Chandler Griffith
Eric Reiff
Eric Reiff
Discussion questions for week 3
The Marx-Engels Reader
“Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”
“The Grundrisse”
All,
I kept my questions close to the text. I went through and pulled out things that I thought were important to Marx’s argument, which being Marx is just about everything. Obviously in 1 hour of discussion we will not cover all of this material; come with the questions you want to discuss (from the below, or your own) and we will cover what we can. I highlighted the questions below that seem most essential. Together we should be able to make sense of anything unclear.
Best,
Eric
“Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”
Pg. 71 (last paragraph)
What is the objectification of labor? How is it alien?
How does the laborer produce capital that then enslaves him?
What is subjective labor? What is objective labor? What is living labor? What is alien labor? What is capital (appropriated alien labor)?
Pg. 71 “The only wheels which political economy sets in
motion are avarice and the war amongst the avaricious—competition.” What scale is Marx assuming that the political
economists are talking about? I don’t think it is clear. Juice box business
against juice box business? Country against country? Neighbor against neighbor?
Husband against wife? Is avarice ever acceptable to Marx?
Pg. 71 “Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity—and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally (71).” What does it mean that labour produces itself and the worker as a commodity?
Pg. 72-3 As the worker appropriates the external natural
world, he deprives himself of the means of life in a double sense: what are
these two ways in which he deprives himself?
Pg. 73 “Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production.” What does this mean?
Pg. 74-75 What are the 3 aspects of estranged labor that Marx discusses?
Pg. 76-77 What does
Marx mean when he argues that estranged labor reverses the relationship of man’s
Conscious Being and life activity? (This is really important.)
Pg. 77-8 What does estranged labor do to the relationship between humans?
Pg. 78 Who does the product of labor belong to if it doesn’t belong to the laborers themselves?
Pg. 79 Where does private property come from? In the first instance does Marx argue that there was estranged labor or private property? Does it matter once the system is in place?
Pgs. 81-84 Does Marx convincingly deploy dialectic historical materialism in predicting the end of private property and the beginning of communism? He argues that there is first a universality of private property, then crude communism, then “Communism as the positive transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man . . .”
Pg. 93 Marx argues that “The need for money is therefore the true need produced by the modern economic system, and it is the only need which the latter produces (93).” –He then argues that, “private property does not know how to change crude need into human need (93-94) .” First, do you buy that private property only make us care for money; second, do you think this is why governments constantly have to intervene in peoples’ lives domestically and internationally to take care of peoples basic needs? Is capitalism’s continued existence the reason these social interventions frequently fail (or maybe they succeed) to resolve problems that they are targeted to mitigate?
Pg. 95 “The machine accommodates itself to the weakness of the human being in order to make the weak human being into a machine (95).” If you have ever worked for a coorperation, how can you argue with this?
Pg. 95 At the bottom of the page (we should read this together in class) Marx talks about how PE is a moral science, because it cause us to be thrifty and save, and therefore not to go out into the world and be immoral. The PEconomist replaces wealth with money, the money has the power to do everything that you chose not to do—in order to save money. The money then works only to make more of itself, thus robbing you of your wealth (aka being human). “The worker may only have enough for him to want to live, and may only want to live in order to have [enough] (96).”
Pg. 96 What does Marx mean by “ . . . too many useful thing produces too large a useless population (96).”
Pg. 97 Marx explains a tension between political economy and ethics. What is this tension?
Pg. 99 Marx says, “In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is completely sufficient (99).” Why, according to Marx, is this?
Pg. 102 “What does Marx mean by, “Money is the pimp between man’s need and the object between his live and his means of life (102).”
Pg. 103-5 How does Marx arrive at the conclusion that, “Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good (103)” and that “Money is the alienated ability of mankind (104).” Or again, “money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and exchanges all things, it is the general confounding and compounding of all things—the world upside-down—the confounding and compounding of all natural and human qualities (105)”.
“Grundrisse"
Pg. 228 What is productive consumption and consumption proper? Are they both immediately production? (need to talk about objective labor)
Pg. 225-233 Why is it important to see production and distribution as parts of the same process rather than different processes? How is our thinking of production changed when we no longer assume inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded (225)”. Is Marx right that Mill, Smith, Ricardo etc. build upon a creation myth?
Pg. 229 How does consumption produces production?
Pg. 232 (Top of pg) Marx again makes the distinction so central to his argument; that, “the individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self-reproducing individual (232)”. How is this process different in society (i.e. after objectified labor faces itself)?
Pg. 237-8 Marx goes after Hegel’s argument in the Phenomenology of Spirit that the in the first instant the real comes from focusing the mind on itself (abstract) and working outward (toward the concrete) to develop, through a dialectic, an understanding of the world. Marx can’t imagine the world without its materiality, its concreteness, so he says Hegel was wrong. Can we see yet what sorts of different issues a world evolving out of materiality has that a world evolving out of the abstract may have avoided? Specifically what is gained or lost when we work from society as the premise?
Pg. 241 Marx (last paragraph) shrouds his understanding of the origin of bourgeois society in the clothes of Darwinian evolution. Does this work? Does it work when we consider dialectics (dialectical evolution?). Or, is does the dialectic make historical materialism part of something other than then Darwinian evolution.
Is there a difference between private property and capital for Marx? Each reading seems to favor a different term. Are they the same?
Pg. 247-50 What is surplus value? How does it factor into capital-labor relations?
Pg. 253 “Labour capacity relates to its labour as to an alien, and if capital were willing to pay it without making it labour it would enter the bargain with pleasure (254)”. Is this Marx blaming Regan’s “welfare queen” problem on capitalists not socialists? Whoa!
Pg. 257 How is it that the more the worker labors, the poorer he gets?
