Karl MarxKarl Marx• 1818-1883.• German-Jewish family converted to Christianity.• Studies Law and Philosophy in Bonn and Berlin• Influenced by Hegel’s dialectics, Smith’s and Ricardo’s

theories, and utopian socialism. Dialectical Dialectical Materialism.Materialism.

• 1844 – Meets Friedrich Engels (life-long partnership).• 1848- Manifesto of the Communist Party• Constant moves, live in London since 1849.• Helped by Engels and other friends, Marx and his

family live in extreme poverty.• 1867 – I Volume of Das Kapital.• 1864-1872: leading role in the International Working

Men’s Association.

• Huge philosophical, economical, and historical work.

• No specific work on political theory, though he is one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century.

Thesis – Negation- Negation’s Negation (Synthesis)

In HegelHegel: movement of disclosing of the IDEA

In MarxMarx: movement of development of SOCIAL RELATIONS.

Dialectics:

Marx, 1845: Theses on Feuerbach

“Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Alienated Labor & Inverted WorldInverted World

• “We have begun from the presuppositions of political economy. We have accepted its terminology and its laws… From political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and to a most miserable commodity; that the misery of the worker increases with the power and volume of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands… and the whole of society divide into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.” (656)

Private Property & other assumptions

“Political economy begins with the fact of private Political economy begins with the fact of private property; it does not explain itproperty; it does not explain it. It conceives the material process of private property, as this occurs in reality, in general and abstract formulas which then serve it as laws. It does not comprehend these laws…”

“…in other words, what should be explained is assumed.” (656)

“The only motive forces which political economy recognizes are avarice and the war between the avaricious, competition.” (656)

Upside Down• “We shall begin from a contemporary economic

fact. The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces and the more his production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an even cheaper commodity the more goods he creates. The devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things. Labour does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and indeed in the same proportion as it produces goods.” (657)

Alienation• “The alienation of the worker in his product

means not only that his labour becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it exists independently, outside himself, and alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power.” (657)

• “…the worker becomes a slave of the object…” (657)

• Capital is alienated labor, privately appropriated.

State of Nature?

“Let us not begin our explanation, as does the economist, from a legendary primordial condition. Such a primordial condition does not explain anything; it merely removes the question into a grey and nebulous distance.” (656)

“The single, isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs to the unimaginative fancies of eighteenth-century Robinsonades... (...)... Purely aesthetic illusion of small and great Robinsonades.” (Grundrisse, 1857)

Bourgeois Society

• “… which, since the sixteenth century, has been preparing itself for, and, in the eighteenth has made giant strides towards, maturity. In this freely competitive society the individual appears as released from the natural ties...”(Grundrisse, 1857)

Labor is Social...Social...

• The production of the isolated individual outside society... Is as much as impossibility as the development of language without individuals living together and talking to one another.” (Grundrisse, 1857)

Marx & Aristotle:Marx & Aristotle:

“The further back in history we go, the more does the individual, and thus also the productive individual, appear as dependent, as part of a greater whole...” (Grundrisse, 1857)

• Family – Tribe – Community

“Man, in the most literal sense, is a zoon politikon, not just a social animal but an animal which can achieve individuation only in society.” (Grundrisse, 1857)

(= Aristotle)

Good Life vs. Mere Life

• “We arrive at the result that man (the worker) feels himself to be freely active only in his animal functions—eating, drinking and procreating, or at most also in his dwelling and in personal adornment—while in his human functions he is reduced to an animal. The animal becomes human and the human becomes animal.”(658)

• “Life itself appears only as a means of life.” (659)

The Workers’ Revolutionary Task:

• “From the relation of alienated labour to private property it also follows that the emancipation of society from private property, from servitude, takes the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not in the sense that only the latter’s emancipation is involved, but because this emancipation includes the emancipation of humanity as a whole.” (661-2)

Communism

• “To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is therefore not a personal, it is a social, power.

• When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses it class character.” (670)

The Mode of Production:

“In the social production of their life...”

• “...men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production.”

Structure/Superstructure

• “The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society –the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.”

NATURE

Relations of Production +

Productive Forces

= Mode of Production

• “The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” (1859)

Being determines Consciousness

Modes of Production

• Primitive Communism

• Asiatic (public slavery)

• Classical slave owning (private slavery)

• Feudalism

• Capitalism

In History,

Classes appear with the division of labor, and class struggle starts once social labor generates a permanent excedent which can be appropriated.

The State appeared historically as a

weapon in the class struggle, and it is always controlled by

the ruling class...

And it will vanish together with class exploitation.

• “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” –(663)

Politics? Sovereignty?

• Seen from a strict Marxian perspective, Sovereignty is not a real problem...

• Clearly, the Sovereign is the Ruling Class...

• And politics is the form of expression of class struggle (which will disappear together with it)

Revolution:

• “At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or –what is but a legal expression for the same thing- with the property relations within which they have been at work before.(...) Then begins an epoch of social revolution.” (1859)

The bourgeoisie appeared in the feudal society and ended by

overthrowing the nobility through Revolution;

Capitalism in turn generates the working class, which now must overthrow the bourgeois society

and build up socialism...

PROGRESS

The 1789 French Revolution

• Swept away all medieval reminiscences from the State

• Parliamentary Control...

• Bourgeois State (1830)

BUT

• The State “assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour...”

Increasingly REPRESSIVE