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Marxism/Marxist criticism. dialectics in action. Imperious-looking males! Beards! Spectacles!. Friedrich Engels. Key texts. 1844 Manuscripts Communist Party Manifesto (with Engels) The Grundrisse Kapital Vol. 1 Also - Conditions of the Working Class in England by Engels.
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Marxism/Marxist criticism dialectics in action
Key texts • 1844 Manuscripts • Communist Party Manifesto (with Engels) • The Grundrisse • Kapital Vol. 1 • Also - Conditions of the Working Class in England by Engels.
Contemporary relevance • 2005, Radio 4’s In Our Time listeners vote Marx as the greatest philosopher. Though probably saying more about the listenership than anything else, this stands against at least three decades of widespread, virulent anti-Marxism. A philosopher seen to underpin our neo-liberal era much more, Popper, a strong critic of Marxism, fell at the final fence… http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20050714.shtml
Biography • Karl Marx, with Friedrich Engels, is usually explained as a founder of modern socialism and communism. The son of a lawyer, he studied law and philosophy; he rejected the idealism of Hegel but was influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach and Moses Hess. His editorship (1842-43) of the Rheinische Zeitung ended when the paper was suppressed. In 1844 he met Engels in Paris, beginning a lifelong collaboration. With Engels he wrote the Communist Manifesto (1848) and other works that broke with the tradition of appealing to natural rights to justify social reform, invoking instead the laws of history (and more specifically historical materialism) leading inevitably to the triumph of the working class…
Hegel • Phenonenology of Spirit (or mind). Hegel attempts to ‘complete’ the project of Immanuel Kant • Marx, one of the Young Hegelians • German Idealism or Idealist Philosophy
‘Dialectics’ Emerges from the Hegelian ‘sublation’. Hegel’s: Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis Applies to ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’, as a model of how consciousness develops in stages, towards ‘pure spirit’, which, when it arrives there, needs no further checking… …the dangers implicit in such a model of a ‘super-being’ have been widely commented upon…
Marxist Dialectics • Marx marries Hegelian ‘sublation’ (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) to his theory of ‘historical materialism’. This produces the ‘dialectic’. Marx struggled with this move away from (but still utilising) Hegel in his 1844 Manuscripts.
‘Commodity fetish’ • For Marx any object moves from its materiality (he uses the example of a wooden table in Capital Vol.1) beyond its use-value (to put things on, etc) into the realm of exchange-value (shifting indexes of prices and all the attendant politics). Arriving between these is the commodity fetish. • The term reification is also important here. In consumer societies, what used to be relations between people, become reified in objects... This is one aspect of the commodity fetish… • Marx uses fetish ironically to refer to anthropological interest in fetish in primitive societies… this is our tribal system... ‘modernism’ does not escape this…
Historical Materialism • Marx identifies ‘history’ as the history of the victors (i.e. great victories in terms of state processions, great monuments, monarchs, etc). In historical materialism he elaborates how his view of history arises from the base and superstructure, i.e., out of the material conditions of existence as produced by the proleteriat. In this sense, he turns the existing assumption of hierarchy on its head. • Detractors claim Marx to be ‘top-down’ theory, but his aims were very much ‘bottom-up’… • History is made by man, not god or ‘destiny’ and the role of the working classes is erased by the violence of battles, statues, civic marches, Royalist spectacle, etc.
Relations of Production • The class relations created by the negotiation of ‘exploited’ and ‘exploiter’ (although this is a crude set of terms to use). Tools can be made by scientists, but are operated by workers. Top-down/bottom-up dialectics are in operation. • Hegel’s ‘master-slave’ philosophy is key here. The slave defers to the stronger, to the master, yet the master cannot do without the slave. The master will never be completely ‘masterful’, as reliant on the other. The slave meanwhile develops skills in-the-world… at this point we need to look at…
…Alienation • The move from ‘craft’ to ‘factory’ (see Ruskin) entails the increasing division of labour. The ‘craftsman’ is forced increasingly to specialise and the masses to work in (what became known as) Fordist conditions. This increasingly stops them from gaining ‘craft’ as they monotonously piece together tiny sections in a vast machinery, often not understanding the very context of the part they work on (and often being moved around). This undermines the potential (in Hegelian terms) for the slave to retain skills in-the-world on his/her own terms. • Alienation is also the reification of social relations under labour, Engels speaks of men ‘who call each other hands and do so to their faces’. The factory owner who has 120 ‘hands’, etc.
Class Struggle & Reification • Lukacs – History of Class Consciousness …some later amendments, Pierre Bourdieu still sees class as operating through commodities, through purchase and difference... Fashion is a very simple example of this… brand hierarchies, tailored suits, vintage clothing… symbolic difference is being produced out of ‘the base’…
Situationism • Reification, is developed by Lukacs. • Society of the spectacle (Guy Debord) develops the commodity fetish and the work of Lukacs, yet disavows Marxism and Marxists later, climbing a ladder that he and the Situationist International then kick away…
Friedrich Engels, 1845 • The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) ‘For the thoroughfares leading from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are lined, on both sides, with an almost unbroken series of shops, and are so kept in the hands of the middle and lower bourgeoisie, which, out of self-interest, cares for a decent and cleanly external appearance and can care for it. True, these shops bear some relation to the districts which lie behind them, and are more elegant in the commercial and residential quarters than when they hide grimy working-men's dwellings; but they suffice to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and grime which form the complement of their wealth.'
