Prof: Okay,
so now we move into the nineteenth century.
It's unclear how long this
nineteenth century lasted, whether it lasted from 1789
until 1914, or 1815 until 1914. Right?
But it was a relatively long
century. And yeah, John Stuart Mill was
already twentieth century. But Karl Marx did get into the
middle of it; he was born in 1818 and died in
'83. And I tried to find a picture
of Marx, what you may not have seen, when he was still quite a
good-looking guy. All right, so a few words about
his family background. His father, Karl Heinrich--no,
no, Marx himself was born in 1818 in Trier,
Germany, and his father was Heinrich Marx,
who was actually a lawyer, quite a successful lawyer,
but he was very much a man of enlightenment.
He liked Voltaire and brought
Marx up in the spirit of liberalism and enlightenment.
Voltaire and Rousseau and John
Stuart Mill, well these were the guiding lights of the time.
The paternal grandfather was
Marx Levy, who was a rabbi of Trier.
But he died early,
before Karl was born, and in fact his father
converted to Lutheranism. It did not matter much.
He was not really religious.
He was quite secular and Marx,
Karl Marx, brought up in a secular family.
So I found you a picture of
Trier in the early nineteenth century.
If you look hard,
you'll probably see somewhere young Karl walking around and
shopping in the marketplace of Trier.
All right, his education.
He attended,
of course, high school in Trier.
Then in '35 he was admitted to
the University of Bonn, where he studied Greek and
Roman mythology and history-- already became involved in
student politics. But he really was bored in Bonn
and was attracted to go to Berlin, which at that time was
becoming a fascinating place. And he was attending the
lectures of Bruno Bauer. Bruno Bauer was a disciple of
Georg Hegel. Bauer belonged to a group of
philosophers who called themselves "the Young
Hegelians." They were the radicals of their
time, and Marx already wanted to be a radical;
he just did not know what kind of radical he will be or should
be. In fact, he received his degree
from the University of Jena. I think I cracked already this
joke in the introductory lecture,
because assumedly it was easier to get a degree from Jena than
Berlin, and Marx was more interested
already in philosophy and radicalism than legal studies.
But he got his degree.
So here is Georg Hegel,
one of the most important philosophers of the eighteenth
and nineteenth century. He was a German philosopher;
and I will talk more when we get into Marx's own work.
He basically saw human history
as the unfolding of human consciousness,
and he also characterized the human condition as in the state
of alienation in which subject and object were separated from
each other. These are big words.
You will get comfortable with
it as I'm lecturing on Marx. Because this is very important
for Hegelian philosophy-- also for Marxism,
the distinction that there is the subject,
yourself, who are observing, and the object,
the others or the material world upon which you are
reflecting. There is also another big word
you will learn in the next two or three lectures,
the word of totality; totality means when subject and
object are together in one unity, that's what is meant to
be totality. Now Hegel's idea was that
subject and object became separated,
and the separation of subject from object--
when there is seen as worth outside of the subject as a
separate object-- that is the state of alienation;
alien, to be a stranger, a stranger in the world,
because what is around you looks like strange,
as different from you. Right?
That's what he meant by
alienation. But, you know,
human consciousness is increasing, and as consciousness
is increasing you will overcome this separation of subject and
objects. Well, I'm sure it is not clear
for the time being, but we'll be laboring on this
in more detail with Marx, and hopefully it will become a
little more clear. Bruno Bauer,
he is this charismatic lecturer, the Young Hegelian
whose lectures Marx attended. And there is no Marx and
Marxism without Bruno Bauer; though most of his work is
vitriolic criticism of Bruno Bauer.
Well, Marx was quite a
vitriolic guy. He liked to use overheated
language. Occasionally it's very
beautiful, the language he's using.
Occasionally this is pretty
outraging. Okay, what about Bauer and the
Left Hegelians? As I said, you know,
he kind of comes-- he's a Hegel disciple,
but he tries to move beyond Hegel and offer a critical
theory of Hegel and the Hegelian system itself.
These guys, the Young
Hegelians--Bauer and his brother and others like Feuerbach,
called themselves "the critical critics."
This is a term which comes up
in Marx's work sometimes, ironically usually.
Why was it so?
Because Hegel is seen in modern
philosophy as the Founding Father of critical theory.
