Marxism

Karl Marx (1818-1883) "Petit Bourgeois" German Philosopher, Economist, Journalist,

Political Theorist, Revolutionary

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) "Bourgeois"

German Philosopher, Social Scientist, Journalist, Industrialist

Estranged Labor (1844)

Under the economic system of private ownership, society divides itself into two classes:

• Property Owners (Bourgeoisie): Employers of wage laborers.
• Property-less Workers (Proletariat): Workers who suffer impoverishment and experience estrangement or alienation from the world.

Estrangement / Alienation

Estrangement is an experience of separation where that which is experienced as separate may appear as an object alien, even hostile, to oneself.

Species-Character / Species-Being

"The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being. Or it is only because he is a species-being that he is a conscious being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity."

First form of estrangement: Estrangement of the worker from the product of their work.

• The worker puts his life into the object produced (commodity)

o Labor is invested in the object

o But the worker does not own the fruits of his labor

o Capitalism has appropriated

o The product becomes more estranged the more he produces it

• Everything the worker makes contributes to a world outside of

him and to which he does not belong.

• He shrinks in comparison to this world of objects that he helps

create but does not possess.

Second form of estrangement: estrangement of the worker from the activity of production.

• Work does not belong to the worker but is a means of survival the

worker is forced to perform for someone else.

• Work activity is not a spontaneous natural act of creativity but an act

that exists outside of the worker that signifies a loss of self.

Third form of estrangement: estrangement from one’s “species-being,” or human “identity”

• For human beings, work = life purpose (their "praxis").

o The process of creatively transforming matter into new things is

the significance of being human.

o A person is what he or she does in transforming nature into

objects through practical activity.

o The modern system of private ownership with its division of

labor, “estranges” the worker from this activity.

Fourth form of alienation: “estrangement of man to man.”

• The worker’s product is owned by someone else

o The worker regards the owner as alien and hostile.

o The worker feels alienated from and antagonistic toward the

entire system of private property

The system of private property permits the appropriation of the objects of production

at the expense of

the worker and their “species-essence”

Marxian Analysis of Academia

An Analogy:

Capital as Alienated Product of Human Labor

&

Prototypical Pedagogy

in Academia

How do schools prepare you for exploitment?

Education is designed to meet the needs of the ruling class.

• It establishes order and stability and prepares workers for capitalism by inculcating the "ruling class ideology" (hidden curriculum)

Through the ideological state aparatus:

• Articulation of different practices in the social structure: religion, education, family, media, work, friends, etc.
• Transmit values that support capitalism
• Fair and good you say? "False class consciousness" (ignorance of your own exploitation)

Louis Althusser (1918-1990)

Classroom behavior and frequent in-class exercises, quizzes, and exams prepare you for:

• Rigor in the workplace

• Fear of punishment

• High speed & dynamic environment

• High levels of anxiety

• Dealing with (extreme?) boredom

• Accepting orders without question

• Whose values are inculcated?

• Accepting others superior knowledge

Bertell Ollman

Professor of Politics, NYU

Historical Materialism

Marx posited "historical materialism" as the means by which history advances. It communicates "epochs" or "periods" in a way that permits analysis of social formations byway of explication of the appropriation and use of the material world.

The idea is that social formations arise from an economic base.

• Thus analysis is engaged on the basis of a period's economic base.
• Periodization leads to the identification of articulations of different practices in the social structure.

The Communist Manifesto

by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1848)

"A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre...

...It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself "(37).

Section 1: Bourgeois and Proletarians

Marx & Engels present their view of history: “The history of all hitherto societies has been the history of class struggles...”

Bourgeoisie: The class of capitalists, i.e., the owners of the means of

social production.

Proletariat: The class of wage laborers who, having no means of

production of their own, are reduced to selling their

labor power in order to survive. The earn a wage

working for others and as such are regarded as "the

working class."

Advancement in Material Wealth

Any group that advances in material wealth sees a direct correlation between such wealth and advantages expressed via political power. Hence, the state becomes an important target for Marx & Engels.

• Honored professions are are reduced to labor wages
• Hierarchy of political clout that also communicates earnings.
• Complete with organizational charts and chains of command

• Personal worth is converted into exchange value

• Family relation has been reduced to money relation

"Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world which he has called up by his spells" (47)

I.e., destruction of surplus goods, economic sanctions on outlier markets, unnatural disasters from market expansion and overproduction, depletion of natural rescources, global disasters.

...the modern working class, developed – a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market... ...Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. ..

Does this remind you of any other of Marx's ideas?

"Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is" (50).

Organizational charts & "chains of command" in the marketplace is common today. They communicate a hierarchy of:

• political clout
• earnings

Focus is placed on the number of clients / customers / (students?) rather than on the quality of the services and goods provided and produced.

Marx's Hope:

That the proletariat realizes the bourgeoisie supplies them with the tools required to combat it (53).

• Political Education

• General education through the experience of the production of their very own condition.

• "Lived experience"

• "Personal identity"

"Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. formation of the proletariat into a class, [the] overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, [and the] conquest of political power by the proletariat."

"The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop."

"The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."

Modern Industry converts the little workshop of the into the great factory of the industrial capitalist.

• Masses of laborers crowd into the factory organized like soldiers placed under the command of a hierarchy of officers.

• Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and State; they are enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker and the bourgeois manufacturer.

• The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

Proletarians are organized into:

• a class, political party
• continually competing competition amongst themselves

Will they rise again, stronger, firmer, mightier?

• and compel legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself?

"The condition for capital is wage-labor... What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."

II. Proletarians and Communists

In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?

• The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.
• They have no interests separate and from those of the proletariat as a whole.
• They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own to shape the proletarias.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by:

1. The national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, because common interests of the entire proletariat are independently of all nationality.

2. The various stages of development of working class struggles against the bourgeoisie.

Communists are the most advanced and resolute

section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others.

The Communist's theoretical aim? The Abolition of private property!

Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor

• Capital is a collective product united by the action of many members only by the united action of all members of society can it be set in motion.
• Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.
• The average price of wage-labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer.