Marxism

1. Marxism

2. Marx’s Life • Completed Doctorate at Jena – 1841 • Journalism Career – Censored by Prussian Government – 1843-1845 – Begins life long collaboration with Friedrich Engels. • The Communist Manifesto and the Revolution of 1848 • Grundrisse and Das Kapital written 1849-1883 – involved in International Workingmen’s Association

3. Marx’s Writing and the Real Marx • Marx as Humanist • Marx as Economist and Scientist • Reconciling or Separating the two is the challenge of Marxian scholarship

4. Hegel’s Philosophy and Politics • Transforming Logic – aufheben – to preserve, eliminate, and or transcend – the core of the Hegelian dialectic • Labor – Attain consciousness of self through interaction with the environment – freedom is achievable in the present historical era • Political Theory – the state mediates between civil society and the family – this role enables the achievement of greater rationality, freedom and self realitzation

5. Critics of Hegel • Ludwig Feuerbach – Hegel’s Absolute idea is a distracting abstraction from human potentialities • Karl Marx – The state, instead of overcoming the ego-dominated civil society, becomes a tool of that society • Marx abandons the ideas for material reality, but applies Hegel’s dialectic to this material reality

6. Marx on the Human Condition • Questioning the effect of industrialization on the human condition • Labor as the source of man’s life and the tragedy of being alienated from this meaningful activity preoccupied Marx • Capitalists use the product of a workers labor to enslave that worker – wage slavery • Non-alienated labor is the source of human freedom, joy, and community – the species-being working out its own evolution and refinement - Beauty

7. History and the Development of Capitalism • Five Stages of History – Primitive Community, Slavery, Feudalism, Capitalism, and Socialism – The goal of history is freedom from natural and human domination • Substructure (the mode of production and control of resources) and suprastructure (the ideas and institutions justifying present modes of domination) • Forces of production collide with relations of production producing a revolution into a new mode of production. (Class struggle)

8. History and the Development of Capitalism - Continued • Progress toward freedom from scarcity and oppression • Bourgeois class a tool to bring the productive capacity that will make possible real freedom, but the Bourgeois prepare their own graves as they pursue their own wealth

9. The Capitalist Economic System: Its Decline and Fall • Labor is the source of value • The Capitalists takes the surplus value from laborers and uses this advantage to tighten is grip around the throats of working people • Competition among capitalists encourages greater capitalization and the further impoverishment of the working classes eventually plunging the system toward revolution.

10. Beyond Capitalism • The revolutionary potential of the masses is brought into question by Marx’s own experience but capitalism is inevitably doomed because of its internal dynamic. • A full and unalienated life awaits those who will inherit the world after the passing of capitalism