Download Karl Marx

Karl Marx
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1818-1883.
German-Jewish family converted to Christianity.
Studies Law and Philosophy in Bonn and Berlin
Influenced by Hegel’s dialectics, Smith’s and Ricardo’s
theories, and utopian socialism. Dialectical
Materialism.
1844 – Meets Friedrich Engels (life-long partnership).
1848- Manifesto of the Communist Party
Constant moves, live in London since 1849.
Helped by Engels and other friends, Marx and his
family live in extreme poverty.
1867 – I Volume of Das Kapital.
1864-1872: leading role in the International Working
Men’s Association.
• Huge philosophical, economical, and historical
work.
• No specific work on political theory, though he is
one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th
century.
Hegel
Dialectics:
Thesis – Negation- Negation’s Negation
(Synthesis)
In Hegel: movement of disclosing of
the IDEA
In Marx: movement of development of
SOCIAL RELATIONS.
Marx, 1845:
Theses on Feuerbach
“Philosophers have only
interpreted the world in
various ways; the point
is to change it.”
Alienated Labor & Inverted World
• “We have begun from the presuppositions of
political economy. We have accepted its
terminology and its laws…
• From political economy itself, in its own words, we
have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a
commodity, and to a most miserable commodity;
• that the misery of the worker increases with the
power and volume of his production;
• that the necessary result of competition is the
accumulation of capital in a few hands… and the
whole of society divide into the two classes of
property owners and propertyless workers.” (656)
Private Property & other assumptions
“Political economy begins with the fact of private
property; it does not explain it. It conceives the
material process of private property, as this
occurs in reality, in general and abstract formulas
which then serve it as laws. It does not
comprehend these laws…”
“…in other words, what should be explained is
assumed.” (656)
“The only motive forces which political economy
recognizes are avarice and the war between the
avaricious, competition.” (656)
Upside Down
• “We shall begin from a contemporary economic
fact. The worker becomes poorer the more wealth
he produces and the more his production
increases in power and extent. The worker
becomes an even cheaper commodity the more
goods he creates. The devaluation of the human
world increases in direct relation with the
increase in value of the world of things. Labour
does not only create goods; it also produces itself
and the worker as a commodity, and indeed in
the same proportion as it produces goods.” (657)
Alienation
• “The alienation of the worker in his product
means not only that his labour becomes an
object, assumes an external existence, but
that it exists independently, outside himself,
and alien to him, and that it stands opposed
to him as an autonomous power.” (657)
• “…the worker becomes a slave of the
object…” (657)
• Capital is alienated labor, privately
appropriated.
State of Nature?
“Let us not begin our explanation, as does the
economist, from a legendary primordial
condition. Such a primordial condition does not
explain anything; it merely removes the question
into a grey and nebulous distance.” (656)
“The single, isolated hunter and fisherman, with
whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs to the
unimaginative fancies of eighteenth-century
Robinsonades... (...)... Purely aesthetic illusion of
small and great Robinsonades.” (Grundrisse,
1857)
Bourgeois Society
• “… which, since the sixteenth
century, has been preparing itself for,
and, in the eighteenth has made giant
strides towards, maturity. In this
freely competitive society the
individual appears as released from
the natural ties...”(Grundrisse, 1857)
Labor is Social...
• The production of the isolated
individual outside society... Is as much
as impossibility as the development of
language without individuals living
together and talking to one another.”
(Grundrisse, 1857)
Marx & Aristotle:
“The further back in history we go,
the more does the individual, and
thus also the productive individual,
appear as dependent, as part of a
greater whole...” (Grundrisse, 1857)
• Family – Tribe – Community
“Man, in the most literal sense, is a
zoon politikon, not just a social
animal but an animal which can
achieve individuation only in society.”
(Grundrisse, 1857)
(= Aristotle)
Good Life vs. Mere Life
• “We arrive at the result that man (the
worker) feels himself to be freely active
only in his animal functions—eating,
drinking and procreating, or at most also in
his dwelling and in personal adornment—
while in his human functions he is reduced
to an animal. The animal becomes human
and the human becomes animal.”(658)
• “Life itself appears only as a means of life.”
(659)
The Workers’ Revolutionary Task:
• “From the relation of alienated labour to
private property it also follows that the
emancipation of society from private
property, from servitude, takes the political
form of the emancipation of the workers;
not in the sense that only the latter’s
emancipation is involved, but because this
emancipation includes the emancipation of
humanity as a whole.” (661-2)
Communism
• “To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely
personal, but a social status in production.
Capital is a collective product, and only by the
united action of many members, nay, in the last
resort, only by the united action of all members
of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is
therefore not a personal, it is a social, power.
• When, therefore, capital is converted into
common property, into the property of all
members of society, personal property is not
thereby transformed into social property. It is
only the social character of the property that is
changed. It loses it class character.” (670)
The Mode of Production:
“In the social production of their
life...”
• “...men enter into definite relations that
are indispensable and independent of
their will; these relations of production
correspond to a definite stage of
development of their material forces of
production.”
Structure/Superstructure
• “The sum total of these relations of
production constitutes the economic
structure of society –the real
foundation, on which rises a legal and
political superstructure and to which
correspond definite forms of social
consciousness.”
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Relations of Production
NATURE
Productive
Forces
+
= Mode of
Production
Being determines Consciousness
• “The mode of production of material
life determines the social, political and
intellectual life process in general. It is
not the consciousness of men that
determines their being, but, on the
contrary, their social being that
determines their consciousness.”
(1859)
Modes of Production
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Primitive Communism
Asiatic (public slavery)
Classical slave owning (private slavery)
Feudalism
Capitalism
In History,
Classes appear with the division
of labor, and class struggle starts
once social labor generates a
permanent excedent which can
be appropriated.
The State
appeared historically as a
weapon in the class struggle,
and it is always controlled by
the ruling class...
And it will vanish together
with class exploitation.
• “The history of all hitherto
existing society is the history
of class struggles.”
–(663)
Politics? Sovereignty?
• Seen from a strict Marxian perspective,
Sovereignty is not a real problem...
• Clearly, the Sovereign is the Ruling
Class...
• And politics is the form of expression
of class struggle (which will disappear
together with it)
Revolution:
• “At a certain stage of their
development, the material productive
forces in society come in conflict with
the existing relations of production,
or –what is but a legal expression for
the same thing- with the property
relations within which they have been
at work before.(...) Then begins an
epoch of social revolution.” (1859)
The bourgeoisie appeared in the
feudal society and ended by
overthrowing the nobility through
Revolution;
Capitalism in turn generates the
working class, which now must
overthrow the bourgeois society
and build up socialism...
PROGRESS
The 1789 French Revolution
• Swept away all medieval
reminiscences from the State
• Parliamentary Control...
• Bourgeois State (1830)
BUT
• The State “assumed more and more
the character of the national power
of capital over labour...”
Increasingly REPRESSIVE