Economics
1818 to 1883, Germany and London
Capital, class, and the engine of history.
Start learning Karl →Marx’s claim that history is driven not by ideas or great men but by economics - by how a society produces the material things it needs to live.
Marx’s claim that all of history is a story of conflict between economic classes - and that capitalism has boiled it down to two: owners and workers.
The young Marx’s haunting analysis of how work under capitalism estranges human beings from their products, their activity, their nature, and each other.
Marx’s theory that the profit of capitalism is squeezed from the unpaid labour of workers - the hidden mechanism he called surplus value and exploitation.
Marx’s prophecy that capitalism, wracked by its own contradictions, would inevitably collapse and give way to communism - and the verdict history has returned on it.
epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.