You may have heard the word;
if you studied philosophy I'm sure you have heard the word.
What is critical theory?
Well the essence of critical
theory is that it believes that the major task of philosophy,
to subject human consciousness to critical scrutiny--
that there is some discrepancy between human consciousness and
the human condition. Right?
Our consciousness does not
reflect properly the human condition, and therefore we have
to criticize consciousness and get the right consciousness.
Well who is actually the first
of critical theorists? There is some controversy about
this. There are some people who
actually name Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher,
as the first of critical theorists.
Kant made a very interesting
distinction between Ding an sich and Ding für
sich; things in themselves and things
for themselves. And one important Kant idea was
that all the ideas what we have in our mind are things for
themselves, and they do not correspond to
the world around us. The world around us is so rich
that the concepts what we develop cannot completely fit.
Therefore, in the act of
cognition--when we try to understand something--we select
from the world stuff which is important for us.
This is why it's things for
themselves. Right?
We select, in the process of
cognition, of learning, from the world elements what is
useful for us. So, I mean, in some ways
already Kant suggested that there is something problematic
with the human consciousness. Right?
We have to subject this human
consciousness to critical scrutiny,
and to be aware that the unexhausted richness of the
world and reality cannot be ever captured by the human mind.
Now others do see really Georg
Hegel as the real critical theorist, because now the
central point is alienation. Right?
Here the central point is that
this is a big problem, and unlike Kant,
who was an agnostic, he did not think we ever can
develop concepts which capture the world.
Right?
Hegel believed that if you
guys, you learn my philosophy, you will be all right.
Right?
Then you will overcome
alienation. You will get the appropriate
consciousness. Read my work.
That was--you know,
to simplify it a great deal. So anyway, he was seen as a
kind of critical theorist. Now, the Young Hegelians were
the critics of the critique. Right?
They wanted to apply Hegel's
critical method on Hegel's theory.
They said, "Why on earth
Georg, Uncle Georg, believes that his theory is the
right one? Why don't we subject this
system itself to the same critical scrutiny what Hegel
suggests everything should be subjected to:
critical scrutiny?" That is really the fundamental
line of argument that greatly influenced Marx.
Marx is, in many respects,
a critical critic. Now this is another Young
Hegelian, Ludwig Feuerbach, who had another very important
impact on Marx. Feuerbach called his approach
"naturalism." This is a term what Marx,
the young Marx, also used for a while to
describe himself. I think most of you in this
room would think that Marx was a materialist,
and eventually Marx used the term materialism,
and even more specifically, historical materialism,
to describe what he was doing. But in his early work he was
shying away from materialism and he used the term naturalism.
And naturalism really meant
that you do not underestimate the importance of consciousness
in spirit, just in the interaction with
consciousness and spirit, and the nature itself,--you pay
more attention to nature. Now Feuerbach's most important
book-- I don't think it is in
English--Das Wesen des Christentums,
The Essence of Christianity,
he also suggested that rather than God creating man,
man created the idea of God, and they created the idea of
God-- this is actually not all that
far from Bruno Bauer, just a more radical position.
Right?
Because it wanted to project
the desperation of alienation into the idea of God.
So, I mean, while so to say
Bauer was not ready to draw the, if I may use this term,
the ontological conclusions of his criticism of Hegel.
Feuerbach went into ontology.
Right?
Ontology means the origins of
things, and he believed that in fact the spiritual world is a
reflection of humans as such. That's why he called this
naturalism, as distinct from idealism.
And we will talk about the
distinction between idealism and materialism,
or idealism as naturalism, which is very important for
Marxism, and has been an important
distinction in philosophy in the nineteenth and early twentieth
century. I don't think in the last,
you know, fifty or a hundred years that,
you know, in philosophy there is too much
discussion of idealism and materialism,
though I don't think it is quite a useless discussion,
who are idealist and who are materialist.
And well, we will talk very
briefly about this. Let me just foreshadow. Right?
You know, you are an idealist
when you think that the material world is coming from an idea.
Right?
If you believe that there was a
transcendental being like God, and this transcendental being,
by its act of will, created the world and created
humans, then you are an idealist.
If you believe that the ideas
are explaining human behavior, then you are an idealist.
