Introducing Economics Students to Marxist Political Economy: Mental and Physical Health in the Workplace

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Introducing economics students to Marxist political economy (MPE) can be a challenging endeavor, especially as there is often limited space in the curriculum. Given this constraint, it can be difficult to know where to start and how to best do justice to the complexity and depth of Marx’s work. Students can find MPE daunting, approach the topic with a range of preconceptions, and find it hard to see the immediate relevance. This case study of our teaching practice illustrates how we have approached this issue by introducing students to MPE with an application to physical and mental health in the workplace. By starting with students’ own experiences of work, we help them unpack how and why the workplace is structured in the way it is. Initial discussions about the workplace, including about situations in which students have tried to avoid doing work, enable some initial theoretical categories to be developed, such as the distinction between labor and labor power, as well as other observations about how their workplaces are organized to extract labor from them, and the unequal rewards from the output of the work that they do. This provides a way into a more formal theoretical presentation of MPE, but one that is rooted in the lived experience of students. We then look at the implications and effects that the labor process has on physical and mental health (which Marx documents in Capital volume 1) using case studies from across the globe, including Amazon warehouse workers in the United States and United Kingdom, and textile workers in India. By teaching MPE in this way, we aim to demonstrate how the logic of capitalism imposes itself on the workplace and shapes daily life, and we hope this can inspire students to explore Marx’s work further. JEL Classification: I2, P1