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Marx. The history of all hitherto existing is the history of class struggles. The Bourgeoisie.
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Marx • The history of all hitherto existing is the history of class struggles.
The Bourgeoisie The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation
The Bourgeoisie … 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.
The Bourgeoisie … has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.
Personal relationships with things… Economic relationships with people
Personal relationships with things… Economic relationships with people
The Bourgeoisie … has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.
The Bourgeoisie … cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.
The Bourgeoisie The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
47 Starbucks in Beijing 4 in Oman 17 in Paris! 22 in Instanbul (4 in Ankara)
The Bourgeoisie The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country
The Bourgeoisie The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization.
The Bourgeoisie The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
The Bourgeoisie The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.
The Bourgeoisie The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground -- what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?
Conclusion 1 We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.
The dialectic The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons -- the modern working class -- the proletarians.
Note 1 • Materialist = • Historical because… • Dialectical reason? • ‘Turned Hegel on his head’?
The Proles Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. • (Metropolis clip)
An argument In ‘Holy Family’: Property and Proletariat form 2 halves of a mutually dependent whole. Property is compelled, for its own self-preservation, to exploit the proles. The Proles are compelled, for their own self-preservation, to abolish property. They are, therefore, both alienated from themselves – one is satisfied, one is not.
Another (Capital) Things (Commodities) have value according to their use (use-value). In Capitalism, things have value according to their exchangeability (exchange-value). Exchange values are ‘accidental and entirely relative’. Use values are indeterminate (use of a shoe as a hammer?).
Marx. “A commodity is, in the first place, a thing outside of us that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another.” But, in reality, commodities have properties other than those that satisfy wants – people collect them, venerate them, are loyal to them, and preserve them. Where do these mysterious properties come from?
Therefore… The interesting thing about commodities is that they are products of labor. “Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labor embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.” (305)
Or, in other words: “A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialized in it.” (305-6)
2 Key premises: • In all states of society, the labor time that it costs to produce subsistence is necessarily of interest to all mankind. • From the moment that men in any way work with or for oneanother, their labor assumes a social form.
Looking ahead: • Marx’s contention: • Since the special status of commodities is above and beyond subsistence, the enigmatic character of commodities comes from this social form of production.
“We then see that that which determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production” (306)
The equality of human labor is expressed in objects by the equal value of the products (If I take 2ce as long to produce a widget than you take to produce a fidget, a widget must cost 2ce as much as a fidget). Thus, the relations between producers take on the form of relations between our products.
Therefore, a commodity is mysterious because: In it the social character of labor appears to be a property of the object itself. The relations between the producers to the sum total of their labor (that is, their products) is presented back to them as social relations between the products they produce. Therefore: “Products of labor become commodities – social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.” (320-1)