Materialists are the ones who
start from the material conditions and try to explain
the ideas from the material conditions.
Right?
Feuerbach made this provocative
statement that we invented God, rather than God creating us.
Marx goes further and he will
say, "Well you have ideas in your head.
I can tell you why you have
these ideas when I look at your material conditions."
And he will later on say that,
"When I understand your position in the class structure,
and I understand your economic interests,
then I will be able to tell you why you think the way you
think." Right? This is the materialist's
approach, when you explain ideas from the material conditions,
versus the other way around. And this comes from Feuerbach.
It is Feuerbach's inspiration.
Right?
So you bring together the
critical theory of Hegel and the Young Hegelians,
radical critical theory, and naturalism of Feuerbach,
eventually pushing it further and to say,
"Let's not fool around it. It is materialism all
right." Okay?
Now what about--let's continue
with the life. '42, he moves to Cologne,
the city of Cologne, and becomes a journalist for
Rheinische Zeitung; eventually even becomes the
editor of this journal. And what he's writing is just
liberal journalism. He's not a radical yet.
He's a bourgeois liberal.
He is writing articles about,
you know, the freedom of the press and civil liberties.
He's writing stuff what John
Stuart Mill would not object to at all.
Right?
Then '43, he marries--I again
cracked this joke before-- after a long engagement,
Jenny von Westphalen, who comes from,
you know, a noble family, a very high class family-- not
a Jewish family, a high class family.
Here is a picture of them too.
Well he was graying fast. Right?
Well he was running into some
political troubles very soon. Now we will very quickly see
some extraordinary years in Marx's intellectual development.
1843, '44, '45,
just three years, it's quite extraordinary what
is happening in Marx's mind and how far he goes.
Already in '43 he is beginning
to write some very important pieces of work.
I will talk about them in a
minute, when we will get to Marx's work.
One is called A Contribution
to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State,
or Hegel's Philosophy of Law, or Rights;
it's translated differently. And then he's writing a very
provocative essay, "On the Jewish
Question" in which he's beginning to
distinguish himself from the Young Hegelians.
Both of these pieces,
especially "On the Jewish Question,"
are unacceptable to the German police and political
establishment. So he had to leave Germany,
and he escapes and he moves to Paris.
And here it is, 38 Rue Vaneau.
That's where he lived,
and that's where Marx wrote his extraordinary unpublished
manuscript, what is called The Paris
Manuscript of 1844, but from which you have read
something, and some of them are the jewel
pieces of social science literature.
Some of them are impenetrable,
but some of them is quite penetrable and still blows
people's minds. Okay, 1844 in Paris,
he abandons this book, The Critique of Hegel
but he wrote an Introduction, and I will talk about this
later. This, in many ways,
is quite an extraordinary piece of work.
It's a wonderful piece of
poetry, and he's sort of beginning to lay out his
philosophy. And then in the summer of '44
he completes--no, doesn't complete,
he abandons The Paris Manuscripts;
and for good reasons. And we will talk about this,
why he never published it and never finished it;
though, I mean, it is quite a brilliant piece.
And he meets a young man,
Friedrich Engels, just twenty-four years of age,
and became lifelong friends, and they're beginning to work
together. They are writing this book,
The Holy Family. I strongly recommend you do not
read it. I have read it a number of
times and suffered a lot. So I want to save you from
suffering. But there are some very
important things in The Holy Family;
just the price you have to pay to find the jewel is very high.
Okay, and then they write many
other things together. The Communist Manifesto
they write together. The German Ideology they
write together; and many other things.
Engels was a brilliant mind.
In fact, he was a much more
clearer analytic mind than Karl Marx, and he had a much better
sense of empirical reality than Marx.
Marx was a bit of an abstract
guy. But Marx was really the genius.
Right?
Friedrich Engels was just a
kind of Yale professor; you know, that Karl Marx was a
sort of a genius really. '45, well even in Paris it is
unbearable what they are doing, so they're kicked out from
Paris, and then they go to Brussels.
And here is Engels when they
met. Well there is--to continue the
work--a big change in Marx in 1945--as some people say,
the epistemological break. Until '45, until The Paris
Manuscript, Marx is still in some ways a
Hegelian. Now he's changing and he's
becoming a materialist, and he coins the term
historical materialism to describe his position.
