2. Translate the names of Karl Marx’s works:

The Communist Manifesto; The German Ideology.

3. Translate the following words and phrases:

credited as; hitherto existing society; pure communism; a transitional period; fetters; to be burst asunder; sway of the bourgeois class; appropriate products; grave-diggers; inevitable; abolish; a relatively obscure figure; impetus.

4. Translate the text about Karl Marx into Russian. Reading and summarizing

Read the description of Karl Marx’s famous book “Capital” and do the tasks that follow.

Das Kapital From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(1)The central driving force of capitalism, according to Marx, was in the exploitation and alienation of labour. The ultimate source of capitalist profits and surplus was the unpaid labor of wage laborers. Employers could appropriate the new output value because of their ownership of the productive capital assets—protected by the state. By producing output as capital for the employers, the workers constantly reproduced the condition of capitalism by their labour.

(2)However, though Marx is very concerned with the social aspects of commerce, his book is not an ethical treatise, but an attempt to explain the objective "laws of motion" of the capitalist system as a whole, its origins and future. He aims to reveal the causes and dynamics of the accumulation of capital, the growth of wage labour, the transformation of the workplace, the concentration of capital, competition, the banking and credit system, the tendency of the rate of profit to decline, land-rents and many other things.

(3)Marx viewed the commodity as the "cell-form" or building unit of capitalist society—it is an object useful to somebody else, but with a trading value for the owner. Because commercial transactions implied no particular morality beyond that required to settle transactions, the growth of markets caused the economic sphere and the moral-legal sphere to become separated in society: subjective moral value becomes separated from objective economic value. Political economy, which was originally thought of as a "moral science" concerned with the just distribution of wealth, or as a "political arithmetick" for tax collection, gave way to the separate disciplines of economic science, law and ethics.

(4)Marx believed the political economists could study the scientific laws of capitalism in an "objective" way, because the expansion of markets had in reality objectified most economic relations: the cash nexus stripped away all previous religious and political illusions (only to replace them, however, with another kind of illusion—commodity fetishism). Marx also says that he viewed "the economic formation of society as a process of natural history". The growth of commerce happened as a process which no individual could control or direct, creating an enormously complex web of social interconnections globally. Thus a "society" was formed "economically" before people actually began to consciously master the enormous productive capacity and interconnections they had created, in order to put it collectively to the best use.

(5)Marx’s analysis in Capital, then, focuses primarily on the structural contradictions, rather than the class antagonisms, that characterize capitalist society—the “contradictory movement that has its origin in the twofold character of labour,” rather than in the struggle between labor and capital, i.e. between the owning and the working classes. These contradictions, moreover, operate (as Marx describes using a phrase borrowed from Hegel) “behind the backs” of both the capitalists and workers, that is, as a result of their activities, and yet irreducible to their conscious awareness either as individuals or as classes. As such, Capital, does not propose a theory of revolution (led by the working class and its representatives) but rather a theory of crises as the condition for a potential revolution, or what Marx refers to in the Communist Manifesto as a potential “weapon,” “forged” by the owners of capital, “turned against the bourgeoisie itself” by the working class. Such crises, according to Marx, are rooted in the contradictory character of the commodity, the most fundamental social form of capitalist society. In capitalism, improvements in technology and rising levels of productivity increase the amount of material wealth (or use values) in society while simultaneously diminishing the economic value of this wealth, thereby lowering the rate of profit—a tendency that leads to the paradox, characteristic of crises in capitalism, of “poverty in the midst of plenty,” or more precisely, crises of overproduction in the midst of underconsumption.

Tasks

1. Name the passage describing the main purpose of the book “Capital”.

2. Read passage 3 and define its main point.

3. Summarize the content of passage 4 using the phrases:

It is reported that …

It is claimed that …

Attention is also concentrated on …

4. Read passage 5 and find the sentence that describes the role of technological improvements in capitalism.

5. Summarize the whole text.

SPEAKING

Presenting a paper

Vocabulary to use

to present a paper

to do research

to discuss in detail

to begin/ finish with

to point out

in contrast with

to explain

to come to a conclusion

Speech patterns

I’m greatly honoured to be invited to this conference.

In this paper/ report I’d like to talk about …

First of all I would like to …

The subject that I will discuss is …

It should be pointed out that …

Let me give you my explanation of …

On the one hand …, on the other hand …

I agree that …

I object to …

In connection with … I would like to add …

In addition, I’d like to …

I would like to draw your attention to …

The paper raises an important question …

These results/ data are of great interest.

As far as I know …

I have a point to make.

What I think is …

In conclusion, let me say …

Summing up, I would like to …

The last part of my talk will be devoted to …

Answer the questions:

1. What is the topic of the paper you are going to present?

2. Why are you interested in this particular topic?

3. Do you always prepare for presentations? In what way?

4. What recommendations would you give for making oral presentations?

Speak about the conference you’ve taken part: how did you prepare for it, what was the topic of your report, how did you make it?

Act out the situation: you are to present your research problem. Speak about the methods, results and conclusions. The time limit is 5 minutes. Make your presentation.