Archetypes of Wisdom

1
Archetypes of Wisdom

• Douglas J. Soccio
• Chapter 13
• The Materialist Karl Marx

2
Learning Objectives

• On completion of this chapter, you should be able
  to answer the following questions
• What is bourgeoisie?
• What is the proletariat?
• What is the Dialectical Process of History?
• What does Marx mean by Mystification?
• What are the three elements of the material basis
  of society?
• What is the difference between the superstructure
  and substructure of society?
• What is capitalism?
• What is surplus value?
• What does it mean to be co-opted?

3
The Prophet

• Karl Marx (1818-1883) was born in Trier, Germany,
  and proved early on to be highly intelligent and
  obsessively interested in everything.
• He entered the University of Bonn to study law,
  then transferred to the more serious and
  prestigious University of Berlin.
• This move proved to be crucial to his later
  philosophical growth, as it epitomized the modern
  city of the nineteenth century, with
  intellectuals, radicals, and social agitators.

4
Marxs Hegelian Roots

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was the
  dominant thinker when Marx was a student.
• Hegels philosophy, known as absolute idealism,
  holds that all consciousness follows a pattern,
  or a dialectical process.
• This is a three-step process in which an original
  idea (thesis) is opposed by a contrary idea
  (antithesis), the interaction of which produces a
  new idea (synthesis).
• Hegel said that previous philosophers were
  unaware that they were working at a particular
  stage in the development of Reason, and that they
  themselves were products of the zeitgeist.
• Zeitgeist refers to spirit of the age, that is,
  a part of History, which for Hegel amounted to
  the march of Absolute Mind or Spirit in the
  process of Self-Actualization.

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Ludwig Feuerbach

• Marxs admiration for Hegel was altered by an
  article called Theses on the Hegelian
  Philosophy, by Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872).
• Feuerbach was a materialist who challenged
  Hegels idea that the driving force behind
  historical eras was spiritual.
• Feuerbach argued that any given era was the
  accumulation of the actual, concrete, material
  conditions of the time not some abstract
  spirit of the age.
• So important were material conditions, according
  to Feuerbach, that they controlled not just the
  way people behave, but also how they think.
• Different material conditions result in what we
  think of as different cultural eras.

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The Wanderer

• In 1843, Marx married Jenny von Westphalen and
  the journal for which he wrote shut down. With a
  wife and no job, Marx moved to the freer
  intellectual climate of Paris.
• There he discovered a congenial group of radical
  thinkers, centered around Comte de Saint-Simon
  (1760-1825).
• Saint-Simon argued that historical change results
  from class conflict, that those who control the
  material necessary for production perpetually
  struggle with those who do not.
• Within a year, Marx was expelled from Paris, and
  moved from there to Brussels, where he lived from
  1845 to 1848.
• He next moved to Cologne, Germany, to help
  agitate for a revolt. In August of 1849, his
  friends gave him the money to move to London
  (which he never left).

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Friedrich Engels

• Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) went to Paris to
  meet Marx.
• The meeting changed the lives of both men
  forever, and they remained friends until Marxs
  death.
• In 1844, Engels published The Condition of the
  Working Class in England. He then went on to
  write a series of attacks on the most important
  English economists of the day, accusing them of
  rationalizing the abuses the upper and middle
  classes heaped on the poor.
• Engels had a gift for acquiring the hard facts
  that Marx needed to support his arguments, and
  for making Marxs often difficult and obscure
  thinking easier to follow.
• The two worked together for over forty years.

8
Vindication

• In Brussels, Marx had helped to organize the
  German Workers Union, which became part of an
  International Communist League in 1847.
• Marx and Engels wrote its official statement of
  beliefs and doctrines, published in 1848 as The
  Communist Manifesto. It became perhaps the most
  important and influential revolutionary tract
  ever written.
• In 1864, the International Workingmens
  Association was established.
• Marx published Das Kapital in 1867. It set his
  reputation as a philosopher, taking on a nearly
  mythical status as the Communist Bible. His
  health declined, and he was unable to finish two
  more volumes (later edited by Engels).

9
The Death of Karl Marx

• In 1881, Jenny died after a long and painful bout
  with cancer. The death of the woman who had
  stood by him in exile, through poverty, and the
  loss of three children, broke his spirit.
• He lived for fifteen months in a state of grief
  and despair.
• On March 14, 1883, Marx died sleeping in a
  favorite armchair, just two months after the
  death of his oldest daughter.
• At the funeral of his old friend, Engels said,
  Just as Darwin discovered the law of the
  development of organic nature, so Marx discovered
  the law of the development of human history.

10
Creating a Philosophy

• From Hegel, Marx took the ideas that there is
  only one uniform reality and that history is an
  evolutionary cycle governed by an internal
  dialectical process.
• From Feuerbach, he concluded that reality is
  material, and that material conditions of life
  control history.
• And from Saint-Simon, he learned to observe the
  relationship between the owning class and the
  producing class.

11
Dialectical Materialism

• Combining these three elements, Marx developed
  his dialectical materialism the theory that
  history is a struggle between the bourgeoisie
  (middle class) and the proletariat (working
  class).
• The bourgeoisie consists of those who produce
  nothing yet control the means of production.
• The proletariat consists of those who produce
  goods and services, and yet do not own the means
  of production.

12
Dialectical Materialism

• Marx took Hegels concept of the dialectical
  process and applied it to history, arguing there
  were five epochs that constituted the dialectical
  development of history
• (1) Primitive/communal.
• (2) Slave.
• (3) Feudal.
• (4) Capitalist.
• (5) Socialist/communist.
• As each epoch develops, its economic structure
  matures and the conditions under which people
  live change.
• According to Marx, ideas, values, and thinking
  itself are shaped by material conditions and
  social relations.