One important piece is The
Theses on Feuerbach. I make you to read that.
I think it is a fantastic piece
of work. He again did not publish it,
and I will explain to you why, though it is brilliant,
why he shied away and did not publish it;
it is in tension with the main message what he tries to get
through. And then '45,
'46, together with Engels, they write again another
unfinished manuscript, which was published only in
1904--and even in 1904 only partially--
The German Ideology. Again, there are some
extraordinary pieces in these incomplete manuscripts.
Then comes the year of
revolutions. February 22- 24 in '48,
a violent revolution in France. They sit down with Engels and
within a week they write The Manifesto of the Communist
Party. They just tell what the
revolution should be doing. Well this is in a pamphlet--a
pamphlet with a lot of disturbing statements,
but a pamphlet with some very insightful,
very important social analysis as well.
A piece of work which cannot be
ignored. It can be hated.
It was loved by many but
usually now it is hated. But even if you hate it or love
it, you better read it, and you pay attention to some
of the very important statements.
And what is extraordinary--this
is a pretty long manuscript. They were writing like crazy.
I mean, I think I'm a fast
writer, but I could not do it in a week.
And a reasonably polished
piece, especially in comparison with his other work.
Now he's expelled from
Brussels, but he moves to revolutionary Paris,
on March 5^(th) already. But the revolution continues.
March 13^(th),
Vienna is on fire. Right?
But you have to wait only two
days and Buda and Pest in Hungary is on fire.
The revolution is spreading all
over in Europe. March 18^(th),
it's already in Berlin. Paris, Vienna,
Buda and Pest, Berlin, whole Europe is on
fire. This is exactly what Marx was
saying will be happening. Right there,
it is happening indeed. So Marx and Engels return to
Germany. Now they will carry out the
torch of the revolution. Well it doesn't last
for--that's a picture, a bad picture of some of the
revolution in Paris. It was quite a bloody event.
And here is The Communist
Manifesto, the First Edition--end of
February 1848, when it was printed fast and
distributed widely. Well, you know,
revolution doesn't last too long.
In October '48,
Austria carries out a counter-revolution.
They oppress the revolution in
Hungary. November the 8^(th) there is a
counter-revolutionary coup in Prussia.
The revolution is depressed.
And then December 1848--well
this is not a violent counter-revolution,
but the French go and vote on elections,
and they elect a guy whose name is Louis Napoleon Bonaparte as
president of France. It was a very stupid way to
vote. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was
the nephew of Napoleon. His father was Napoleon's
brother, younger brother, and he was the king--he was
made king of the Netherlands until,
of course, Napoleon fell and he was ousted,
and Louis Napoleon Bonaparte grew up in Switzerland,
in exile. Was not a particularly smart
person and caused a lot of trouble in France.
Well here he is when he was
president. Later on he became an emperor
of France; Napoleon III,
he renamed himself, and kept causing trouble.
Yeah.
Well Marx returned to Paris
briefly and was hoping, you know, the French eventually
will come to their senses and overthrow this jerk.
Well the French did not come to
their senses. Right?
It looks like the French
occasionally do silly political things, like the Jacobins did.
Electing Louis Napoleon
Bonaparte was not a smart thing. But, you know,
therefore they have to move to London, and that's where he
spends the rest of his life. This is where he has another go
at the big book he wants to write.
It is called Grundrisse,
and I will ask you-- it will be a little sweating to
read it, but I promise I ask you to read
the most readable part of the Grundrisse.
So if you will have troubles
reading what I ask you to read, remember the rest would be
much, much worse. Right?
So you have to enjoy reading it.
But I think it's--what I ask
you to read is extremely important to understand who the
real Marx is. Right?
There are many faces of Karl
Marx, and one of--one outcome most clearly in the
Grundrisse. Then he writes finally the
book what he always wanted to do, Das Kapital,
in 1867. Then there is another
revolution in France, the Commune,
and this is a real proletarian revolution--
very much following what Marx and Engels wrote in The
Communist Manifesto. There are few instances in
history when two people can claim, "We wrote it down,
and here the masses put it into action."
They did it in France.