Pg. 262 In bourgeois society, the worker e.g. stands there purely without objectivity, subjectively; but the thing which stands opposite of him has now become the true community [Gemeinwesen], which he tries to make a meal of, and which makes a meal of him (262)”. How is the worker made a meal of?
Pg. 264 Marx distinguishes between the worker and his labor. Only the labor and not the worker are needed by capital; does this satisfactorily explain workers’ relationships with machines?
Pg. 267 and 271 How are workers doubly and ironically freed? (Marx at his best IMHO)
Pg. 270 Why is it important for Marx to explain that capital did not “create the objective conditions of labour (270)”?
Pg. 274 (Toward the top) How does Marx explain the laborer comes under the capitalist’s command?
Pg. 275 How does Marx arrive at the end of this page to conclude that, “the production of capitalists and wage labourers is thus a chief product of capital’s realization process (275)”? –there’s divorcing and destroying going on, ugly!
Pg. 276-8 How does Marx deal with Malthus?
Pg. 284 According to Marx, how has man’s relationship to nature changed under the capitalist mode of production?
Pg. 293 Laws and conditions of the production of wealth and the law of the ‘distribution of wealth’, should we think of them as different sets of laws as JS Mill is quoted or are they the same laws as Marx claims? If Marx is correct what does this mean when US political parties argue economic strategies (i.e. they seems to argue about different distributions, but favor the same means for producing wealth, right?)
Pg. 293 Is Marx a Luddite when it comes to machines?
Pg. 293 This section of the Grundrisse ends with a finger firmly pointed at the importance of the process of history. Does Marx need to bed his argument in a telos as he has done? Obviously the communist paradise hasn’t been realized; does this hurt Marx’s arguments?
Science is even given over to the promotion of production:
Pg. 284 (top) the natural and technological sciences arise from and promote material production. So how is this resolved? Can there be a science that is not rooted in production? Has there been in the past? Or has science always been in support of production?
Pg. 285 How does capitalism survive as a contradiction? –Is Marx using the dialectic in this analysis? If this is dialectic, is this Marx sowing the seeds for capitalism’s synthesis into communism?
Pg. 286 At the end of the main paragraph is Marx discussing the business cycle? Has modern capitalism gotten better at controlling this tension?
Pg. 287 Marx discusses another tension between surplus labor time and disposable time. Is this again the dialect at work?
Pg. 289 What is fixed capital, floating capital, circulating capital
Pg. 290 What is the difference between direct and social production?
Pg. 291 The end of capitalism, happens by internal contradiction. What is the internal contradiction?
Pg. 291 Are the crises that increase in scale the business cycle? What can we say about the last financial crisis? It was big, yet no overthrow of capitalism?
Broader questions
From what we have read is Marx guilty of historical materialism or does this belie the complexity of his arguments?
By analyzing human history through the lens of material relations, are there aspects of social history that Marx may be blind to? i.e. what are the limitation of Marx’s materialistic ontology?
In spite of periodic continuing regional and global economic ‘calamities’, why does capitalism persist? Is Marx wrong in his understanding of a teleological history? Is he wrong in his material analysis of social relations? Or should we just wait and let Harvey tell us in the next reading why capitalism persists?
Marx is generally arguing that what is social about humans is their control over their productive capacity; and that private property disaggregates society by enslaving the worker to the product of his own labor that is then owned by the non-working capitalists. In other words, the worker is alienated from his labor and thereby from the rest of society when private property is realized. First, is the logic sound? Second, do you buy this argument in general? Does the argument hold true at all scales, places and times? Does this argument ever fall apart? How does this argument mater to your project?
Fictitious primordial condition
Marx says that PE assumes as historical fact that which it wishes to explain. Marx always digs underneath the assumptions, plunges into the murkiness that we have ignored and explains things that we haven’t thought through before. Do you think overall his work is revealing or overcomplicating?
jacquelynjampolsky
It makes me very nervous that this will be the first discussion paper posted. Please, I highly recommend that you do not use this as guidance in your own work. This is my first shot at anything 'social theory,' and per Elizabeth's caution, I did my best to 'get one thing' out of the text. I look forward to hearing what all of this really means on Monday.
Have a good weekend,
JJ
Eric Reiff
Discussion Paper 1 - Marx
Eric Reiff
9 September 2012
Marx’s writings offer a deterministic view of the world which, today with the insight of post structuralism and postmodernism, appears to be misguided in its application of 19th century natural science (Darwinian natural selection) and the continued belief in a Hegelian Zeitgeist. Marx put forth a hypothesis explaining how the relation of capital and labor evolves over time and how that evolution should result communism that is both a more structurally appropriate and qualitatively desirable (for the worker) relation of capital and labor. Marx proposes that capital has moved through several stages of development leading to his contemporary time. In that time the plight of the worker was arguably bad for all workers—as opposed to just most as it is today—and Marx can be forgiven for hoping that workers would seize control of their objectified labor—the capitalist’s capital. While it is difficult to not support Marx’s exquisite structural analysis of how workers and capital relate to one another, I would argue that over the long term it has been impossible to maintain a focus on a deterministic trajectory in which the workers develop a collective consciousness and reappropriate the product of their labor. Instead, I would argue that Marx’s necessary step of proposing a deterministic materialism is what gives us the later wealth of continental social theoretical perspectives, some of which we are exploring in this class.
