The first lecture, titled ‘Capital and the critique of bourgeois political economy’, was delivered on 9 September 2017 at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi. In this lecture, Professor Chandrasekhar talks about Marx’s analysis of capitalism as an inevitably transient mode of production in a constant opposition to political economists of that period, and his contributions to the Labour Theory of Value. He also discusses how Marx’s analysis does not fully examine the role of the state and the periphery as sites for primitive accumulation thus overestimating the transformative potential of capitalism.