Marx’s Capital: Reading and Teaching the Three Volumes
Release Date: 03/28/2025
Professor Wolff meets Louis Althusser
The Dialectic At Work
In the 1960s, Louis Althusser imported the concept of 'overdetermination' from Sigmund Freud into the domain of Marxian analysis. In the 1980s, Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick developed this idea into a Marxian Critique of Political Economy in their seminal book Knowledge and Class. Yet, many of the premises of the concept and its applications remain fuzzy to people, even students of Marxian theory. This week, the dialectic goes to work with Professor Richard Wolff to explore this important idea. What is overdetermination? How does it liberate analyses from determinism and...
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A Socialist Win in NYC: How, Why, & What it Means
The Dialectic At Work
Zohran Mamdani was declared the winner of the New York City mayoral election on November 4th, 2025. He ran as a Democratic Socialist. He ran as an immigrant. He ran as a Muslim. He ran on a platform of affordability, and he ran without taking a dime from corporations. He defeated a member of a political dynasty and the billionaires who backed him, and he did so with a resounding majority of the vote. He has set an example for others to follow and given hope to many in a tumultuous political era. In this episode, the dialectic goes to work with the world's leading Marxian economist,...
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Keynesian vs Marxian Economics
The Dialectic At Work
State intervention or private interest? Public investment or private? More taxation or less? More regulation or less regulation? We are often asked to comment on these questions because, in popular perception at least, they are the 'central' concerns of left-leaning economists. But, as we will discover in this episode, while these may be essential concerns (particularly for Keynesian economists), Marxian economists and thinkers have provided an alternative way of thinking about the project that goes beyond these naive binaries. In this episode, the dialectic goes to work with the...
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What is Money? Bitcoins and Cryptocurrency
The Dialectic At Work
Most things in life--- automobiles, lovers, cancer --- are essential only to those who have them. Money, in contrast, is equally important to those who have it and those who don't. Both accordingly have a concern for understanding it. Both should proceed in the complete confidence that they can.", so writes John Kenneth Galbraith in his famous book “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went.” But what is money? This question may seem obvious at first glance; however, as we discover in this episode, there is more to it than meets the eye. Some claim that we are now entering a new monetary...
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No Risk, No Return: Capital VS Labor
The Dialectic At Work
A popular myth propagated ad nauseam may begin to sound like the truth to some. It is no different for the “risk” theory of profit: the claim that capitalists “create” profits by assuming risk to capital. This theory was born out of the rise of the financial bourgeoisie as a dominant class; from the standpoint of this class, as Marx points out, “production is just an unavoidable middle”. For the financial bourgeoisie, it is a pure case of M to M”, the attempt to convert money into more money by buying and selling financial assets. But the “modern portfolio theory” is an...
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Ideology and Economics: Bourgeois Theories of Value
The Dialectic At Work
It is often argued, naively in our view, that “economics” is a science. Yet, it is easy to see that while discredited and unscientific theories, such as the Phlogiston theory in chemistry, can easily get replaced by better ideas, there has always been resistance to the development of revolutionary thought in Economics. This has earned the discipline the title of the “dismal science”. In this episode, we argue that economics is “ideological” in the precise sense that different groups in society conceptualize economic value (and hence profit) from their respective standpoints: the...
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Marx: the Business Analyst
The Dialectic At Work
Marx, an analyst of real businesses? You must be crazy. Well, before you arrive at that conclusion, consider the following: Procurement time, lead time, inventory management, freight costs, and supply chain management: these are terms commonly encountered by business analysts and participants alike on an everyday basis. Contemporary corporations, such as Amazon and Walmart, have developed elaborate interconnected networks of warehouses and logistics management systems that reduce the 'turnover time' (the two-day delivery method) and facilitate the circulation of capital. Any analyst of the...
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Value & Prices: The Transformation Problem
The Dialectic At Work
This week, the dialectic sat down with Professor Richard Wolff again to discuss the relational interplay between value and prices. About The Dialectic at Work is a podcast hosted by Professor Shahram Azhar & Professor Richard Wolff. The show is dedicated to exploring Marxian theory. It utilizes the dialectical mode of reasoning, that is the method developed over the millennia by Plato and Aristotle, and continues to explore new dimensions of theory and praxis via a dialogue. The Marxist dialectic is a revolutionary dialectic that not only seeks to understand the world but rather to...
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Marx's Capital Volumes 2 & 3
The Dialectic At Work
This week, the dialectic sat down with Professor Richard Wolff again to discuss Karl Marx's Capital, Volumes 2 and 3. The Dialectic at Work is a podcast hosted by Professor Shahram Azhar & Professor Richard Wolff. The show is dedicated to exploring Marxist theory. It employs the dialectical mode of reasoning, a method developed over millennia by Plato and Aristotle, and continues to explore new dimensions of theory and praxis through dialogue. The Marxist dialectic is a revolutionary dialectic that not only seeks to understand the world but rather to change it. In our discussions, the...
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Karl Marx In America With Andrew Hartman
The Dialectic At Work
To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of individuals to formulate a more nuanced understanding of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine, but Marx is rarely considered alongside these figures. Yet his ideas are the most relevant today because of capitalism’s centrality to American life. In...
info_outlineProfessor Richard Wolff’s co-author, colleague, and friend, the late Stephen Resnick, would tell his students about his discussion, as a student at MIT, with Paul Samuelson. He asked Samuelson: “What is there in Marx that is both valid and absent in neoclassical theory”? To this, Samuelson responded: “Class analysis.” In this episode, Shahram and Professor Wolff use the dialectic to explore how Marx’s magnum opus, Das Kapital, is understood and its connection to class and class analysis. It begins by examining the overall project of Capital and discussing why beginners should read this essential text. Professor Wolff explains the importance of the three volumes in Marx’s theoretical scheme, the main differences between the first two volumes, and how they individually contribute to our understanding of the ‘capitalist totality’.
About
The Dialectic at Work is a podcast hosted by Professor Shahram Azhar & Professor Richard Wolff. The show is dedicated to exploring Marxian theory. It utilizes the dialectical mode of reasoning, that is the method developed over the millennia by Plato and Aristotle, and continues to explore new dimensions of theory and praxis via a dialogue. The Marxist dialectic is a revolutionary dialectic that not only seeks to understand the world but rather to change it. In our discussions, the dialectic goes to work intending to solve the urgent life crises that we face as a global community.
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