It’s been a strange and busy week, partly for personal reasons, and partly because my co-authors Mike Beggs and Bhaskar Sunkara and I are in the very last stretch of finalizing our long-promised title for Verso Books (The Blueprint: Life After Capitalism, which will I really hope be out in fall 2026). I wrote a little bit about the ideas in that book here.
In partial recompense for not having an essay for you, though, I do have a big announcement for anyone who might have missed this on my podcast or social media feeds. On Labor Day weekend, not one but two new classes on Marx’s Capital will be starting on the GTAA Patreon. Check out the cool poster my friend Andy made for them:
The first time I taught a class on Capital, it started as an 8-week class at Michael Albert’s School for Social and Cultural Change. When SSCC shut down, we moved to the Patreon, and we eventually made our way through the rest of Vol. 1. That first class was relatively informal, almost more like a Zoom study group I’d kick off with some opening comments than a class. Last year, I started a new one, that was much more traditionally class-ish. Every week, I’d prepare a one-hour lecture and then we’d do an hour of discussion. (Well, more or less. Sometimes the lecture would go way, way over, sometimes we’d have to start late, etc. But when things went smoothly, that’s how they went.) That one finally finished Capital Vol. 1 a few months ago, and since then I’d been very slowly going through Marx’s “Results of the Immediate Process of Reduction” document (sometimes called the Resultate) with that class. We finally finished that about a week ago. I’ve also been teaching a free in-person version of the Vol. 1 class in Los Angeles. (For anyone who wants to join midway through, that one meets at 7 PM on Wednesdays at Cafe Mak in Koreatown. It’s not meeting this coming Wednesday—I’m traveling this week—but it will meet the week after to finish up talking about Ch. 15.) That one is a pretty close adaptation of the Zoom one I just finished, except that we’re all in the same room and people tend to go out for Korean food after, which is hard to do when you’re dispersed around the world.But I kept thinking, doing this most recent version, that it would be fun to do a version of a Vol. 1 class where we went way slower than any of the previous versions. Both times I’ve taught Capital Vol. 1 before (or all three times counting the in-person one that’s still in-progress), we’ve barreled through it at a chapter a week, only splitting up the most absurdly long chapters (10, 15, 25). This time, I want to try doing a version of the class where we only do one section a week—so, for example, Ch. 1 will take four weeks. The disadvantage of that approach is of course that it’s going to take a lot longer to get through the book. But the advantage is that the reading load will be way easier every week.
At SSCC, they had a sliding tuition scale based on income. When I first moved Round 1 of the Vol. 1 class from SSCC to Patreon, I just set tuition at SSCC’s “low-income” price. (That was $60 for an 8-week class, so this is $30 a month.) It’s a tricky and uncomfortable thing, since on the one hand, over the course of the last several years since I stopped doing full-time university teaching, I’ve assembled a weird hodge-podge of not-individually-super-renumerative gigs to support myself on (podcasting, Jacobin articles, university adjunct teaching, etc.), and teaching these Capital classes takes up a huge portion of my time that I can’t then spend doing things like picking up more freelance writing work at other magazines, teaching more regular university classes, etc. On the other hand, the last thing I’d want is for someone not to take one of the classes since they can’t afford it. So the compromise I’ve settled on over the years is that I’ll keep tuition fixed for the foreseeable future at what the SSCC anarchists considered “low-income” in 2021, and if anyone absolutely can’t afford even that, they can get in touch with me and we’ll figure something out so they don’t miss the class.
The time slot I’ve figured out over the years for these classes has been Sundays (since it’s a day pretty much everyone has off) from 1 to 3 PM EST. That way, it’s not too early in the morning for those of us on the U.S. West Coast (where it works out to 10 AM to noon), it’s a totally reasonable time in the afternoon for students on the U.S. East Coast, and it’s not too late in the evening for anyone in Europe. If you’re in Tokyo, you might not be able to catch classes live, but I think this accommodates as many time zones as I can figure out how to reasonably accommodate! I post the Zoom links on the Patreon the day before, and then the recording goes up later in the day and anyone enrolled in the class has access to all of those forever. I have to keep Sundays open for the class that already finished Vol. 1 and is now ready to go on to Vol. 2, so for the Vol. 1 Slower class, we’ll do the same time slot on Saturday.So:
The new Vol. 1 class will start on Saturday, August 30th. The reading is going to be the Preface to the First Edition and Section 1.1.
The Vol. 2 class will start on Sunday, August 31st. Before we even start reading Marx, we’re going to be easing into the volume by reading Ernest Mandel’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Vol. 2.
If you want to join either one, head over to patreon.com/benburgis and pick the tier for the class you want (or, if you want to do both at once, pick the “GTAA University” tier). Really looking forward to both of these, and hope to see some of you there!
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