Karl Marx (1818-1883)
The manifesto wasn’t popular at all during his life.
It was only after Marx’s death that something akin to Marxism was standardised.
He was schooled in philosophy, phd in 1841.
Born in Trier (so part of one of the most densely populated parts of Germany)
Was initially an editor at the Rheinische Zeitung.
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Each day he was censored at this newspaper. So he left.
The revolutions of 1848: important because it was the first revolution led by the working class.
(In Paris before there were the sans culottes, but they didn’t lead the French revolution.)
- Has important impact on the bourgeois
They were progressive at that time according to Marx, ever since the French revolution.
However, after 1848, the bourgeois class becomes afraid of the working class
→ they take on the role of the class that is supposed to lead society, and thus also societal change.
The workers didn’t only demand liberal rights, but also social rights.
Thus, the bourgois class becomes increasingly conservative, and begins to make compromises with aristocrats and other governing bodies.
→ Sociology generally cannot be understood without this context, in which Marx worked.
Marx, like most German revolutionaries fled to the UK, creating a big diaspora community in London.
During Marx’s lifetime, very few people actually knew about him, and he was mainly destitute.
A lot of his ouevre was actually published after his death, and so most of it is actually unpublished drafts.
Marx in total is about 100 volumes of about 500 pages each.
It was around 1850-1870 that Marx was actually the most active, due to the beginning of the first international, an organisation meant to unite working class organisations across the world.
The German Ideology
Marx did not see himself as a social scientist, but rather as a revolutionary that wanted to change society, and so thought that he needed to also understand society.
Contrary to appearance, it’s the revolutionary position marks takes up which is the reason why he can do science, because he feels no reason to defend the institutions already in place.
Marx was part of the Young Hegelians
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Thought that men are chained by their thoughts and ideas, and that the critique of these ideas is enough to liberate them
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For them, to change society means to change consciousness
”They are in no way combatingthe real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world”
- Marx
Ideas have to be related to and understood in terms of social reality
Ideas are part of society, are an expression of this society
Marx becomes a social scientist by criticising the philosophy of Hegel.
You cannot approach ideas as something that is freefloating and/or seperate from society.
They are explicitly part of the society in which we live, and thus also our social conditions.
Changes in ideas are often an expression of real changes within society. Ie. Material changes.
”For capitalism to work, we need a certain amount of freedom. A very ’certain’ amount.”
We shouldn’t only criticise concepts, but we should criticise concepts in terms of what material relation they really express. All ideas that have emerged, have emerged within a society that allows those ideas to emerge.
”Science is possible. What are the conditions that make science possible?”
According to Kant, this is entirely a mental manifestation, and thus it is possible because the mind makes it possible.
According to Marx however, science is possible because the society in which it happens makes it possible.
You cannot see knowledge seperately from society. Many concepts are made possible within a particular type of society.
This is a kantian type of critique, but in a way that Kant himself would not have followed.
Ideas shouldn’t only be considred out of their truth-content, but also from the perspective of the function they play in society.
”Ideology”: initially the study of ideas.
Now it is the type of ideas that are unscientific and dogmatic.
But! Ideology is a necessary product of society. Dogmas are impossible to avoid.
”Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people”.
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Marx
The point of studying ideologies is not about whether they are true or false (just like above) but rather what role/function they play in society.
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eg. Religiousness or ”religion” has to be seen as a product of society.
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eg. Where is religiousity found? Today the answer to that question would be something along the lines of ’where people are poor’.
”The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, ie. The class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the means of mental production, that that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”
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Marx, the German Ideology.
Marx builds up from Material premises: human beings are living individuals, part of nature, transforming nature.
Key concept: mode of production
Production = broadest sense of the term
- Also includes the production of ideas, the production of social relations, the reproduction (ie. Producing those things that ensures that production continues in the future) of society, or the working class.
Including reproduction of life: ”What men and women create most notably are other men and women” (Terry Eagleton)
Production is also self-production: by producing you are also producing something of yourself.
It is in the mode of production that something fundamental takes place; our interrelations with nature.