It is not hard, when reading Dickens’ description of Marx’s world, to understand the hopeful naivety of Marx; that the workers would somehow coagulate over the labor-capital schism and heal the exploitive cleavage between labor and capital. However, from our current social theoretical perspective we can see that social relations are much more nuanced than Marx allowed for. For most Marxist theorists the wait for a transition to communism has become a hopeful illusion anachronistically seated in 18th century zest for a positivist explanation of socio-political realities and Marx’s inability to completely part ways with Hegel’s Zeitgeist. While the worker’s reappropriation of capital has not taken place, much to the consternation of Marxists; this frustration has led to amazingly more nuanced arguments as to how capital (objectified labor) persists—alien to its progenitor—without credible revolution (i.e. Hardt and Negre 2001). It is upon the failure of Marx to predict a simple, clear transition to communism that much of continental philosophy has since been built. Marx’s vagueness in detailing the mechanisms of the transition to communism suggests to me that he took his work to the threshold of the inherently political, spatial, and ultimately nuanced ways in which different cultures exist in relation to one another and to capital. Because he described a path to communism that was suited best for North America and Western Europe, his theories become unable to explain as clearly how the move to communism took place and how it was practiced in all places (Soviet Union, Cuba, China). Marx’s vagueness in explaining how we get to communism and inclusion of a parallel Asiatic mode of production suggest that something is amiss with instilling his theories with positivist natural science and Zeitgeist.
I argue that these vestiges of modernist science and Hegel, while they appear anachronistic and to undercut Marx’s credibility, offer a necessary connective tissue between Hegel and modernist science on one hand; and the postmodern, poststructuralist ideas that come after him. Marx does not offer us detailed explanations as to how objectified labor and the owners of that labor will find each other again, because he can’t while he is steeped in the thoughts of his predecessors (Hegel) and contemporaries (positivist science). What he offers us becomes the unsatisfactory thesis upon which continental philosophy has worked against ever since. His “failure” of prediction has become the intellectual food that has fed most of the rest of the writers we will read this semester in this class and is why it is essential for social theorists to understand Marx.
Chandler Griffith
Of Marx and Men
Chandler Griffith
9/9/12
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, as well The Grundrisse, Marx’s contradictory depiction of man as “the worker” wavers between painting him as an animal and as a machine. In either sense, the worker is posited as subaltern, subhuman. While I have no intention of arguing against Marx’s main arguments regarding the nature of labor, capital, and exchange, I maintain that his one-dimensional depiction of “the worker” weakens those arguments by ignoring the power of human mobility and adaptation.
In saying that man “no longer feels himself to be freely active in anything but his animal functions… what is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal,” Marx reduces the worker to a mere biological organism, an instrument of production hardly distinguishable from other primary resources (Marx 74). This reduction contradicts the human agency assumed as a requisite in the exchange of labor for capital between proletariat and capitalist. The assertion that estranged labor converts a man’s “life activity,” that which distinguishes him from animal, into “a mere means to his existence,” further positions the worker as a biological instrument of production, a natural commodity (Marx 76). In his explanation of surplus labor, Marx discusses only what is necessary to keep the worker “alive,” with no mention of psychological or social awareness, again framing diminutions that appear as potential seeds for Agamben’s theory of “bare life” (Marx 248).
As another challenge to “the worker’s” humanness, Marx posits workers as so mechanized by divisions of labor that they are highly susceptible to replacement by machines (Marx 273). In referring to the “worker’s struggle against machinery,” he equates “the worker” with machines, poising them as predecessors. While it is important to note that he later refers to machines as “products of human industry,” and “organs of the human brain, created by the human hand,” this limited discussion of machines as products themselves does little to address the fact that they cannot exist independent of humans (Marx 285). By arguing that automation, as the concentration of “fixed capital,” has changed the relationship between surplus labor and the general development of wealth, Marx asks the reader to see the mechanization of man as a precondition to the fall of capitalism (Marx 284).
Another danger in portraying man as animalistic and mechanistic is the myopia resulting from the dismissal of the will of man to adapt and move outside the system of wage labor, as opposed to just revolting from within the system (the fall of capitalism). There is little talk of government intervention, even less about migration or informal economies. Marx’s criticisms of Malthus, while well articulated, are particularly poignant when applied to his own theories of labor. He asserts that Malthus, in his discussion of overpopulation, “stupidly reduces these very complicated and varying relations to a single relation, two equations…” (Marx 276). He is also critical of the “external checks” believed to prevent the geometric growth of the “Malthusian man,” without acknowledging similarities between these “ external checks” and his own allegations about “contradictions” leading to the eventual fall of capitalism (Marx 277, 291).
Kaitlin Fertaly
Kaitlin Fertaly
9/9/2012
Discussion Paper 1
The Grundrisse and The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
Marx’s writings in the notebooks that form The Grundrisse sketch out the emergence of capitalism as a historic process, it’s inherent contradictions, its need for its own reproduction, and its eventual collapse. In this reading of his work, I will focus on his thoughts about workers’ alienation, his emphasis on process and relations, and the uneven emergence of capitalism to highlight questions that these works raise but do not fully address.
In The Grundrisse, one of Marx’s main goals is to explain the emergence of capitalist social relations which he shows is founded on two pre-conditions. The alienation of workers from their labor, which they then must sell in exchange for money, is the first pre-condition. The second is the separation of workers from their means of production. It is in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (E&P Manuscripts) that Marx really delves into a discussion of workers‘ alienation arguing that there are four aspects. First there is the alienation of the object produced by a worker from the worker himself. This leads to the second aspect of alienation, that is the process by which his labour becomes an object which the worker produces but does not own (72). These two forms of alienations result in the final two, that is that men who are alienated from their own labor become separated from what it means to be human (they are reduced to animals striving only to survive), and they also become alienated from other men (77). While these arguments are fundamental to Marxist theory, what I find most interesting here is that there is an often overlooked connection to some current contexts where women who cook for their families do own their labor and their own means of production and are therefore not alienated from the objects of their labor, i.e. food or a meal. Marx’s approach to alienation opens a portal onto understanding how women’s domestic work may be valued differently from their work as laborers, perhaps identifying a space where domestic work maybe empowering, not devaluing, to them.
