Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Week 6: Marx - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Reason has a history (i.e. it is embodied in human societies), the progress of Freedom
        
        The absolute spirit (Geist) = infinite rational subject that comes to know itself over time
        
        The world realises iteself as an infinite, rational subject
        
        Reason is being actualized in the world (the rational is actual and the actual is rational)
    - - Critic of Hegel - leftist persuasion and major influence on Marx
        
        Religion is an alienated form of human emotion - in Hagel religion is something society is moving away from
        
        Notion of human species-being: and loss of essential community through religion over time
        
        Involved in political activity - it is in the response to him that Marx famously writes “Philosophers have long tried to understand the world. The point is, however, to change it.”
        
        Criticism of the mainframe of these people who are influenced by Hagel
  - - - Marx acknowledges that these guys:
        
        Recognises some form of labour theory of value
        
        Propose that the key theoretical relations to be studied are those between elements of rent and wages in manufacturing production and socially rather than focussed on individual actors (aggregate groupings of society like Ricardo)
        
        Ricardo: “the interest of the landlord is always opposed to that of the consumer and manufacturer.” (1817)
- - - - Once the existing relations of production are no longer appropriate for the forces of production, you have revolutions
    - - First stage: Tribal form - (prologue to primitive communism as is not a full on class system) society has no social classes but it’s structured in kinship relations in hunting and gathering. Quite elementary in terms of the complexity of society - further extension of the division of labour within one family
        
        Second stage: Primitive Communism - ancient communal and state ownership proceeds from the union of several tribes into a city by agreement or conquest. First official class based society
        
        Third stage: Feudalism - state property. Like tribal and communal ownership as is based on the community but the producing class standing over against it is not the slaves but a rather kind of small peasantry
  - - - Alienation: Separation of labor from ownership of the means of production → this is a key component of capitalism
        
        From products of labour
        
        from the processes of work - hyperspecialisation
        
        From themselves
        
        From others
      - Why? Division of Labour
        
        “The division os labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him.”
      - What would unalienated life look like? What would communist society look like?
        
        “While in Communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes. Society regulates the general production and that makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow. To hunt in the morning and fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic”
        
        Basic form of freedom not equality: “The condition for the free development of each is the free development of all” Marx
    - - In pre-capitalist society, goods are produced for their use value - commodities are produced for consumption by the producers e.g. farmers
        
        vs. Exchange value - in a capitalist society commodities are not produced for the producer, there is exchange in a market
      - Labour allows commodities to be exchangeable - what allows commodities to be exchangeable is their labour content
        
        Labour power - living human labour power is the only source of new exchange value. Is a commodity like any other
        
        A common mistake in interpreting Marx is to say that value is determined by the value of what the worker produces
        
        Rather, value is determined by the cost of producing the worker - this is why the physicist is paid more than the textile worker, it costs more to produce that worker than it does to produce the textile worker who is unskilled
      - Surplus value = price – cost of production
        
        Labour is robbed of surplus value because they don’t own the means of production - the capitalists own the means of production
        
        According to Marx - captial has no role in creating surplus value (not necessarily a fact, is sort of up for debate)
    - - What keeps profits in the positive?
        
        Malthus - population increases push wages down so profits are maintained
        
        Marx - reserve army of the unemployed (people, for example, who have been dispossessed in primitive accumulation) once they’re employed and wages rise, further technolgoical advance allows them to be released again back into the pool of the reserve. Continue push them out and draw them back which allows you to continue to extract that surplus value out of them and continue to have profits
        
        But profits persist?
        
        Mill and CPE agree on the falling rate of profit to reach a stationary state, for Marx the mechanics are slightly different
        
        According to Marx, the profit rate (rather than absolute profit) depends only on labour
        
        If you increase captial to increase total profit, the profit employed per unit of capital declines - profit rate declines
        
        Over time this leads to a concentration in industry and a lower demand for labour
        
        Why? reserve army of labour
        
        Reinvestment of profits leads to accumulation
- - - - 1848: Year of Revolutions (Sicily, France, Germany, Italy, Austrian Empire)
        
        Across Europe precipitated by economics crisis
        
        All of these fail
        
        Napoleon
        
        Have mentioned a number of revolutions in this course e.g. America, Haiti
- - - - Communism - emerges from socialism
        
        Monetary or material incentives won’t drive work
        
        Marx’s passage - hunting and gathering and driven by curiosity
        
        Under communism each contributes to their own ability and receives according to needs
- - - - Class Analysis - can we reduce class to bourgeois and proletariat
        
        Question of is mankind perfectible? This utopia of Marxism that we talk about is that something that might be what Marx himself would have hoped for society