In his Postface to the second edition of Capital Vol 1., Marx wrote that after 1830 in France and England, the intensification of class struggle sounded the death knell of scientific bourgeois economics and in place of disinterested inquirers there stepped hired prize-fighters. Does the same apply to the critique of political economy Marx inaugurated? Contemporary polarizations around how to read the relationship of colonialism and capitalism, race and class, in Marx’s Capital are a sign of accentuating class struggle in our times. They are also reminiscent of the 1960s and 70s, when theories of racial capitalism first emerged in activist contexts around the world, including in the US, which this talk will reconstruct in order to compare with the strategic interpretations of the present.

Speaker

Colleen Lye is Associate Professor of English and chair of the Asian American Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. She is affiliated with the Department of Rhetoric and the Program in Critical Theory. She is a founding member of the UC Materialist Institute for Research and a former cochair of the Berkeley Faculty Association. Most recently, she is the coeditor of After Marx: Literature and Value in the 21st Century. She is writing a book on Asian American Marxism.

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