Marx’s emphasis on relations and processes in understanding the production and reproduction of capitalist relationships may also raise questions for feminist scholars. For instance, in his discussion of the processes of production and consumption, Marx writes, “The important thing to emphasize here is only that, whether production and consumption are viewed as the activity of one or of many individuals, they appear in any case as moments of one process...The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself but returns as a productive and self-reproducing individual” (231-232). Here Marx is showing how production is also the reproduction of the labourer and of the society in which he or she is a part. But one question that remains is how does labour that is not objectified by capitalist social relations, such as domestic labor or motherhood, become a part of the system of production and social reproduction. Essentially, the issue of social reproduction remains to be explored further.
Thirdly, Marx discusses the emergence of capitalism and its pre-conditions to critique political economists (aka capitalists) for arguing that capitalism is a primordial, natural, and eternal form of social relations (71, 225, 234, and elsewhere). Marx claims that capitalist forms of social relations are materially and historically determined by showing that other forms of social relations coexist at the same times as capitalist ones. This mode of reasoning essentially introduces the idea of uneven capitalist expansion as it moves into (some of) those areas not already subsumed under the umbrella of capitalism. Although Marx’s direct confrontation with the topic is scarce, he does note that capitalism arises through the “dissolution” of older forms of social relations (263), but not as a complete totality. Instead, he finds that capitalist relations must arise in contradiction to the existing social relations of production. Furthermore, he shows that capitalism is always coming up against social and natural barriers to its inherent need to reproduce itself through expansion. Yet, these limits are different in different places given various pre-existing forms of social relations and the barriers of the environment. These observations open up questions on human/nature relationships and the relationships of other social relations within and to capitalist modes of relations.
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Marx
Response Paper
For at least the last five years, I have participated in community supported agriculture (CSA). I pay a farm to grow produce for me as well as share in the risks (and benefits) of the farmer. If the weather or drought causes crops to fail, I do not get these crops but more often than not, the amount of food I receive is more than I can consume before it spoils. So, this time of year during my "free" time, I am preparing, cooking, and preserving food to last through the winter. I have a freezer full of tomatoes, and a pantry full of canned peaches. A few weeks ago I was at the farmer's market and noticed a new business that supplies canned and preserved local produce throughout the winter to its members. I was intrigued by this business and in talking to them realized that they provide the "service" or "labor" for what I am doing in my free time: canning and preserving. My reaction was to think of this as one step closer to commercialized food production - one thing I am trying to avoid by the CSA. The chain of events would be first a business cans your produce freeing your time; the next business offers a more efficient process that offers the canned produce cheaper; the next business outsources to even more farms to offer you an even cheaper product, and eventually the market leads to canned green beans in the grocery store. I would be left with more free time and more money. What is wrong with this? Isn't the green bean on the grocery store shelf nutritionally equivalent to the green bean on my pantry shelf? I want to argue that they are not the same at some other level and I realize Marx offers the theory to do so; namely that useful labor created my green beans while productive labor created the others. To explore fully the way in which CSAs and food production can be analyzed from a Marxist perspective would take far more than two pages, therefore, I use this anecdote to mediate my understanding of Marx's concepts of labor, alienation, use-value, and capital.
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (EPM), Marx discusses the nature of mankind and man's relation to labor or "life-activity" or "productive life itself." He argues that animals are identical with their life-activity while "man makes his life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness" (p. 76). He argues that animals produce but they only produce for their immediate needs; man, on the other hand, produces not only for his needs but for its own sake. Because mankind is not synonymous with its life-activity, he can become estranged or alienated from it in two different ways: first through the relation to the product of labor, second, through the relation to the act of production. This alienation occurs when we are looking at the relationship between worker and production. The labor that I put into my green beans is not the same labor that a worker puts into a commodity. The labor I perform is voluntary; the labor a worker puts in is coerced, or forced labor. Therefore, I am not alienated from the product of my labor.
The idea of forced labor is expanded upon in The Grundrisse. Marx is not saying that a worker is literally forced to work; rather, he is making a point about exchange and capital and surplus labor. "If one day's work were necessary in order to keep one worker alive for one day, then capital would not exist, because the working day would then exchange for its own product, so that capital could not realize itself and hence could not maintain itself as capital" (p 249.) However, in capitalism we do not value someone's labor directly, we value labor-power or their ability or capacity to work for a period of time. This is in contrast to labor itself-which creates use-value or value that addresses a particular need. He gives the example of the tailor who takes cloth and makes an article of clothing (p. 256). I take my relationship to my farm as one of trading use-values (although we could debate this) because the farm provides me with my need for food. However, if I paid a company to can and preserve my food, this seems like less than an immediate need and more of a service that is fulfilled through labor-power, turning a use-value into an exchange value. And this is what Marx argue capital does: it "rapidly forms an internal market for itself by destroying all rural secondary occupations, so that it spins, weaves for everyone, clothes everyone, etc. in short, brings the commodities previously created as direct use values into the form of exchange values" (p. 275).
In the end isn't a can of green beans still a can of beans? My take away from Marx was that our economic system creates a particular way of being in the world; this is an existential claim. We can argue the value and merits of capitalism (or communism) but we cannot doubt that it affects our existence.
Lauren Gifford
Lauren Gifford
Response: Marx
9/8/2012
The main idea I’m grappling with following these readings is the trajectory of the person as he enters the workforce and the relationship of that person and his product (capital) to private property.
As a person begins to create capital, does he become a means of production? And, in doing so, becomes a commodity himself? Does that worker than aid in the creation of increased capital for those with the most property while simultaneously transforming the worker into nothing more than a commodity or means to greater capital?
The answers to these questions begin to appear in Marx’s deconstruction of political economy. He writes, “The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of men” (71).
