Capital, Value, and Scale

4 credits · Graduate

This seminar focuses on major works in political economy and social theory concerning capitalism, human action, and space-time. We grapple with what "value" means in "Capital", paying particular attention to issues of historical specificity, abstract labor time, and the "value theory of labor." We spatialize the argument by a close reading of David Harvey, and we look at attempts to understand capital's relation to human action and other forms of value, in anthropology and the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Finally, we take up the issue of scale in hope of formulating a coherent conceptual framework for integrating across scales, from the human-body (or even smaller scales) up to global, economic, cultural and ecological processes