Karl Marx
In Our Time
Marx and Hegel
Reason has a history
Hegel makes philosophy real life
Hegel sets up problem - Trying to save Christianity. His philosophy says the same things in
concepts as religions do in picture paintings. Modernising Christianity.
The dialectic
- movement forward history through
- Feuerbach - criticises Christianity and religion —> Hegel’s idea of spirit is JUST a spirit. Man is
sensuous. Spirit AND mind and is thus dependent on others. humanity is dependent and the
community of I and thou. CHRIST is interposed and the mediator —> this creates an
individualistic attitude where individual is sovereign and doesn't relate to others but to Christ.
- ANTI-religion. “Religion is the opium of the people”.
Marx says F’s materialism is static.
“Dialectical materialism”
The Communist Manifesto
Contradictions between ideas — realisation of the absolute (material conditions which really
matter)
Capital
Marx sought to show that capitalism was temporary!
AND there was something viable after capitalism
Former modes of production (ancient, feudal etc.)
Markets and bourgeois uncontrolled and always trying to generate profit
Capitalism organises the working class and forces modes on them which help them liberate
themselves from capitalism.
MARX doesn’t notice —> BUT also was capable of organising itself against the fall of capitalism.
CREATION of desires/wants —> responsive. Underestimates its resilience.
Was he wrong?
- Revolutionary road only one possible in Russia which perhaps explains why it happened there
and not UK/Germany (where they had workers rights etc.)
- Lenin/Mao adapted marxism to local conditions and ‘turned it on its head’
- fault of twisted Marxism
- “If they're marxist then I’m not a marxist”
- PROVED him right that soviet union didn’t work — proletariat wasn’t ready and he had said this.
Need a large movement NOT a few people leading from above (ie the Bolsheviks)
Can he be absolved?
- he personally cannot be blamed for things many years later
- but doesn’t he call for revolution?
- He wanted to RAISE condition
- MARXISM is a method, way of arguing NOT a rigid list of commandments
Ideas the product of their economic environment?
- human affliction not caused by God or nature but by humans
BBC Documentary
Private property
- at the heart of Marx’s ideas
- economic relationships between people at the heart of EVERYTHING (THIS is materialism, i.e.
the material relations between people - this drives human interaction)
- Economy is structuring principal of social totality
- “Those that have it and those that don’t”
- Proletariat works for the capitalist. Capitalist sells product for more than he pays proletariat
and so on - profit at the heart of everything as capitalist expands and owns more and does
more
- Need to earn more and more profit is at the heart of capitalism and is the recipe for disaster
after disaster.
WHERE was Marx right?
- income inequality is source of tremendous tension
- globalisation and capitalism lead to crises
CAPITALISM is unstable and leads to crisis after crisis, as well as being unequal.
Bosses/workers, always at odds.
- bosses save on wages to make more profit. As workers earn less they have less to spend on
what the bosses are selling. This can cause a crisis
- eventually it will collapse after too many crises. POWER of money is at heart of everything
- capitalism is riddled with contradictions which causes crises
How problems with wages cause crises:
- High worker to boss ratio means higher competition and bosses have to pay more. As this cuts
into profit ACROSS ECONOMY, profits fall and capitalists go out of business. This equals a
crisis, workers lose jobs, wages fall and exploitation restarts. High labour costs bad for
business/profits.
- VERY high worker to boss ratio means bosses can pay very little as they all compete for jobs
(high unemployment = low wages). BUT paying them less means they pay less and they
eventually lose out. Thus, seeking profits in the short term erodes away at them in the long term
as they ultimately get their money from the workers. Capitalism is doomed.
- desperate supply of cheap labour at heart of all the problems of capitalism
70s saw powerful trade unions keeping wages low. 80s reversed this as Thatcher/Reagan stripped
away obstacles which made it hard to keep wages low (union bombardment etc.) No longer high
wages and high security.
Peter Singer - Marx: A Very Short Introduction
Communism as the resolution of the tensions between man/nature and man/man (i.e. alienation).
Abolition of:
- wages
- private property
- alienated labour
The source of this is the abolition of private property - only then will humans be able to
appreciate the world in a human way. We don’t know what this communism would look like entail,
we only know a few of the things it certainly wouldn't contain.
The huge economic (necessary) contradiction is that between the proletariat and private property.
Private property relies on the existence of a proletariat, which is compelled to overthrow it - this
being the solution. This is dialectical materialism.
THE PROLETARIAT BECOMES CONSCIOUS OF ITS MISERY AND SEEKS TO OVERTHROW
CAPITALIST SOCIETY, HENCE: “CONSCIOUSNESS DOES NOT DETERMINE LIFE, BUT LIFE
DETERMINES CONSCIOUSNESS”.
