Activist Readings of Capital — Colleen Lye on Marx and Political Practice
Literary scholar Colleen Lye closes Columbia's Pedagogy of the Deed series by examining how activists have read Marx's Capital as a guide to action.
Why we picked this
Reading Capital as literature rather than scripture. Lye's approach asks what changes when organizers treat Marx as a text to argue with rather than follow.
Colleen Lye closes the Heyman Center’s spring Thursday Lecture Series with a talk that asks how activists, not academics, have read Marx’s Capital. The distinction matters: academic readings tend toward exegesis, treating the text as an object of analysis, while activist readings treat it as a tool, a provocation, or sometimes a problem to be solved in practice.
Lye, a literary scholar, brings a disciplinary perspective that is itself slightly off-center for this material. The result is a talk about reading as a form of political action, fitting for a series titled “Pedagogy of the Deed,” which has spent the semester exploring the boundary between education and direct engagement with the world.
Free and open to the public at the Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room.