And then already in '64 Marx
created a political organization,
what he called International--International,
The Workers' Organization; eventually we refer to this as
the First International--with a Russian anarchist,
whose name is Bakunin. '71, there is this proletarian
revolution inspired by The Communist Manifesto.
They proclaim a Commune in
Paris. It's not all that different
from Soviet Russia or Maoist China--the same ideas.
Does not last too long. Right?
In two weeks it is suppressed
and overthrown. And Marx dissolves the
International. There is a big fight between
Bakunin and Marx. I think in this big fight
Bakunin, who is actually not very smart,
but in the--I think in the debate Bakunin is quite right
about Marx's state-ism-- too much belief in Marx what
the government should do, and Bakunin is bottom-up, right?
Bakunin is an anarchist.
He believes in the ordinary
people and he wants to get rid of the state,
rather than doing stuff by the state.
Anyway, they dissolved the
First International. Well the defeat of the Paris
Commune was a very ugly affair. People were mass murdered
without trial. Not very nice stuff.
Though, I mean,
the Paris Commune--of course, you know, if you,
as the anarchists are saying, "Well, if you want to have
scrambled eggs, you have to break a couple of
eggs." Right? So if you have a revolution,
occasionally you shoot. Right?
Well, there was shooting during
the Commune--there was a lot of shooting after the Commune.
Right?
Well after the Commune,
we have a conservative epoch in Europe.
Bismarck in
Germany--right?--the Iron Chancellor.
Queen Victoria--right?--ethical
conservativism. Kaiser Franz Joseph,
the Blue Danube. Right?
The Operetta. Right?
But a very conservative guy.
I have so many nice anecdotes
about him. Too bad the course doesn't last
two semesters because I could entertain you with great stories
about Kaiser Franz Joseph. Big trouble the guy.
He primarily caused the First
World War, out of a completely stupid
action, and caused the deaths of millions of people in a bloody,
terrible, stupid war. Well but there is no room in
this conservative time for revolution.
Right?
Revolutionary Marxism.
Marx dies in desperation.
Actually if you read the later
work, his mind is gradually disintegrating.
And he's buried together with
Jenny in London Highgate Cemetery.
There was just a piece in
New York Review of Books on Highgate Cemetery--also names
the Tomb of Karl Marx, which stands there,
and Marxists go. Now a postscript well they
create a Second International, after his death.
Engels created it.
It eventually became what we
call a Social Democratic International.
It still exists.
Social Democratic parties
occasionally meet on an international meeting.
For awhile, when the Democratic
Party was a kind of JFK liberal party,
even the American Democratic Party sent observers to the
Second International meetings. Right?
Bobby Kennedy was kind of very
sympathetic to the Second International--
were kind of considering should not the Democratic Party join
the Social Democratic International Movement?
1917, there is a Communist
revolution in Russia. In 1919, they say,
"Second International, this really sucks.
This is not about revolution.
This is about reform.
We need a real revolutionary
organization." They create the Third
International or Communist International,
which lasts until the Second World War,
when Russia, Soviet Russia,
needs the help of the United States to defeat militarily
Germany, and the U.S.
said, "All right,
but you dissolve the International."
So they did dissolve the
International. There is actually a Fourth
International--I don't have time really to talk about
this--created by Leon Trotsky. All right, so that's about the
life of one of our major authors, Karl Marx.
And let me go on and talk about
his theory of alienation. And I have, my goodness,
twelve minutes to do that, though I could spend in fact a
semester on this. Well but let me try to
economize with my time, and I'll just very briefly rush
through what is leading to The Paris Manuscript and
the theory of alienation. And I really have to talk about
alienation, so I will skip a lot of stuff leading to the
alienation. As I said, Hegel is the point
of departure for Marx's theory of alienation.
But there is a kind of
intellectual project for the young Marx.
As I said, he writes--tries to
write this book, a critique of Hegel's
philosophy of right. In this book Hegel suggested
that there is a--the civil servants constitute a universal
class. It is a critique of the French
Revolution and the bourgeois society in which Hegel felt the
workers and the capitalists are representing particularistic
interests, and order can be brought into
this only by civil servants, by the government,
who represents the universal point of view.
And Marx criticizes this book.
Then he writes "On the
Jewish Question", where he said,
"Well the state bureaucrats are not universal,
but we need a universal standpoint,
we need universal emancipation, as such."
