Socialist Night School: What is Marxism?

What is Marxism? Why does it still matter to socialists?

“Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” This is how Marx, in one of his more literary moments, described the relation between capital and labor.

Marx was predominantly a theorist of how capitalism worked, not what a future socialist society may look like. In this introduction to Marxism, which will strive to be light on jargon, we will focus on how Marxists view capitalism, how capitalist profit is rooted in the exploitation of labor, and how the class struggle is the result of this.

The session will be led by Chip Gibbons, who is co-chair of the Metro DC DSA Political Education Working Group. He is also a journalist whose work has been published in Jacobin and the Nation.