Author
Listed:
- Kevin Deane
- Julia Chukwuma
Abstract
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
Suggested Citation
Kevin Deane & Julia Chukwuma, 2025.
"Introducing Economics Students to Marxist Political Economy: Mental and Physical Health in the Workplace,"
Review of Radical Political Economics, Union for Radical Political Economics, vol. 57(3), pages 485-494, September.
Handle:
RePEc:sae:reorpe:v:57:y:2025:i:3:p:485-494
DOI: 10.1177/04866134241280674
Download full text from publisher
More about this item
Keywords
;
;
;
;
;
;
JEL classification:
- I2 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education
- P1 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies
Statistics
Access and download statistics
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:reorpe:v:57:y:2025:i:3:p:485-494. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.urpe.org/ .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.