Cromarty, Inverness Underground Tradesman’s Entrance - built so that the occupants wouldn’t see the servants arrive and leave The mansion was built in 1772 for George Ross.
Lizzie Burns (above) and Flora Tristan (right)
Gramsci • ‘Hegemony’, the culture of the ruling classes is the default culture…
The Frankfurt School Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas…
Freudian Marxism Herbert Marcuse And also Erich Fromm, et al
False Consciousness • Marcuse retitled this ‘repressive desublimation’… explicitly attempting to hook up with ‘sublimation’ (Freud) which is the redirecting of anything which threatens the ego… • So, ‘repressive desublimation’ is a kind of negative ego-provision, in Marcuse’s time, Playboy magazine might be given as an example of ‘repressive desublimation’. • In Marx this is an aspect of what he calls ‘false consciousness’, although Marx has none of the Freudianism…
False Consciousness • ‘Repressive desublimation’ also accounts for the assimilation of culture, the re-appearence of ‘Bach in the kitchen’, or ‘Freud and Marx in the drugstore’ (Marcuse). In their re-emergence as ‘classics’ they become defused, drained of their otherness, of their powers to jolt humans out of their routine assumptions… this is arguable… • Adorno and Marcuse discussed ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture in fairly binary ways, although it must be said that Adorno knew that ‘the masses’ of mass culture realised that its products (for instance romantic novels) were ‘shtick’… Their critics often talk about them as though mass culture is a kind of thought police…
Walter Benjamin • Theses on the Philosophy of History The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.
Walter Benjamin • The Arcades Project & ‘reading in the ruins’
Crystal Palace The Great Exhibition - 1851
Crystal Palace • Marx visited and was very interested in the Crystal Palace seeing it as an expression of commodity fetish…commentators were concerned about ‘the masses’ coming together for this event, thinking it may lead to a revolutionary situation… international police spies watching Marx (and other radicals) at the Great Exhibition, more than once, arrested each other.
Base and Superstructure • See The Grundrisse. • Superstructural products, according to Marx, are determined by ‘the Base’, i.e. economic modes of production. • Fredric Jameson has pointed out that CGI technology coincided with a spate of Hollywood conservatism, remakes, formula films… however, the ‘one-way traffic’ argument, is arguable…
Marx on Art • Non-alienated labour! • The ‘self’ is a bourgeois construct. Rather than seeing identity as produced by economic circumstance, class position and the potential for navigation (both up and down the class ladder for the middle classes) culture operates to render positions fixed by mythologising them with a ‘self’ made from ‘lineage’ and ‘pedigree’. • We will see how ideas of the self are problematic when we look at psychoanalysis…
Bourdieu • ‘Cultural capital’: Bourdieu, though not understood as dogmatically Marxist (as Jameson is) continues Marx’s investigations into the construction of the ‘self’, relocating ‘cultural capital’ alongside earlier Marxist terms such as ‘labour-power’, especially in a now de-industrialising West.
Vertov – avant garde clampdown Man With A Movie Camera - 1929
Russia - ‘Heroic’ realism Svarog, Stalin & Politburo in Gorky Park, 1931
Criticisms of Marxism • Philosophical ideas of ‘prophecy’, ‘inevitability’ are in doubt, the revolutions as Marx predicted did not occur. However, the Russian revolution of 1917 did occur, yet no-one predicted it would have happened in a largely illiterate Russia…this tends to undermine the application of class consciousness as it arrives from Hegel. • The obviously problematic outcome of the Russian revolution, largely emerging, in terms of western understanding in the invasion of Hungary (1956) although emerging also in the Spanish Civil War (see Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom) through the rise of Stalinism. George Orwell realised the dangers of both left and right extremism and totalitarianism during his time in Spain. Leftist intellectuals leave the communist party from here on in (although key figures, for instance Eric Hobsbawm, stay in, controversially). Yet it is important to distance what Marx said from what was done in his name… Marx lived to see the first trickle of people calling themselves ‘Marxists’ and declared that he himself was not a Marxist.
Popper & von Hayek • Criticisms of the tendency of overly-strong states to edge towards totalitarianism, in von Hayek’s work these critiques are hooked up to libertarian individualism and lassez-faire capital… Margaret Thatcher was a keen exponent of von Hayek, influenced by his work… • Criticisms of von Hayek: Orwell, reviewing Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom claimed that although his critique of [Stalinism] was welcome, lassez-faire brings ghettoes, ‘the problem with competitions, he says, ‘is somebody wins them’… http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20070208.shtml
