phylosophy
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Marx2onye.pptxMarx
Introduction to Philosophy
Fall 2017
Jennifer K. Greene
1
Communism
“Holding everything, including freedom, in common. The principle is less one of equal distribution than one of equal co-ownership of material and other resources.”
Barbara Goodwin
Distribution requires central authority … state
Communism – the state “withers away”
2
Marx & Engel’s Historical Materialism
The means of production and exchange influence, or determine, the relations of labor and the entire superstructure.
“The production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must therefore be explained, instead of vice versa”
Frederick Engels, speech at Marx’s grave
3
SUPERSTRUCTURE
(religion, politics, law, education, culture, social media, art, family, etc.)
RELATIONS OF LABOR
Employers-employee relations
Feudal relations - master slave
Corporate dominance
Globalization (Americanization?)
Outsourcing
Democratization (Uber, Makers Movement, etc.)
MEANS OF PRODUCTION AND EXCHANGE
Hunter gatherer
Agricultural
Feudal
Guilds
Manufacture - small
Industrial – huge
Service
Informational
Entrepreneurial
4
Domination of the Superstructure by the Bourgeoisie
“the bourgeoisie has … since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (15)
“free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it” (17)
Freedom … for the rich
“When you call yourself a friend of liberty, ask your own heart whether it would not be more consistent to style yourself the champion of Property, the adorer of the golden image which power has set up.
Security and Property! Behold in a few words the definition of the rich that is secure, the man who lives by the sweat of his brow has no asylum from oppression.”
Mary Wollstonecraft, The Vindication of the Rights of Man
6
Today
“Neoliberalism … accentuates a structural relationship between the state and the economy that produces hierarchies, concentrates power in relatively few hands, unleashes the most brutal elements of rabid individualism, destroys the welfare state, incarcerates large numbers of its disposable populations, economically disenfranchise large segments of the lower and middle classes, and reduces entire countries to pauperization”
Henry A. Giroux. The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy. (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2004), 45.
7
Effects of Rule by the Bourgeoisie
Everything is reduced to cash value
“personal worth into exchange value …” (16)
Hyper-individualistic
Naked self-interest
Americanization (globalization)
“it creates a world after its own image” (16)
Inverse advantages of system
Rich get richer, poor …
Externalities, true cost, & “poverty tax”
Proletariat Revolution
Superstructure (social structures & institutions) benefit bourgeoisie, harm the proletariat
“Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests” (20)
Factories create opportunity to unite
The Bourgeoisie is unfit to rule
Make life for proletarians so miserable – nothing left to lose
Janis Joplin …
The bourgeois are their own gravediggers – (21)
“The proletariat … cannot raise itself without the whole superincumbent strata of official society [the superstructure] being sprung into the air” (20)
Dictatorship of the Proletariat
First conquer bourgeoisie and take over political power
“Centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State” (26)
Get rid of private property
Bourgeois property – “property in its present form” (22 & 23)
“do away with the miserable character” (id)
Truly human property (proletarian) doesn’t oppress and is fine
Allow the state to wither away (26)
When there are no more class antagonisms & exploitation (because no classes), no need for coercive power of the state
