Karl Marx Alienation, Material Historicism, and Fetishism Ref. “ The Relevance of Class ”

Karl Marx

Alienation, Material Historicism, and Fetishism Ref. “The Relevance of Class”

OutlineStarting Questions Life and Basic ConceptsConcept 1: Ideology and Materialist

Concept of History; Concept 2: Alienation Concept 3: Value and Commodity

Starting Questions Is our love as conditioned by our unconscious

desires, as by our materialist existence? If the former can be sublimated, can the latter be transcended?

Materialist determinism: To what extent is consciousness determined by “existence,” or the socio-economic aspects of our life? (Norton 768, concept 2)

Alienation: What does “wage labor” mean? Who are wage laborers? Does alienation happen to any kind of wage laborers? (Norton 764-67—concept 1)

Fetishism: How does Marx explain fetishism? How is it different from the way Freud defines it?

(Note: Freud: To disavow the mother’s lack of phallus, a man shifts his object of love to an inanimate object associated with the mother or to a specific part of her body.)

Karl Marx: his Life 生於德國 (Trier, Germany, on May, 1818) 猶

太中產階級． 23 歲獲得博士學位。 1845-1847 年間加入共產黨．和恩格斯都加入

第一國際（ The International Working Men‘s Association; 1864 年建立），之後馬克斯成為其領袖．

1849 moved to London and stayed there for the rest of his life.

革命者（恩格斯在他的墓前說他是「 before all else a revolutionist 」 ) ． （ Schimitt xiii; 3 ）

Karl Marx: his Work and Major Concepts up to 1844 -- Early Writings

1844 Manuscripts (The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts) Alienated Labor

1. revising Hegel’s concept of alienation; 2. 4 types:

1) from his product; 2) from himself in the act of production; 3) from his ‘humanity’ or social essence

(which is taken away from him); 4) from other individuals

Ref. McLellan

Karl Marx: his Work and Major Concepts 1844-1847

German Ideology (With Engels 1845-46; published 1932 ）

Historical Materialism --

“Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.” (768)

four forms of ownership: tribal, ancient communal/State, feudal/estate property, Capitalist, private property exploitation communism

Karl Marx: his Work and Major Concepts

1848 – Communist Manifesto;

1) history of class society and the future of communism;

2) communists positions with proletarian and communist revolution

3) criticism of the other types of socialism 4) description of communist tactics and finishes

with an appeal to the proletariat unity. Our excerpt – bourgeois vs. proletariat (pp.

770-71) –how the bourgeoisie is revolutionary (destructive of traditional structures) expanding its power.

Wage Labor and Capital; Impoverishment or immiseration thesis

Karl Marx: his Work and Major Concepts

1857-67 –Economics Grundrisse(or Foundations of the Critique of

Political Economy) interrelationship of production, consumption, distribution & exchange.

《資本論》 Capital concepts of value, labor and surplus value.

Concept 1: Alienation From "Wage Labour and Capital“ 1. surplus value: the differences between wage

labor and sale price. 2. Labor power is . . . a commodity which its

possessor, the wage worker, sells to capital. (Both the labor power and laberer become commodities.)

3. Capital does not consist in accumulated labor (or surplus value) serving living labor as a means for new production. It consists in living labor(or laborers) serving accumulated labor as a means of maintaining and multiplying the exchange value of the latter.

Ref. Alienation: Hegel’s concept

The Phenomenology of Spirit –the development of mind (or spirit) from its immediate perception of the here and now to the stage of self-consciousness (understanding of the world, and ordering the self’s action accordingly ), the stage of reason (understanding of the real), after which the spirit, by means of religion and art, attained to the absolute knowledge (recognizing in the world the stages of their own reason).

These stages Hegel called ‘alienation’ creations of the mind which are superior to the mind.

Concept 1: Wage labor A wage labourer is a person whose

primary means of income is to sell labor. From The Communist Manifesto (anthology

771) “The bourgeoisie . . . has played a most

revolutionary part. . . . has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers.” (771)

Concept 1: Wage Labor + industrialism Alienation1844 Manuscript: Alienated labor (anthology765-67 ) Capitalist – two classes: the property-owners and

propertyless workers.(764) Labour produces not only commodities; it produces

itself and the worker as commodity. The more he produces, the less he possesses. His labor becomes “an object, an external

existence, … outside him…as something alien to him.”

Four kinds of alienation of labour (767)

Wage Labor and Alienation"The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he produces. ...Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity….

…the object which labour produces—labour’s product—confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is an objectification of labour. ...