That's the point of view.
Then he writes this wonderful
piece, Introduction to the Critique
of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,
and he said, "But who will carry out
this universal point of view?"
And it is the introduction for
the first time in '44, January, and he said,
"The proletariat." But people say,
"Why the proletariat? Goodness gracious."
That's when The Paris
Manuscript comes in. He said, "The proletariat,
because the proletariat is the ultimate of alienation,
and because they are alienated, they have the interest to
overcome alienation." Well I think I just have to
rush through. I will put this stuff on the
internet, but I really don't have time to get into any
detail. I want to get,
in the last few minutes, into The Paris
Manuscripts. And this is the structure of
The Paris Manuscript of 1844.
You can see the line of
argument, how he's developing his argument.
What is really interesting from
The Paris Manuscripts is the first manuscript,
which is twenty-seven pages. It is on wages,
profits and rent, and culminates with the idea of
alienation. Again, unfortunately I don't
have more time to work more on it.
Especially Section IV is
crucially important. And the second and the third
manuscripts are of lesser important.
Now the major themes:
wage, profit and rent, and private ownership,
they all culminate in alienation.
This is a re-interpretation of
Hegel. Alienation does not come from
ideas, it comes out of material conditions of the nature of
capitalist economy. As I said, he does not have the
notion of capitalism. It comes out of the nature of
commodity producing commercial society.
Right?
That's where alienation is
coming from, rather than ideas,
and the problem can only be solved if you fix the problems
of commodity producing societies.
And then he identifies four
characteristics of alienation. And I will talk to this.
Alienation is from the object
of production. The second is alienation from
the act of production. Then alienation from species
being; again, a very big
word--Gattungswesen, in German.
What makes us human,
what makes us distinct from animals, that's what the notion
species being refers to. And finally alienation from
fellow man. Well I have seven minutes to
labor on this, so let me do that.
Okay, as I said he reinterprets
Hegel's alienation. Hegel wanted to overcome
alienation in thought. Alienation was a problem of the
state of consciousness. Marx wants to ground the theory
in material practices. Right?
And when emerges alienation?
When labor is becoming a
commodity and when profit drives the economy;
that's when we enter the stage of alienation and private
property emerges. Well I'll just leave this
section out, and let me speak to the four dimensions of
alienation in the next six or seven minutes.
So the first point is there is
in--you know, we are talking about commodity
producing commercial societies, to put it with Adam Smith.
Right?
Or Marx will call it later
on--it will take him one more year to figure out what is
really the nature of the society he's talking about.
But already in The German
Ideology, as we will see it Tuesday or
Thursday, he coins the term the capitalist mode of
production. So in the capitalist mode of
production, in a commodity producing
society, the object which labor produces,
labor's product, confronts the workers as
something alien from him, as a power alien of the
producer. Right?
Under these conditions,
this realization of labor appears as the loss of
realization of the worker. In sharp contrast with petty
commodity production, the work of the artisan where
the work what you produce is part of your own life;
you identify with the part what you produce.
Right?
You are a shoe-maker,
you are producing a beautiful shoe.
Right?
You are proud of the shoe.
You go to the church Sunday and
you saw a nice lady walking in these beautiful shoes,
and you proudly say, "This is my shoe."
Right?
Then you are not alienated.
Right?
When you are working on the
production line and you are mass producing, you know,
Toyota Camry, you don't know what you
produce. Right?
It's an alien object from you.
You put a little bit of work
into the product, and the product is not you any
longer; it is something which is alien
from you. Well, of course,
not all work is necessarily alienated.
You know if you are an artist,
if you are a scholar, you identify the work and you
have copyright for the work what you produce.
But ordinary workers usually do
not have a copyright; you know they cannot license
the work what they produce. It becomes alien from them.
That's the point. Right?
The product.
Well then you are also becoming
alien in the act of production. He said because labor is
external to the worker--there are different points in
this--external to the worker; it does not belong to his
intrinsic nature. In his work he does not affirm
himself but denies himself--does not freely develop itself.
You know, you say,
"Well it's already 4:45. I have only fifteen more
minutes to go and then I am free." Right?
Life begins when work ends.
Right?
You can see it.
