Capitalism 101: Teaching First-Year Students How to View the Social World Through the Lens of Marxist Theory

Abstract

Many students and even some instructors are hesitant to engage with Marxist theory because of the political implications associated with this school of thought as well as the perceived abstract nature of theory. However, over the course of nearly a decade teaching introductory-level sociology courses, I have found no better way to help students understand the social world than to use Marxist theoretical concepts in an explicit manner. The key to successfully integrating these concepts is to distill them down to fairly basic forms and, significantly, to engage students in discussions that allow them to apply the concepts using concrete examples. In this chapter, I highlight the usefulness of two concepts, alienation and reproduction, and describe how they can be integrated into discussions of work and gender inequality to demonstrate how these social phenomena are inextricably tied to the nature of capitalism.