A MOOC Avant la Lettre: David Harvey’s Lectures on ‘Reading Capital’ and what Distance Educators may get from it

Abstract

Since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008 a number of commentators both in books (Eagleton, 2011; Reheis, 2011) and newspapers (Henwood et al., 2014) asked the question if Marx may have been right about capitalism. Doug Henwood in his contribution to the NYT debate has held that the recent development of capitalism had led to “A Return to a World Marx Would Have Known” (Henwood, 2014). More generally, escalating inequality has attracted general attention and turned Thomas Piketty’s book Le capital au XXI siècle into a best seller which gave its author celebrity status (Piketty, 2013).