Seminar 1: Rhetoric, Marx, and the Crisis of Late Capitalism

Leaders: James Rushing Daniel (Seton Hall University) and Catherine Chaput (Fordham University).

This seminar will introduce Karl Marx as a resource for enhancing materialist inquiry, exploring
many of his most prominent concepts as assets for the rhetorical investigation of late capitalist
crises. We will discuss “historical materialism” as a methodology uniting discursive and material
analysis; “general intellect” as a collective force of production that today is at risk of assimilation
by AI; “value” and “commodity fetishism” as means of obscuring labor from the capitalist
schema; and “ideology” as the persuasive inversion of material conditions, among other key
terms. These foci will offer conceptual springboards into larger questions about political
economic approaches to such contemporary concerns as racial, gender, and economic inequality;
technology and AI; climate change and resource extraction; economic exploitation; and
democratic dissolution. We will address a selection of Marx’s political economic writings––
excerpts from Capital I and III, the Grundrisse, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844, and The Ethnological Notebooks––as well as his political analysis, including readings from
On the Jewish Question, The German Ideology, and The Civil War in France. Secondary
readings will include contemporary interpreters of Marx focused on such issues as feminism,
race, decoloniality, power, and class (Anderson, Chibber, Kumar, Federici, Mau, McNally,
Saito) as well as rhetorical scholarship related to these areas of inquiry, specifically studies of
identity and intersectionality (Hsu, Yam), feminism and feminist movements (Schell et al.),
climate change and environmental ecologies (Barnett, Hawhee, Ingraham et al.), and the
“rhetorical economy” (Wang) of artificial intelligence (Hallsby; Majdik and Graham).