While the latter concept seems clear, I still struggle with connecting the value of property in relation to capital and its construction. In The Grundrisse, Marx revisits the primitive construction of capital. Early on he describes language as the most primitive form of produced capital (223) as well as community (261), sparking a re-imagination of what defines capital (previously I didn’t realize it could manifest itself in such seemingly inherent manors).
When the reading transitions into the idea of alienated labor (79), I wonder why Marx found the need to quality it as such because, given his explanation of labor as separate from the worker, it would seem all labor is alienated, given its nature as a means of production that takes away from and increasingly further marginalizes the worker.
I come away from these readings with many questions, but here are the ones that stand out the most: How is property valued? And where does it fit on the spectrum of capital, from language and community on one end, to fictitious commodities (al la Polanyi), on the other? Or, to that end, what does the spectrum of capital even look like?
And, separate from the direct connection between capital and property, I wonder: How is the idea of the worker imagined differently from that of the “haves” who benefit from the capital created by workers? Where is that line drawn, and how is it defined?
Joel
Joel Correia
Geography 5100
September 9, 2012
Response to Selected Readings from The Marx-Engles Reader[1]
Karl Marx is one of the most influential scholars and his works found in The Marx-Engels Reader have spawned scores of critique, analysis, and discussion. However, due to the limited scope of this response paper my commentary is brief and I focus on one passage from page 275 that illustrates two central arguments employed in both the Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts and Grundrisse. In this paper I briefly discuss how Marx’s argument is focused on historical materialism and comment on alienation, value, and estrangement.
This week’s readings illustrate the centrality and importance of historic processes to the Marxian critique of political economy and structure of social relations. Marx’s materialist analytic is rooted in exposing the historical preconditions of phenomena[2] to demonstrate their significance in a greater structural process of economic and social relations. I understand Marx’s historical materialism to mean that his tautology centers on historical processes that he believes create overarching structural conditions in which all social and economic relations occur. The following quotation is exemplary of his approach and incorporates many arguments from the week’s assigned readings:
The transformation of money into capital presupposes a historic process which divorces the objective conditions of labour from the worker and makes them independent of him, it is at the a same time the effect of capital and of its process, once arisen, to conquer all of production and to develop and complete the divorce between labor and property, between labor and the objective conditions of labor, everywhere (sic, emphasis mine, p. 275).
In this passage, the “historic process” is 1) the separation of the worker from his own means of reproduction, 2) the insertion of the worker into the process of capital production, and 3) the generation of surplus value through commodification. In other words, the process is centered on the removal of the worker from the land and from the means of producing his own goods that sustain his life (i.e. those goods with use-value for social reproduction) so that his labor can be used to create products with exchange value. As a result of this process the “objective conditions of labour (sic, ibid.)”, or rather the actual realized labor of the worker, is taken from the worker and “congealed in an object” (p. 71) which in turn becomes a commodity through the process of production and exchange. These are critical moments for Marx because they represent the point where the “objectification of labour” (sic, p. 71) occurs and the locus of alienation when labor is embedded in a product and surplus value created. Hence,
…in short, [capital] brings the commodities previously created as direct use values into the form of exchange values, a process which comes about by itself through the separation of the workers from land and soil and from property (even in the form of self property) in the conditions of production (p. 275).
So through the historical process of divorcing workers from their land and by incorporating them into the production process they are alienated first from their property and second from their labor. The mode of production central to the capitalism dictates that the worker generates surplus labor and an exchange value for the product is created. Furthermore in the passage on page one, Marx states that this is an “effect of capital and its process…to conquer all of production and develop the complete divorce between labor and property…” (Ibid.). He reinforces the notion that the laborer is removed from his/her site of self-reproduction and rendered dependent on the capital system for reproduction.[3]
Hence, Marx demonstrates that capitalism’s intrinsic telos is focused on separating workers from the ability to create their own livelihoods and in doing so it makes wage-labor necessary for their reproduction which addresses capital’s need for “and internal market for itself by destroying all rural secondary occupations” (p. 275). The worker becomes embedded within the process of production and capital expansion (i.e. part of its internal market) because she/he is dependent upon it for her/his own consumption and ultimate reproduction. The dependency of workers on the capital process bounds them to the relationship between production, distribution, exchange, and consumption.[4] Once dependent upon this system, the worker is alienated of his/her labor time in exchange for a wage (p.74). This wage, however, is less than the value of the total labor that the worker expended in the production process and this deficit, or surplus labor, is where the capitalist makes his/her profit (pp. 248-249). Therefore, through the alienation of labor wealth is generated for those who owns the means of production and the worker is trapped in a process of having to work to earn enough for his/her reproduction. This effectively creates dependence between the worker and capitalist where the former relies on the latter for her/his welfare. The physical output of the production process that the worker is tied to is a product or commodity that’s value is based on the amount of “congealed labor” (ibid.) contained within it.
[1] Marx, Karl. “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” (pp. 70-86, 93-106) and “The Grundrisse” in The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978.
[2] See Section E. “Pre-Capitalist Property and Production” on pages 261-276.
[3] See pages 93-96 from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
[4] See pages 227-236.
Lindsay Skog
Lindsay Skog
GEOG 5100: Introduction to Social Theory
Marx Response
In selections from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The Grundrisse, Marx argues that the accumulation of private property by means of alienation of the worker from his (or her) labor produces and reproduces social inequality. Further, Marx posits that revolution against private property and the alienation of the laborer from his labor will lead to a communist mode of production and social equality. Throughout these works Marx is responding to classical economic theorists, specifically Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, either failed to consider social differentiation or essentialized such stratifications.
