Jeopardy on Marxism Readings

Divide the class into groups with an equal number of students. Give them 20 minutes to discuss the readings using the information below. Open up the following site: https://jeopardylabs.com/play/marxism17 and run a game of jeopardy. Winning team gets most discussion points for the day. Game last about 30 minutes.

Gilderhus –

Marx’s ideas of class struggle, how goods obtain their value, what is dialectical materialism and where did it come from, what did Marx see as the point of history

Marx & Engels –

What makes men different from animals, how is an individual’s identity determined, what is the relationships between society/politics and production, what is the division of labor and how is it established, when and how does history start

The Editors –

What is their view of using natural science, social science methods, and romanticism to study/examine history, what is the point of their new journal, what is the point of studying history

E.P. Thompson –

What is class, what are some of the wrong ways others look at class, what is class-consciousness and how is it established, what are some of the wrong ways of studying class-consciousness

General Discussion Questions for after Jeopardy:

  1. How does Marx differ from previous authors we’ve read?
  1. So do you agree with how Marx sees the world?
  1. How might periodization differ in histories written by Marxists compared to histories written by Romantic or Ancient or Enlightenment historians?
  1. What kinds of things are left out Marx’s analysis?
  1. Is Marxist analysis a useful tool for historians or not? What are some benefits to this approach? What are some drawbacks to this approach?