Karl Marx

1
Karl Marx

• 1818-1883.
• German-Jewish family converted to Christianity.
• Studies Law and Philosophy in Bonn and Berlin
• Influenced by Hegels dialectics, Smiths and
  Ricardos 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 Mens Association.

2

• 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.

3
Thesis Negation- Negations Negation
(Synthesis)In Hegel movement of disclosing of
the IDEA In Marx movement of development of
SOCIAL RELATIONS.
Dialectics
4
Marx, 1845 Theses on Feuerbach

• Philosophers have only interpreted the world in
  various ways the point is to change it.

5
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)

6
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)

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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)

8
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.

9
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)

10
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)

11
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)

12
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

13

• 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)

14
Good Life vs. Mere Life

• We arrive at the result that man (the worker)
  feels himself to be freely active only in his
  animal functionseating, drinking and
  procreating, or at most also in his dwelling and
  in personal adornmentwhile 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)

15
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
  latters emancipation is involved, but because
  this emancipation includes the emancipation of
  humanity as a whole. (661-2)

16
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)

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The Mode of Production
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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.

19
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.

20

• ? ? ?
• ? ???? ? ???
• ? ? ? ?
• ??
• ??? ? ?

NATURE
Productive Forces
Relations of Production
Mode of Production
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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)

22
Modes of Production

• Primitive Communism
• Asiatic (public slavery)
• Classical slave owning (private slavery)
• Feudalism
• Capitalism

23

• In History,
• Classes appear with the division of labor, and
  class struggle starts once social labor generates
  a permanent excedent which can be appropriated.

24
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.
25

• The history of all hitherto existing society is
  the history of class struggles.
• (663)

26
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)

27
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)

28
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...PROGR
ESS
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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