Billion Worlds Lab

Critiques Of Capitalism

The goal of this course is to develop a nuanced understanding of capitalism, the ways it works and the ways it doesn’t work – or who it works for and who it works against. We focus specifically on a critique of racial capitalism in order to center Marxist-feminist, decolonial, and black radical critics of capitalism. These thinkers help us understand the many ways that global capitalism operates through inclusion and exclusion, the production of sameness and the production of difference, the humanizing progress of modernity and the dehumanizing violence of coloniality. Over the course of the term, our investigation will span from the global to the local, from large-scale macro-economic flows of wealth and commodities around the planet to the intimate and mundane realities of everyday working lives; from toxic sacrifice zones where raw materials are extracted and laborers are treated as disposable and dehumanized beings, to suburban landscapes where a complex mix of convenience, disposability, incarceration and debt differentially enables some lives while dehumanizing and destroying others

Here is a link to the graduate syllabus and here is a link to the undergraduate version.