Marx analyzed a "state of society in which the process of production has the mastery over man." At about the same time, Emerson was lamenting that '"Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." In this course we will read works by major figures in the American renaissance (Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Douglass, Poe, and others) in conjunction with writings from roughly the same period by Karl Marx ("The German Ideology," "Capital," "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," Communist Manifesto). We may supplement this reading with excerpts from some recent examples of Marxist political philosophy (Jameson, Balibar, Derrida, Zizek, Spivak, for example). We will be considering, on a general level, the relationship between nineteenth-century American and Marxist critiques of capitalism, and we will be looking — more locally — for points of convergence in these writers' approaches to questions concerning commodification, the mass market, slavery, democracy, the charisma of political leaders and the mid-century revolutions in Europe.