 Okay, let me say a good morning, a good afternoon, good evening whenever you're watching this. I want to go through the content of this course, who I am, and a little bit about the format of this online learning course. I've taught Marxian theory for many, many years to undergraduates and graduate students here at University of Massachusetts. It's a fairly popular course, anywhere from 60 to even over 100 students can take it. I suppose that's in part because of the ideas of Marx this mighty thinker intrigues individuals. It's also a bit naughty to take Marxism, and that may suggest some of the popularity of this particular course that you're going to be taking as well. Certainly Marx provided, and the Marxian thinkers after him, some provocative and controversial ideas that we want to discuss in this course, and I'm going to introduce you to one of them in a moment. So that's me. Secondly, we're going to present in these lectures an overview of the course, and I'm going to be your guide to the ideas and to the readings in the course. Third, let me just make a comment about the format of this course. It's somewhat different than what I do in the classroom because I don't have an audience, and hence it's very difficult for me to gauge your reactions since I don't see you, obviously, whereas if I have students in the classroom, I can look at their eyes, I can watch their facial expressions, and I can get some idea of the reaction to what I am doing. Since I don't have that, and I'm speaking to a camera, I'm going to have to, obviously, guess based upon my experience of all these years. And I may well repeat some portions of the course, so you're going to have to bear with me. With that in mind, let me begin the course, and I'm going to start with one of the most provocative parts of Marxism, of what Marx did and the Marxists that followed him, which is the following. Marx provided a profound and disturbing criticism of capitalism, the society in which many of us live, and certainly in the United States. And it's a criticism that he developed that has so bothered and disturbed non-Marxists and often it gets suppressed, that is, this particular criticism generates a good deal of fear amongst individuals, and that's part of the reason why Marxism as a theory is often difficult to present and disseminate in society. So there seems to be a lot at stake with this particular critique that Marx presents of society, of capitalism. So we've got to examine then what is this idea, which is the forms, one of the most important parts of this course that you're going to be taking and that Marx presents in his most famous book, Capital. The idea is, and it's an economic idea, the idea is that there is a part of society, an economic part of society in which Marx claims, and let me just, there's a footnote there. You understand that it's a claim by Marx. Marx claims that individuals in society, he will call them workers, produce an enormous amount of value, let me take the United States, they produce a $12 trillion of value every single year, so workers are producing $12 trillion of value, and they're getting paid back a smaller sum of value that they produce, let's say $6 trillion. So there's an excess of $6 trillion that the workers produce but don't get back in value. Just to help this, let me put this on this whiteboard behind me. So workers, let me write it out here, workers are producing, let's say, $12 trillion in value, U.S. dollars, that's what they produce. Let's call that, as a matter of fact, what they add in value, again in dollars, and workers are getting paid, the same workers, say $6 trillion in value. So this is the workers, let's say, wages. As you can see, if I subtract one from the other, I have $6 trillion, and Marx calls this surplus value. So this is the surplus value that workers produce but don't get paid for. Marx uses another term, a very provocative term, which bothers people to go back to that idea of why individuals are so bothered by this. He calls this, as we're going to see in this course, unpaid labor. Why? Because workers are getting paid, six, they produce 12, and hence this unpaid value here of $6 trillion that they're producing but not getting paid. So there's another group in society, different from workers, another group in society in capitalism, another group, that is getting this $6 trillion without paying anything in return for it. Marx then makes a leap. He uses the term class in a new, indifferent way than it had been used prior, where class exists for a long period of time, find it way before Marx. But Marx begins to develop a new understanding of class, which is he begins to classify individuals into a group that produces this extra, this surplus value of $6 trillion and a different group that gets it without giving anything in return. That is, it's unpaid labor for the group that's receiving it, it's unpaid labor for the group that's producing it. Marx's critique then is one of class exploitation. So he's claiming, it's a claim, he's claiming that in capitalism, there is this kind of social theft that's occurring, which is some individuals are receiving a quantum of value, $6 trillion, without giving anything in return. It would be akin to something like the following. You leave your apartment, wherever you're living in your house where you're watching this, you leave it, you go out to shop to get some food for dinner. And while you're gone, somebody comes in and steals all your property. They rip you off. You come back, oh my goodness gracious, all my possessions, my property, my TV set, my radio, blah, blah, blah, it's all gone. That's what Marx is claiming that occurs every day, of every week, of every month, of every year in capitalism. There's this kind of ripping off social theft that's occurring of people's value that they're producing because they're only getting paid once again, a smaller portion of the value that they produce. That's what we're going to examine in this course. We're going to examine in detail of this kind of surplus value that they're producing. And we want to also then ask, if Marx is, it's an if now, if Marx is right, if this class exploitation, this kind of social theft occurs, then how come people don't rise up and get rid of it? I mean, the logic is, if the man was right, if it occurs, then why don't we eliminate this kind of theft since we have in society capitalism all kinds of laws and a culture which says, you know, the stealing is bad, then how on earth could this kind of trillion dollar theft occur year after year after year without people rising up to eliminate it? That's a provocative question and we're going to begin right there with the next lecture on this. So let me stop.