For Marx, the process of production alienates the worker from his labor because his labor is objectified outside himself in the product. Moreover, the worker puts the value of his labor into the product, yet the value of the product increases with production while the value of the labor decreases over time. In this way, surplus value is created and accumulated by the owner of the means of production. The surplus value becomes capital in the form of private property. Thus the production of social classes results from the movement of capital from the worker to the owner of the means of production creating greater wealth for the capitalist at the expense of the worker. Social differentiation is then reproduced as the owner of the means of production reinvests capital into the means of production in the form of machinery that results in greater productivity. This further devalues the worker’s labor while increasing the surplus value extracted from the production process.
While this brief overview considers the relationships of man to society, Marx is equally concerned with the relationship of man to nature. Indeed, for Marx these relationships are intimately entwined. As Marx reflects on the Industrial Revolution in northern Europe he describes the ways in which man became alienated from nature. At first man worked land/nature as the owner who produced for his own subsistence. With the closure of the Commons, man was driven into the urban space of production where nature remained the raw material of production, but did not serve to produce man’s—now the worker’s—subsistence. Rather nature was transformed, through the process of production, into private property comprised of the worker’s labor, but not meeting the worker’s subsistence needs. This appropriation of nature both exhausts the means of life for the worker as well as nature as the material of labor.
Key to Marx’s understanding of the production of capital are the contradictions inherent in capitalist relations. In the pursuit of ever-more capital—a driving requirement of the capitalist system—the material of production (nature) is exploited while the wage paid to the laborer increasingly loses exchange value. Marx posits that such contradictions lead to crises that resolve themselves yet increase in intensity. Ultimately, Marx argues the intensity of the crises will be irresolvable and will result, through revolution, in the annihilation of private property, and hence social differentiation, in a communist mode of production.
While Marx’s work persists in informing understandings of social differentiation in both time and scale, we must also keep in mind the limits of Marx’s works. Marx’s understanding of class structure and social relations is based in the narrow experiences—including social and economic conditions—of northern Europe during the Industrial Revolution, thus rendering any claim to universality or application beyond this context suspect. Related to the context specific limitation of Marx’s ideas, is it possible that Marx overdetermines the political economic conditions of social differentiation. Indeed, the South Asian caste system may be one example of social differentiation with economic influence alongside religious and familial determinations.
Ian Rowen
Ian Rowen
GEOG 5100
9/9/12
Week 3 Response: Marx
In this latest return to Marx, which always feels too soon yet too late, I’m struck in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by his clarity, color, quotability, and even, as my undergraduate professor Lisa Rofel liked to point to, sense of humor (!) when it comes to questions of property, capital and money (If only this clarity and humor continued in The Grundisse…)
Marx brilliantly describes the social processes by which surplus value is produced by the laborer and appropriated by the capitalist, who “obtains objectified labor time, i.e. value, without exchange” (248). This is “money for nothing”, and yet more, because capital (as reified by Marx) is able not only to maintain itself, but is all itself productive. With this theory, Marx is able to view all relations of productions in bourgeois society through the lens of capital, and to make some sweeping assertions about its self-contradictory character and necessary demise.
Yet, I remain unconvinced by several peripheral and central points of his argument. To start with something relatively minor, I fail to understand what his concept of man as species-being (75-78) brings to his argument, unless it is an attempt to relate his take on political economy to the biological concerns of his contemporaries.
This question relates directly to another apparent shortcoming in his work—his dichotomizing of natural and historical objects, processes, and needs. For example, he writes that in the realization of capital, through the inter-related processes of production and consumption, “a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one” (249). How would Marx have us distinguish between a historically created need and a natural one? Would Marx even allow us this possibility, given the entanglement of our consciousnesses with capital? Marx continues by criticizing the bourgeois economists who “regard capital as an eternal and natural (not historical) form of production” (252). Yet even as he criticizes their ethical and political commitments, he seems to have his own matching naturalistic fallacy. Marx asserts that, “Capital is the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois society. It must form the starting point as well as the finishing-point, and must be dealt with before landed property” (243). He says in the same paragraph that ground rent cannot be understood without capital, but is this not an ahistorical, theoretically-overdetermined argument that awaits empirical demonstration? To be sure, Marx does indeed subscribe to a peculiar teleology (for example, see 241, P3) rooted in some kind of historical scholarship, but his treatment of capital as a master category, and assumption of universal stages of historical development seems empirically unvalidated.
The other issue I find troubling is the agency that Marx seems to impute to capital. As persuasive and exhaustive as his general argument about the objectification of labor, the creation of surplus value, etc. is, it is hard for me to accept that the abstract entity (or process?) of “capital” is capable of doing anything of its own accord. Statements like, “capital could not realize itself and hence could not maintain itself as capital” (248) tread dangerously metaphysical for my taste. And yet, this is of course not Marx’s sole reification or subjectivation of abstract concepts. For example, “Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution” (84). How does “communism” “know” anything. Is this an artifact of translation, or am I missing something fundamental?
My other remaining question relates to Marx’s frequent use of the word, “negate”. I presume there is a Hegelian metaphysical connotation that I have yet to fully grasp?
galenbmurton
Galen Murton
Response Paper #1
In spite of being the godfather of social theory, prior to this week my general (but still influential) ‘familiarity’ with Karl Marx was basically limited to his often paraphrased quote, “Religion…is the opium of the people,” from his 1843 Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. This simplified statement, from Marx and Engels’ passage on the societal systems that enslave humanity, resonates powerfully in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The Grundrisse. It is a bold and perhaps blasphemous metaphor, but in reading these works one can equate capitalism with religion, capital with God, and private property (or objectified labor, or money) with that addictive opiate that controls the masses.