Materialism also in the idea that human practical activity must be at the heart of resolutions, not
philosophy (hence quote on his gravestone). - this is the materialist conception of history.
Alienation is very much linked to materialism and the materialist reading of history. It describes a
struggle and a consciousness. Human beings will never be free as long as they are subjected to
forces which determine their thoughts, ideas and nature.
Ben Fine - Marx’s Capital: Third Edition
Hegelian dialectic - Progression of man throughout history towards the Idea (perfection of
institutions, cultures, religions and thus society); this constitutes a battle between institutions/ideas
for dominance which is ever present. EACH stage brings about advancement on the last and the
roots for the change into the next. This is the Hegelian dialectic.
Feuerbach — Idea of materialism: “humans need God because religion satisfies an
emotional need”:
- best human qualities mapped onto God
- God assumed independent existence in human consciousness
- humans must substitute love of each other for love of God if they are to regain humanity
Marx turns this into a view of society as a whole AND comes up with an explanation for the need of
God: material conditions:
- the way in which production is produced (this, to him, is at the heart of all social existence -
material relations
- the force for change in society is the contradiction between the forces of production and
the relations of production
Relations of production
- slave/master; capitalist/wage-earner; lord/serf
- these relations are best considered as class relations
- they are the LIMITS on which society is constructed
- right to buy/sell; dependency etc. in capitalism
- people have little choice in their condition, and though in capitalism workers might force
higher wages, the system of wages itself is never threatened.
- Stability
- only become unstable when the conditions of production are disrupted (i.e. when
proletariat can no longer sell his labour)
- forces of production held back by the relations of production
- CRISES
- this is class struggle, upon which depends the development of the relations of
production!
Unconventional Economics
- Marx places greet significance in human consciousness and human nature in understanding
economics
- to him it is a social science
The Labour Theory of Value
Capitalism is a highly developed system of commodity production
Use-value - unquantifiable (how useful something is)
- determined by physical properties determining its usefulness
Exchange-value - quantifiable (ability to exchange with another commodity)
- bears no systematic relation to those physical properties
*every commodity has a use-value, but not every use-value is a commodity. Use values which are
freely available have no exchange value*. A use-value is not a commodity unless it embodies a
labour cost and is exchanged. Thus all commodities are the product of labour value and this is
the basis for the relationship of exchange.
Key Q. What is common to two commodities that causes them to be equivalent in their
exchange value?
A. NOT physical relationship but specific social one - the relationship between commodities is the
product of human labour
Nature of exchange relationship, or more specifically the appropriation of one person’s labour
from another, is different under different systems (feudalism/capitalism)
The labour theory of value considers the relationship of exchange from the viewpoint of the labour
time necessary to produce commodities. It expresses definite facts about material life so is
*not* metaphysical.
Under capitalism, production is solely for exchange (i.e. not immediate use), and the aim of this
production is social use values (which are unknown due to market anonymity - alienation?)
- intimate link between social use-values and exchange
- products embody social use-values and are created by social labour in the abstract
- exchange = exchange of products of individual concrete labour (something someone has made)
as abstract labour (sold to unknown person for (less?) money than is worth
- exchange only considers QUANTITY OF ABSTRACT LABOUR and not quality of product
- CAPITALISM is defined by the production of social use-values and thus the exchange of the
products of individual concrete labour as abstract social labour. Thus a social relation — the
products of individual concrete labour (see above re. economic relation being at the heart of
social life).
- the relationship between exchange, prices (of goods) and values is NOT wholly quantitative but
also reflects social relations of productions (relation of worker/boss/consumer etc.) and
distribution.
Labour and labour-power
LABOUR = labourer’s work
LABOUR POWER = labourer’s capacity/ability to work (what a labourer is specifically capable of
producing/doing/making)
**In capitalism, labourer’s ability to work is exchanged as well as the products of labour. Thus
labour-power becomes a commodity (purchaser = capitalist; labourer = seller). The PRICE of this
labour-power is the wage. The use-value of labour is that it in turn creates use values. It is the
source of value when exercised as labour which is unique. The labour-power which produces
these specific use-values created by the labourer has to be bought by the capitalist who thus then
owns and sells the use-values as commodities.**
IS the worker thus like a slave?
NO
- s/he owns and sells labour power
YES
- little to no control over the labour process
- limited freedom to selling labour power - otherwise starvation
- he is a Wage Slave
What about the capitalist???
- controls labourer AND the product (by commanding wage payments)
- owns tools and raw materials/means of production
- THUS capitalist class has a monopoly of the means of production and it is this which keeps
the labourer in wage-slavery
- THE CAPITALIST CLASS OWNS THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION
- if the labourer owned all this then there would be no need to sell labour-power
- labour theory of value refers specifically to capitalism
- the social exchange of labour-power PRESUPPOSES the monopoly of the means of
production and the existence of wage-labourers.