13
Mystification

• Marx radically transformed Hegels dialectic by
  confining it to the material world. He objected
  to excessively abstract philosophy, referring to
  it as mystification.
• Mystification is the use of cloudy abstractions
  to create elaborate metaphysical systems that
  distract us from concrete material reality.
• For Marx, material conditions meant not just
  physical or biological conditions, but economic
  and social relationships.
• Marx was not a hard determinist, denying the
  possibility of free will or action. He was a
  social determinist, holding that there is a
  reciprocal relationship between individuals and
  their environment (which they are able to alter).

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Economic Determinism

• Marx proposed a radical view of ideas that the
  economic structure of a culture creates and forms
  its ideas.
• For Marx, the term economic refers to the various
  social arrangements that constitute a particular
  social order.
• He assigns a crucial role to the material base of
  a society, collectively known as the substructure
  of society. This consists of three components
• The means of production (natural resources).
• The forces of production (technology, equipment).
• The relationships of production (who does what,
  who owns what, and the effects of such divisions).

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The Superstructure of Society

• According to Marx, the material substructure
  determines the nature of all social
  relationships, as well as religions, art,
  philosophies, literature, science, and government
  the superstructure of society.
• The material substructure of any society produces
  ideas and institutions that are compatible with
  it, so that one might go through history and see
  that, in each age, the culture was a product of
  the material conditions of the time.
• The superstructure of every society depends on
  the material conditions of the substructure
  shaping it.

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Critique of Capitalism

• While many of Marxs ideas are revolutionary, and
  though he did predict a violent overthrow of
  capitalism, he never made a moral judgment of
  capitalism.
• He thought of his analysis as pure social
  science.
• His aim was to describe current social and
  economic conditions objectively, identifying
  their causes and predicting the next historical
  change.

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Critique of Capitalism

• In Marxs opinion, tension under capitalism
  increases as inequities of distribution destroy
  any correlation between how much an individual
  contributes and how much he or she receives.
• A large pool of workers keeps wages low, and
  manufacturers keep prices higher than the actual
  cost of production.
• The surplus value accumulates as capital for the
  owners, so that those who contribute the least
  profit the most.

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Co-Option and Class Struggle

• According to Marxism, all history is the history
  of class struggle. Under capitalism, the
  bourgeoisie forges the instrument of its own
  destruction in the form of the proletariat.
• Under capitalism, the working-class and
  middle-class can come to identify with the
  possibility of acquiring wealth rather than with
  their actual chances of doing so. Marxists refer
  to this as being co-opted.
• Marx and Engels predicted that such conditions
  will not change until the working-class becomes
  fully aware of its class interests.

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Class Struggle

• Marx was sharply critical of capitalism, which he
  saw as a stage on the way to a classless
  socialistic economy.
• In his view, the capitalist substructure contains
  a fundamental contradiction in the tension
  between the owners desire to keep wages low
  while prices fluctuate according to the law of
  supply and demand.
• Marx predicted that the demands of the
  bourgeoisie would result in an ever-growing
  proletariat whose living conditions would
  continue to decline.
• The proletariat, he said, would finally rise up
  in violent revolt and destroy the bourgeoisie and
  capitalism, leading to the next historical epoch
  socialism.

20
Alienation

• One of Marxs most interesting insights centers
  on the concept of alienation, which occurs when
  the worker no longer feels at one with the
  product of his or her labor.
• It results from the transformation of a human
  being into a commodity (labor).
• Anyone who takes a job solely on the basis of
  what it pays becomes alienated in this sense, by
  reducing themselves to a money-making machine.

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Alienation

• This alienation extends to our relationship with
  nature.
• The alienated worker sees money rather than
  nature (the source of bread, milk, fruit, and
  wood) as the means for life.
• Unchecked capitalism uses up nature, because
  capitalism does not function as part of nature.
• Today we know the consequences of alienation from
  nature on a scale Marx could not have imagined.

22
Species-life

• We often identify with the system, rather than
  our true role in it. In capitalism, we often
  identify with the possibility of getting rich,
  while our actual chances of doing so are slim.
  Marx refers to this as being co-opted.
• Such an alienated life renders people unconscious
  of how distant they have become from nature and
  from their own possibilities.
• Marx distinguished an alternative to such an
  existence, called species-life a fully human
  life, a life lived productively and consciously
  with a sense of belonging, in which we relate to
  what we do.
• Marx is propounding not just an economic theory,
  but a sophisticated philosophy of
  self-realization, of concern for all hard-working
  individuals who make up the masses.

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Discussion Questions

• Compare kinds of contribution Who contributes
  more - builders who construct houses or the
  developers who finance them? Who contributes more
  the president of a corporation or the workers?
  Are such comparisons fair?
• Analyze some corporate scandals of the last few
  years from a Marxist perspective. Pay particular
  attention to the enormous compensation packages
  paid to CEOs in contrast to the devastating
  pension plan and stock market losses incurred by
  average workers. What do you consider to be fair
  and just?

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Chapter ReviewKey Concepts and Thinkers

• Capitalism
• Surplus value
• Co-opted
• Alienation
• Eudaimonia
• Species-life
• Alienated life
• Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872)
• Hegel (1770-1831)
• Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)
• Karl Marx (1818-1883)
• Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825)

• Absolute idealism
• Dialectic
• Dialectical process
• Bourgeoisie
• Proletariat
• Mystification
• Marxian materialism
• Economic
• Substructure of society
• Means of production
• Forces of production
• Relationships of production
• Superstructure of society