You go to the supermarket and
the cashier can hardly wait, you know, to get out of here.
I was trying to buy last night
a little beer, and it was 8:45 and the cashier
said, "Sorry, I cannot sell it to you."
I said, "Why not?
Until 9:00."
She said, "It's not nine
yet?" She wanted to get out of there.
Right?
So it's alienated from the
process of production. Right?
And labor is not voluntary but
forced. Right?
Well forced, not legally.
You can starve. Right?
But if you don't want to starve
and you want to have a place, a roof over your head,
you have to work. So it is forced economically.
And so it is not--it is,
here is the--and your activity belongs to somebody else.
It's somebody else,
you know, who commands you, who is the boss,
who tells you what to do, and then you shut up.
Right?
And this is why,
you know, in the act of production you have alienation.
The third one is that you are
alienated from your species being, of your human being.
And now Marx has a theory of
man in nature. Right?
What is man in natural
conditions? What makes us man as distinct
from animal? There are very different
answers you can give. Well Schiller,
the German poet said, "What makes us humans?
That we know how to play."
Right?
Play makes us human.
Marx said what makes us human,
that we work. Labor, that we transform the
material world to meet our human needs, with a plan in our head,
that's what makes us human. There are animals which kind of
work, like bees, but they don't work with a
plan. There are only humans who have
an idea about my house we'll build, and then you build the
house as you had the idea about it.
That is the essence of human
beings. And he said the problem is that
we, in a commodity producing society, we are alienated from
labor, what makes us human. So we are alienated from our
very human essence. That's the most horrifying
thing for Marx, in a commodity producing
society. Right?
And then finally we are
alienated from our fellow man. This is probably the deepest
idea in the whole theory; namely, that we're beginning to
treat each others as object. Right?
As we are entering the world of
commodity production, profit maximization,
self-interested individuals maximizing utility and thinking
instrumentally around the world. What are the most least
expensive means which gets us the cheapest to this end?
When we're beginning to treat
each others as instruments. Right?
And he said this is the worst
alienation. Which is new, right?
It has--this is very important
to see in Marx's theory of alienation.
It's not a general condition of
humankind, as Hegel thought it. Alienation is emerging in
modernity. It does not have the term
capitalism yet, or the capitalist mode of
production. This is--the characteristics of
modernity and modern industrial and urban life,
that we are not interacting with each other as human beings,
in an all-sided personal relationships,
but we tend to treat each others as objects.
Right?
We treat the other person as a
sex object. Right?
The erotic complex relationship
is reduced to a brutal act of sex.
Right?
We treat each other as an
instrument to reach an end. Right?
We call the others only when we
need that person for something. Right?
We act out of simply
self-interest in interacting with the others.
We lack compassion. Right?
We lack love. Right?
We lack sympathy. Right?
You know, he probably did not
read his Adam Smith carefully enough.
Right?
He has not been reading much
Smith until '44. This is where he's beginning to
read Smith very carefully, around this time,
in '44. Anyway, you see the point what
he is making. And I think what Marx describes
in alienation, particularly alienation from
fellow human beings, is something what probably some
people in this room can respond to,
and to say, "Well yes, I did experience that.
I have been treated as an
object. When I go to the admission
office, occasionally an administrator treats me like a
piece of paper." Right?
That's when you are alienated,
when you're becoming an object rather than a human being.
So that's in a nutshell the
theory of alienation. The rest will be up on the
internet, and you may want to dig into
the whole intellectual development which brings you to
the peak of what we call the young Marx;
Marx, the Hegelian Marx, who is not a materialist yet,
not a historical materialist. He does not have the idea of
exploitation. He does not have the idea of
the capitalist mode of production yet.
All right. Thank you.
I'm down for a talk.
You consider the David Harvey YT vids on Capital? They aren't bad
PS - Are we dumb for being interested in this stuff? I'm not hot enough to make my knowledge about anything pay off.
I'll take a listen now, lmk about the discussion please
The ideal PowerPoint background
Listening now
Thanks I'm currently watching
I'd be down for a discussion Saturday sometime
early 'humanist' works composed in the shadow of Feuerbach? gross.
https://old.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/md0wbq/anyone_want_to_go_through_some_of_these_with_me/
I like this dude's Hungarian accent.