Marx outlines estranged labor in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and presents how labor, class divisions, and private property form a vicious circle that fuels capitalism. Because they labor for someone else, workers in ‘modern’ capitalist systems become alienated from their labor, from themselves, and from one another. The result of such alienated labor is the division of society into two classes: the property-less workers and the property owners. The resulting structure, which resembles a relationship between the laity and the clergy, is one in which labor, commodified and objectified as property, becomes all powerful and can be bought and sold (not unlike atonements or indulgences). Furthermore, in a cynical yet evocative illustration of the miraculous power of money, Marx draws from Goethe and Shakespeare to demonstrate how money, because it can bring the beautiful to the ugly and transform imperfections into powers, has in fact become God.
Marx’s critique of political economy in The Grundrisse can be read according to Biblical themes as well. He identifies the ‘Fall’ of man from his tribal/clannish (primordial) stage with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the production and appropriation (and alienation) of labor. It follows that the capitalist system of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption ensnares workers in an endless cycle of labor in the vain effort to gain capital. It is capital that draws humanity into the system and then ties them there, as “Capital is the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois society. It must be the starting-point as well as the finishing-point,” (The Grundrisse, 243). That is, capital is the Alpha and the Omega, the mechanism that forces man to forsake his living labor, and thereby himself, for objectified labor and the wage of slavery.
Although his critique of political economy is anything but an endorsement for religion, Marx not only creates a model to which Christian analogues do apply, but also waxes poetic about mystical and communal traditions of ‘The Orient’ and Peruvian South America. Considering this, is it possible that Marx had a spiritual vein in his body after all? Or, rather, was he just taking the long view, and drawing on pre-capitalist societies to forecast a future in which technology hastens capitalism’s demise and communism is realized as some kind of Kingdom on earth.
Ahn Lee
Ahn Lee
GEOG 5100: Introduction to Social Theory
Response: Marx
While I thoroughly enjoyed reading Marx’s unpolished, yet not-so-humble, The Grundrisse, here I want to focus on one of my fundamental misunderstandings with Marx, which stems from The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. My misunderstanding relates, at its core, to Marx’s most basic intention as a writer and thinker and it relates to the following term:
Moral science: I’m responding to one of Eric’s discussion points, which concerns the nature of political economy, as a “method” or a science. In this regard, Marx states, “Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of denial, of want, of thrift, of saving… This science of marvelous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave” (Marx 95). These characteristics of political economy thus comprise, according to Marx, a “moral science.”
Not to nit-pick, but I’d like to break down this idea of moral science a bit. To this end, I can offer questions but probably few answers. First, what is a “moral science”? What might other examples be? Is political economy a science because it offers a formulaic method for economic and, more fundamentally, societal relations? And, is it “moral” because it prescribes particular “ideals” (the ascetic and extortionate miser as well as the ascetic, productive slave)?
Marx visits the notion of a moral science only briefly in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and, to my recollection, not at in the Grundrisse, indicating its relatively minor importance within the larger scope of his work. Yet, the idea plagued me throughout the entire reading because it strikes at the very core of his reason for exploring and writing about the progression of capitalism. Perhaps this is my ignorance speaking for me, but I found Marx’s work to be chiefly concerned with the “moral” or “best” life. For Marx, though, unlike the political economist, ideal man is “species man” or one for whom his own life is an object, rather than a “mere means to his existence” (Marx 76). Is not Marx’s argument necessarily a moral one? More to the point, Marx seems to have interesting preoccupations with both religion as well as the idea of “nature”—is he envisioning the progression toward a more “natural” existence or a more “moral” one? Is there a difference for Marx?
Caitlin Ryan
Caitlin Ryan
Response #1: Marx
This will be less of a coherent reaction piece than an attempt to re-tell and digest a few key concepts in the reading selections. In doing so, I have the impression that Marx has not entirely connected the dots in his description of the evolutionary historical process, especially in terms of the role that labor and property plays in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. (I am more forgiving of his failure to fully explain the transition from capitalism to communism only because I know that Marx never really described communism in much detail.)
History as evolution, and where private property comes in: Marx argues that private property is an effect, an outcome, of estranged labor. Thus, alienated labor happens before private property occurs. This is a key point that differentiates him from his contemporaries and the various proponents of political economy that he spars with in much of his writing. While Marx does not seem to be in direct conversation with John Locke here, it is worth noting Locke’s take on property. Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, published in 1690, is often cited as the origin of western theological and legal understandings of private property. Locke saw private property as existing in a state of nature, before government. In this way, private property is naturalized and unproblematic. Not so for Marx, who only says that political economy approaches private property in a reverse (even perverse?) fashion, e.g. that private property is antecedent to estranged labor rather than a result of it.
In order to answer the question, “What is the origin of private property?”, Marx suggests that we should really be asking “What is the relation of alienated labor [since it causes private property to come about] to humanity’s development?” (p. 80) In this way Marx actually sidesteps the role of private property in capitalism’s emergence and power, seeing it as the result of the estrangement and alienation of labor. Yet, private property is directly tied up with Marx’s concept of what communism is – it is the departure point for communism: “the entire revolutionary movement necessarily finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property” (p.84). I am honestly not sure where that leaves us!
I am also interested in the Marx’s view of property and labor as deeply social relationships. In his description of Communism, Marx gives us a sense for the importance of social relationships: “What is to be avoided above all is the re-establishing of ‘society’ as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being (86).” This also reflects Marx’s commentary on man as a species being, by which I understand him to mean, man in a state of freedom from capital and the production process.
As a final comment, I thought it was worth highlighting the historical context in which Marx was writing. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts were published in 1844, and the Grundrisse in 1857-58. Shortly thereafter, Tsar Nicholas II of the Russian Empire emancipated Russian serfs (1861), and Abraham Lincoln signed the Emanicipation Proclamation (1863). That is, Marx was writing at a period in which slavery and serfdom were at the forefront of public discussions. Slavery as a mode of production features prominently across Marx’s writings.
