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).

Note from the organizers:
As per previous workshops, there may be pre-reading and pre-work required before June. Your leaders will reach out to you some time after registration with additional details.

There will be no A/V equipment available in this seminar. The seminar leaders encourage participants to bring charged devices with their preferred hardware and software pre-loaded, especially for any participants who have accessibility needs. You should indicate any accessibility needs on your registration form.