The Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities’ Interpreting Capitalism series will continue this week with a lecture by Jonathan Sperber, the Curators’ Professor of History at the University of Missouri, titled “The Falling Rate of Profit: Karl Marx’s Struggle to Prove the Demise of Capitalism.”
Although never explicitly mentioned in the first volume of Capital, the idea of a falling rate of profit was central to Karl Marx’s understanding of both the workings of capitalism and to what he expected to be its ultimate demise.
Sperber will explain Marx’s concept of the falling rate of profit and the difficulties he encountered with definitively proving what he knew intuitively to be the case. This elucidation of a central element of Marx’s economics will help to place his ideas both in the history of economic thought as well as in the history of the capitalist economic system.
This event, which is free and open to the public, will be held Thursday, Nov. 14, from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. in Clark Hall, Room 309. Registration is recommended.