Public Talk: Senior fellow Eric Lott "Marx in Texas - Slavery, Capital, and the Revolutionary 1860s"
The Zukunftskolleg and the Centre for Cultural Inquiry (ZKF) invited everyone to the public talk led by Senior Fellow Eric Lott.
We invited you to the public talk entitled "Marx in Texas - Slavery, Capital, and the Revolutionary 1860s" by Senior Fellow Eric Lott on Wednesday, 4 May 2022.
The joint event by the Zukunftskolleg and the Centre for Cultural Inquiry (ZKF) took place hybrid at the Centre for Cultural Inquiry (ZKF) and via Zoom.
Speaker:
Professor Eric Lott, Senior Fellow (invited by Jacob Bloomfield) and Distinguished Professor of English, City University of New York Graduate Center
Abstract:
Karl Marx followed the progress of the U.S. Civil War closely and wrote about it extensively in his dispatches for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and the Viennese newspaper Die Presse. Too few have recognised, however, that the war and Marx’s dispatches not only coincided with, but also entered quite broadly into, the composition and text of Das Kapital; published not long after the war’s conclusion in 1867.
In illuminating how America’s revolutionary 1860s were fundamental to the plot of Marx’s great Victorian masterwork, Eric Lott raises the spectre of an American Marx. American conceptions of labour (slave and free), politics, and – not least – territory profoundly influenced Marx’s complex figurations of wage work, capitalism, modes of production, and revolution itself.