All these consequences are contained in this characteristic, that the worker is related to the product of labour as to an alien object."

Concept 2: Materialist concept of history –1) ideology

Inversion of German idealism. Life is not determined by consciousness, but

consciousness by life.” (anthology 768) “. . . Man makes religion, religion does not make

man.”

Not all ideas are ideologies, which support those in power. Those connected with the contradictions in socio-economic relations or the labor process. Contradictions caused by 1) division and alienation

of labor; 2) possession of private property

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. … Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. (768)

Materialist Determinism

1) ideology--definitions German Ideology: “Ruling ideas of the ruling class.”

False consciousness (Engel’s term) the

camera obscura allusion.(768) “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the

ruling ideas, . . . The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

精忠報國；毋忘在莒；處變不驚、莊敬自強

1) ideology--definitionsLater writings: ideology as illusion vs.

ideology as functional in daily life. German ideology published in 1923.

2nd International simplification of Marx’s idea of economic determinism;

Ideology – seen as negative; Western Marxists e.g. Gramsci & Althusser

(McLellan 1995: 19; Ref. Anthology 762)

Concept 2: Materialist concept of history and society The socio-economic process (e.g. base) is

basic to human society and the other human activities (such as religion, politics and other cultural activities and forms of social consciousness, which form Superstructure) are secondary.

modes of production: 'The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist' ('The Poverty of Philosophy', 1847). Marx does not always support this narrow causal connection.

Concept 2: Materialist concept of history 2) Dialectical MaterialismFour forms of ownership in history:

(future: communist) Class struggle Communist Manifesto

Primitive Communism,

slave feudal Capitalist, bourgeois

no classes Bondage;

state

Nobility; landed ownership

Ref. Dialectical Materialism in History

“. . . at each stage there is found a material result: a sum of productive forces, an historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions, which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances. (The German Ideology Chap 2: Civil Society and the Conception of History )

Concept 3: Value and Commodity The materiality of value is not physical but

social. For Marx, value is a social substance that appears in a series of material forms (labor-selling people, commodified things, money).

Use value (quality) vs. Exchange value (quantity)

Exchange value can be measured (e.g. labor-time labor value of the wage (kept as a secret) vs. labor value of the product

Fetishism anthology 776 - : commodity as fetishes Three-stage “fetishization” in commodity

production:1. Value creation by labor; (Capital vol 1) 2. “realization” of this value in monetal form; 3. “accumulation” of this value through capital investment

that set in motion further cycles of valorization, realization, and accumulation (Capital vol 3)

Capital – a universal form; the ultimate fetish; a means that becomes an end. (e.g. credit card and stock)

Fetishism (2) Value creation by labor; (Capital vol 1) 1) p. 776 A thing has a value in use becomes

something transcendent. The mysterious thing added to commodity through: Abstraction (1) – producer’s labor for others

(takes a social form) quantified as labor time (2) The social characters of men’s labour

objective and stamped on their products. (3) The products take on social relations with

other products.

Fetishism (2) –quote “A commodity is therefore a mysterious

thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.”(776-77)

The Social Character of Labor P. 777 labor also abstracted The relations between the producers

become the relations between their products = a relation between things

778 – to equate products with values also means to equate/quantify the different kinds of labor expended on them.

Abstraction (3): money Value is determined by labour time, but

this is actually a secret hidden. (779)“It is…just this ultimate money-form of

the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between individual producers.”

Commodity and its Exchange Value

"Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values"

The working dayThe life of a laborer vs. the expansion of

capital, which depends on unnatural extension of the labor day p 784

The Relevance of Class Today Class (in terms of control relations) –

and occupation (self-esteem) Capitalist, shareholder operational management strategic management wage laborer and working on routine

maintenance

Where are you positioned, and how about teachers??

Corporation three different themes.1. The Pathology of Commerce, filmmakers examine

the pathological self-interest of the modern corporation.

2. Planet Inc. looks at the scope of commerce and the sophisticated, even covert, techniques marketers use to get their brands into our homes.

3. The final program, Reckoning, examines how corporations cut deals with any style of government — from Nazi Germany to despotic states today — that allow or even encourage sweatshops, as long as sales go up.

References McLellan, David, ed. Karl Marx: Selected

Writings. 2nd Ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977, 2000.

Tucker, Robert C ed. The Marx and Engels Reader. 2nd Ed. NY: Norton, 1978.

Schmitt, Richard. Introduction to Marx and Engels: A Critical Reconstruction. London: Westview P, 1987.