Marxism/Marxist criticism

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Marxism/Marxist criticism

• dialectics in action

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Imperious-looking males!Beards!Spectacles!
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Friedrich Engels
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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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Contemporary relevance

• 2005, Radio 4s 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/inou
  rtime_20050714.shtml

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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

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Jargon alert!
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Hegel
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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

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Dialectics

• Emerges from the Hegelian sublation. Hegels
• 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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.
• Hegels 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

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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.

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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

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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

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Feuerbach
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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.'
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Manchester, 1780
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Manchester, 1875
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A Birds Eye View, 1889
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Cottonopolis Manchester, 19th Century
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Cromarty, Inverness
Underground Tradesmans Entrance - built so that
the occupants wouldnt see the servants arrive
and leave The mansion was built in 1772 for
George Ross.
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Lizzie Burns (above) and Flora Tristan (right)
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Diego Rivera
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Gramsci

• Hegemony, the culture of the ruling classes is
  the default culture

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The Frankfurt School
Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas
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Freudian Marxism
Herbert Marcuse And also Erich Fromm, et al
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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 Marcuses 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

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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

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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 puppets 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. 
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Walter Benjamin

• The Arcades Project reading in the ruins

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Crystal Palace
The Great Exhibition - 1851
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Crystal Palace

• Marx visited and was very interested in the
  Crystal Palace seeing it as an expression of
  commodity fetishcommentators 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.

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Lenin
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Mayakovsky - futurism into constructivism
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Guillaume Apollinaire
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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

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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

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Bourdieu

• Cultural capital Bourdieu, though not
  understood as dogmatically Marxist (as Jameson
  is) continues Marxs 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.

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Vertov avant garde clampdown
Man With A Movie Camera - 1929
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Russia - Heroic realism
Svarog, Stalin Politburo in Gorky Park, 1931
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Flowers for Stalin
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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 Russiathis 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 Loachs 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.

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Popper von Hayek

• Criticisms of the tendency of overly-strong
  states to edge towards totalitarianism, in von
  Hayeks 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
  Hayeks 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/inou
  rtime_20070208.shtml

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Margaret Thatcher - monetarism
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Marxism and (some of) its legacies

• China (this is problematic though)
• Hobsbawm
• Frederic Jameson
• Slavoj Zizek

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Fredric Jameson

• The political unconscious
• Jameson argues that although postmodernism is
  seen as a radical break with what Lyotard
  described as master-narratives (church, a
  strong state, Marxism itself, etc) these,
  master-narratives move underground, rather than
  disappearing altogether Marxism is therefore
  latent, as is religion

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Slavoj Zizek

• http//www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowe
  d/
• 9th January 2008, Violence.

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Eric Hobsbawm

• Sticks with historical materialism.
• Interested in the histories of the excluded and
  those transgressing the boundaries of capital,
  bandits, etc.

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Gao Hong Marx and Engels talking to textile
workers in Manchester, 1845(Beijing, 1983,
accessed at the international institute of
social history website)
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Andy Warhol Chairman Mao (Silkscreen - Art
Institute of Chicago)
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Free resources

• Look no further than
• http//www.marxists.org/
• Which contains all the key works not just by Marx
  and Engels but selections by other key Marxist
  writers working after their deaths in many
  different languages.