Issues I’d like to discuss as a group:
- Marx’s account of historical evolution in the production process. Is it convincing? Is it whole?
- The different forms of capital (surplus, circulating, fixed)
- Value, of course. Surplus value, use value, value value
- Role of money vis-à-vis value
Austin Cowley
Austin Cowley
GEOG 5100: Introduction to Social Theory
Marx on the Ontological Dilemma of Estranged Labour
How does the estrangement of labour impoverish both the health and spirit of the working class? While Marx (1978) more notably explains structural processes and relationships that produce capitalism and the classes that exist under it, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 provides insight into how that course of development is rooted in human nature. On this more unfamiliar ground, Marx speculates on the ontological framework of capitalism and what kinds of existence it makes possible. In this paper, I wish to briefly explore that moment. In explaining the process of alienated labour, how does Marx theorize the formation of different subjects under capitalism?
In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (1776) maintains that it is basic human nature to “truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another”. Although Marx acknowledges that this does occur, he rejects the notion that they arise out of natural human law. Instead, he contends, “capital does not create the objective conditions of labour. Rather, its original-formation is that, through the historic process of the dissolution of the old mode of production, value existing as money-wealth is enabled, on one side, to buy the objective conditions of labour (270).” Thus, the historical context by which primitive accumulation produced capital has also created divisions of labour. How then is labour divided and what new forms emerge from this division? Because she does not own the means of her own production in a capitalist system, the worker’s primary commodity is her labour. The actual product, the congealed labour-time of a specific object, is produced for the capitalist. Because the worker is only paid for the labour to reproduce herself, the more she produces the less valuable her labour. Thus the production of surplus labour then only benefits those who own the means of production. This process of estrangement, which classical political economy conceals, establishes the direct but unequal relationship between the worker and the capitalist. Unevenness specifically occurs whereby the worker is devaluated by producing more value for the capitalist. Under these terms, exploitation thrives and further enervates the working class. Additionally, this process only grows in relation to capital growth, which reproduces itself without limit. This begins to emphasize the role of crises in capitalism. Although Marx reiterates these tenets in later works, how this alienation is “rooted in the nature of human development” is explored more exclusively in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.
While Marx casts aside Smith’s thesis that free market interaction is of human nature, he is nonetheless intrigued by what drives humans to produce their own worlds as conscious beings: “the object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created (76).” What Heidegger (1977) would later call the process of “worlding”, Marx calls “conscious life-activity” is the process of creating an objective world and is a source and expression of human existence. Consequently, estranged labour not only unfastens the relationship the worker’s relationship to production, but also reverses the relationship to life-activity and being so that the latter is a “mere means to his existence”. The worker is estranged from the products of her labour as well as the nature of her own being. Thus, the proletariat subject formed under capitalism is one estranged from himself. Exploitation of the working class and alienation of labour meant more than material poverty for Marx; it indicated a spiritual impoverishment as well.
Elizabeth Wharton
Elizabeth Wharton
Weekly Response
Week 1: Marx
In first reading selection from the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” (pages 70-86) Marx presents two primary foundational ideas that are later developed in more technical and historical detail in “The Grundrisse”. First is the assertion that, within the capitalist system, the more laborers produce the less they themselves possess. Second, and closely related, is his discussion of the alienation he says is inherent in the system, between workers and the product of their labor, consequentially between workers and the activity of labor itself, and ultimately between human beings: “through estranged labour man…engenders the relationship in which other men stand to his production and to his product, and the relationship in which he stand to these other men” (page 78). In sum, he presents a series of causal linkages in which the alienation inherent in labor (in which the laborer is unable to directly benefit from the product of the labor but rather sees that transferred to the capitalist) leads axiomatically to the alienation of the respective power relations between capital and labor, “man and man”, which in turn produces private property, stressing the latter is a product of the alienation rather than an original condition for it. The discussion of the need for money that follows in the second selection (pages 93-106) seems directly borne not only of the systemic / structural needs created by these arrangements, but also to fill the gaps – of meaning, connection, authenticity – created by the original alienation. Money in this discussion becomes the “store of your estranged being” (page 96).
Returning briefly to the first selection, I found his discussion of the stages / types of communism to be particularly interesting. The first form he elaborates – a “really nothing but the logical expression of private property” seems remarkably predictive of the ways that communism manifested in the 20th century on a large scale in the USSR and the PRC: “General envy constituting itself as a power is the disguise in which avarice re-establishes itself and satisfies itself, only in another way” (page 83). On the other hand, his description of the ideal expression of communism – “the positive transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement” no longer sounds like an earth-bound political or economic project, but rather almost like an idealized, arguably spiritual (though avowedly non-religious), state.
“The Grundrisse” clearly draws on the framework of ideas laid out in these earlier writings. While reference to alienation much less frequent, the grounding in the idea of alienation clearly informs this discussion. At the same time, he has moved away from the arguably somewhat metaphysical analysis of man’s alienation from his true self of the earlier pieces toward a more technical explication of a number of his ideas in regards to the grounded evolution and functioning of the capitalist system, including most importantly his analysis of how and why labor and capital emerged as a distinct historical arrangement, and the process by which he views capitalism as approaching its final terminus of overwhelming contradiction.
With all the intellectual rigor and obvious mind ferment drawn from his observations of the world around him, I remain struck also by the contrast between the clarity and brilliance of some of his insights alongside the frequent disconnection from real-world observation. Thus the idea of alienation has internal argumentative coherence on the one hand, and describes aptly realities of labor-capital relations both of his and our time that do exist. But does not allow that there may be other very different, less alienated experiences within the same system. Moreover, he freely draws on the examples of “Asiatic societies” to build his arguments regarding the development and exchange of capital and the meaning and function of wage labor, but without ever having travelled to this Asia of his imagination.
