Marx etc

Karl Marx

• 1818- ) German, settled in London
• Critic of capitalism
• Arguably most influential philosopher of all time
• Socialist Revolutions in: USSR, China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, Vietnam
• "Capital"- basic premise: against class-system and private property. 

Problems with Capitalism: Alienation

• Modern World is Alientated 
• Modern work is highly specialized
• Lack of identification with product of labor
• Alienation is a feeling of diconnection

Modern Work is Insecure

• Capitalism makes human expendabe
• We are terrified of being abandoned
• We yearn for belonging in the world

Workers get little, capitalists get rich

• Primitive accumulation: Capitalists shrink wages to get profit margin
• Marx thinks profit= theft= exploitation

Capitalism is unstable

• Capitalist systems are characerized by series of crisis
• The cause of crisis: we produce more than can consume
• Capitalism is so efficient, then why do all not benefit from profit?
• Modern economy is very productive: few need to work
• We understand work as freedom.
• We look down at unemployment

Capitalism is bad for capitalists

• Capitalists not evil
• Marriage is an extension of business
• Capitalism forces everyone to put economic interests at core of life
• Deep relationships are not possible
• Commodity fetishism: makes us value things that have no objective value
• Feminists 20c: women want to work! 

Ideology

• Material conditions create psychology
• People's beliefs are value judgements
• Evil of capitalism is not the bank, but that it makes us anxious, competitive, conformist, politically complacent

Possible Utopia

• Communist Manifesto
• No private property or inherited wealth (i.e. class)
• Central control of bank, communication systems, transportation
• Free education
• People can develop their nature

Freedom

Only in community [has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. In the previous substitutes for the community, in the State, etc. personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed within the relationships of the ruling class, and only insofar as they were individuals of this class

Alientation

Alienation is the process whereby people become foreign to the world they are living in.

The concept of alienation is deeply embedded in all the great religions and social and political theories of the civilised epoch, namely, the idea that some time in the past people lived in harmony, and then there was some kind of rupture which left people feeling like foreigners in the world, but some time in the future this alienation would be overcome and humanity would again live in harmony with itself and Nature.

Reification

 social relations are conceived as relations between things

Commodity Fetishism

Fetishism, in ancient religions, meant the belief that inanimate objects such as icons or trees, clouds, etc., possess human properties; in Marxism, the belief that commodities possess human properties.

In this formulation, Marx has captured the essential nature of all the ideological illusions of bourgeois society.

Bourgeois Society

Last step of he project towards freedom. Its contradictions with itself point to another possible world.

Possible cause of failure of USSR project: skipped bourgeois stage.

Failure of the Soviet Project

• Frankfurt School and Adorno: USSR form of perverse capitalism 
• Formation of the New Left
• Critique of capitalism teams with psychology, art, literature
• Appraisal of early Soviet and Cuban Constructivism

The Left

• Situationist Guy Debord and Society of the Spectacle (1967): "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation."
• Adorno's Culture Industry: Bullet Three
• Deleuze's Capitalism and Schizophrenia
• Slavoj Zizek on Ideology