 Welcome back to Marxian Economics, this is Deepankar Basu from the Department of Economics at UMass Amherst. Let me quickly remind you about the structure of this class. So we have so far looked at one video which gives us an overview of the whole class and then we started into the content of the class. The first video was an introduction which discussed the issue of how Marx came to the study of political economy. It discussed the phases through which Marx went over his period of life and we saw that there were two phases of his study, one going from 1843 to 1847 and another going from 1850 to 1883 when he died. We saw that during the first phase of his study, Marx not only engaged with political economy but he also engaged with classical German philosophy and French socialism and what emerged from the critical synthesis of these three strands of European thought later came to be known as Marxism. Two key ideas that emerged during this phase of his study is the dialectical method and historical materialism. Both of these ideas remained with Marx for throughout his life. So when he returned to his studies again in 1850 after he had been chased from different countries in Europe, he finally settled down in England in 1849 and he was able to resume his studies from 1850. So the phase of his studies that runs from 1850 to 1883 was the phase during which he really concentrated on political economy. But during his phase, the second phase of his study, he was always guided by these two key ideas that he had worked out during the first phase of his study, the dialectical method which told him that if he wanted to understand the social system, he not only had to understand its current structure but also identify its key conflicts and contradictions which lead it to change. So that was an idea that remained with him. And historical materialism told him that if he wants to understand society, he has to understand how the structure of production is organized. What kind of relationships emerge in the process of production between different groups of people whom he called classes? And therefore, the key object of his study in the later phase of his study through political economy was a way to understand the key ideas that would help him understand the key social classes of capitalism. So that is what we are going to be focusing on for the rest of this course. So that was the first module of the class. The rest of the class will be broken up into three modules, two, three and four. Each of these three modules will cover the argument developed by Marx in the three volumes of Capital. As we have said in the introductory part, this class is a study of the economic ideas of Marx. And the most complete and comprehensive picture of his ideas of economics is found in the three volumes of Capital. So that is what we are going to be studying. The first volume of Capital will be the focus of the module that we are going to discuss now. The next module will deal with volume two and the module after that will deal with volume three. Now let me quickly remind you what the argument about what the content of volume one is. Marx tells us that the content of volume one is to understand the process of production of Capital. In the introductory section, we argued that the key concept that Marx uses throughout his economic work is the concept of surplus value. And therefore we can restate the content of volume one as the generation and accumulation of surplus value. So in this module, we are going to be studying the processes which are relevant to understanding the generation and accumulation of surplus value. Once we have done that, we will turn to volume two and the content of volume two is the realization of surplus value. Why is this important? Because Capitalism not only wants to generate surplus value but wants to realize them in monetary form by selling the commodities. In volume one, we are abstracting from issues that are relevant to the second question. How does the Capitalist system sell all the commodities at prices that are necessary to realize all the surplus value that was generated? So we will return to those questions when we discuss volume two. After we have done so, we are going to be studying another important issue which is how the surplus value that was produced and realized then gets redistributed in society and emerges as the income of different fractions of the ruling class. So the content of volume three will be an analysis of the distribution of surplus value. So that should give you a good idea of the main economic argument that Marx laid out in the three volumes of Capital. We are going to be spending the rest of the class understanding the key components and details of that argument. So today we are going to be starting with the argument in volume one of Capital.