atlantic, and senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where she coleads a project on twenty-first-century disinformation. Her books include Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956; and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Her most recent book is the New York Times bestseller Twilight of Democracy, an essay on democracy and authoritarianism. She was a Washington Post columnist for fifteen years and a member of the editorial board; she has also been the deputy editor of the Spectator and a columnist for several British newspapers. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, among many other publications.

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Centering the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Critique of Capital: Marx, Slavery, and the Problem of “Primitive Accumulation”

Stephanie Smallwood is Associate Professor of History and Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Washington, Seattle, where she is also a faculty associate of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. Her research and teaching explore early modern histories of slavery, colonialism, and race, with particular emphasis on the transatlantic slave trade, racial capitalism, and African diasporas in the Americas.

Bringing His Own Skin to Market and Has Nothing to Expect but a Tanning: Dramatis Personae and Their Bodies

Massimiliano Tomba is Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Previously, he taught political philosophy at the University of Padua. He has published several texts on the political philosophy of Kant, Hegel, the post-Hegelians, Marx, and Walter Benjamin, among them Krise und Kritik bei Bruno Bauer: Kategorien des Politischen im nachhegelschen Denken (2005); La vera politica.

What Did Marx Have to Say about Cooking Dinner? Social Reproduction Theory and the Labor Theory of Value

Tithi Bhattacharya is Professor of South Asian History and Director of Global Studies at Purdue University. She is the author of The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (2005) and the editor of the now classic study Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (2017).  Her recent coauthored book, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (2019), has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. She writes extensively on Marxist theory, gender, and the politics of Islamophobia.

Use-Value and Exchange-Value … and Value

Andrew Kliman, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Pace University, is the author of Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital”: A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency (2006) and The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession (2011). His research on value theory, economic crisis theory, and other topics has appeared in numerous journals and book collections. He works with the Marxist-Humanist Initiative and is cohost (with Brendan Cooney) of Radio Free Humanity: The Marxist-Humanist Podcast, which appears biweekly.

Marx’s Concept of Alienation

Marcello Musto is Professor of Sociology at York University, Toronto, and has published worldwide in more than twenty languages. He is the author of Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International (2018) and The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (2020). Among his most recent edited books are Marx’s “Capital” after 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism (2019), The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations (2020), and Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation (2020).

Fred Moseley, Mount Holyoke College
Wednesday, December 2, 2020 | 6:00 pm

Marx’s Abstract Theory of Value and Money in Chapter 1 of Capital

The Value of Marx’s Capital

Fred Moseley is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Mount Holyoke College.  He has published extensively on Marxian theory and Marxian analysis of the US economy. His latest book is Money and Totality: A Macro-Monetary Interpretation of Marx’s Logic in “Capital” and the End of the Transformation Problem (2016). He also edited and wrote the introductions to the English translation of Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1864–65  and to an excerpt from Marx’s Manuscript of 1867–68. He is a long-time member of the Union for Radical Political Economics and served as Program Director for URPE sessions at the Annual Convention of the American Economic Association from 2005 to 2015.
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Pre-circulated paper by Fred Moseley

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Cinzia Arruzza, New School for Social Research
Wednesday, December 9, 2020 | 6:00 pm

Readings and Misreadings of Primitive Accumulation

The Value of Marx’s Capital

Cinzia Arruzza is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. She works on ancient Greek philosophy and Marxist and feminist theory. She is the author of Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism (2013); Plotinus. Ennead II 5. On What Is Potentially and What Actually (2015); A Wolf in the City: Tyranny and the Tyrant in Plato’s Republic (2018); and coauthor of Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (2019).
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