”The production of life, both of one’s own in labor and of fresh life in procreation, appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as natural, on the other as a social relationship.”
We have to understand society in terms of relations.
Natural and Social relations
The Natural relation is the metabolism:
”Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in otion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously change his own nature.”
Marx appropriates many ideas from different disciplines, meaning he had a keen eye to the sciences at the time.
Marx saw that something was going wrong with the metabolism at the time, and seeing that crisis, he developed the first tools to understand ecological crisis.
Context: crisis of agriculture in UK at the time, the farmlands had been farmed dry and so food could no longer be produced.
→ shows that the metabolic cycle had been broken. It had been put into overdrive.
A ”metabolic rift” had been created. The nutrients should naturally return to the soil, but capitalist agriculture cannot maintain this state. So they invent fertiliser (which they made from soldiers who died in the napoleonic wars, and latin American Guano.)
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This trade became so profitable that there was even war over Bird Shit.
There are also social relations,
eg. the relations between countryside and city or global north and global south.
→ The metabolic cycle is disrupted due to the social relations at the time.
Urbanisation is fucked
Globalisation is fucked
Social relations caused ecological crisis, but the solution to ecological crisis is further problematised social relations, eg. Imperialism.
The problem is moved from countryside-city to imperialist center-imperialist periphery
The solution for one ecological crisis creates new ecological problems on a larger scale.
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Before, when ecological crisis happened locally, people would have to move away.
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In capitalism however, the solution to local problems is to move those problems to another place.
”Society is not merely an aggregate of individuals; it is the sum of the relations in which these individuals tand to one another.”
It would be wrong to state that ”slaves and citizens do not exist; they are all men. In fact, this is rather what they outside society. Being a slave or a cotizen is a socially determined relation between an individual A and an individual B. Individual A is not as such a slave. He is only a slave in and through society.”
Marx is generally interested in Macro relations, large structural relations, rather than the relations between individuals.
division of labor:
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In a workshop, a factory: technical division of labour
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In society: social division of labour.
eg. working class v bourgois
town v countryside
commercial v industrial labour
intellectual v material labour
Mode of productions: relation of relations.
If you want to understand mode of production, you have to understand:
productive forces: technology, knowledge, forms of social co-operation
relations of property: especially property of the means of production (instrument and objects of labour)
You cannot have slaves do the sort of complex work that capitalism requires. Thus, workers need the kind of freedom that makes them no longer managed through violence, eg. by threat of no longer being able to maintain their living standards; the wage.
”Men make cloth, linen, silk-stuffs, in certain determinate relations of production. These determinate relations are just as much produced by men as are clth, linen etc. Social relations are intimately connected with the forces of production. In acquiring new forces of production, men change their mode of production, their way of earning their living; they change all their social relations. The hand mill will give you a society with the feudal lord, the steam mill a society with the industrial capitalist.”
- Marx seems like a historical determinist in this kind of passage
However it seems that the professor thinks that Marx generally is more nuanced than this.
What is a revolution basically: It is productive forces trying to remove the current state of affairs.
If there will be a socialist revolution, it will be like this: ie. The productive forces will begin clashing with the social relations that are the case.
eg. Workers are concentrated in small areas, generating a productive force.
Here Marx speaks of the socialisation of production.
Production becomes increasingly social, in a massive sense.
But under what social relation?
Thousands of workers together produces a car; yet in the end it is still a capitalist who owns that car and gets to profit off of it.
The appropriation of the social product is non-social.
According to Marx, this will in the end lead to social relations of production appropriating its own production.
Accelerationism as an aesthetic idea – According to the professor.
Professors’ hypothesis: The young Marx started his huge work with the hypothesis that capitalism is an unstable system that cannot last and will generate crisis. It seems reasonable that Marx believed in this point, but was never able to properly prove it as being the case.
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He could find that capitalism generated contradictions, but he could not generally show that it would actually lead to collapse.
Engels however, who published many of Marx’s works after his death, rewrote some of Marx, instigating the myth that Marx theorised of a collapse which must happen from capitalism.
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If capitalism ”collapses”, it might simply be that society generally collapses.
”Socialism is the type of society that emerges after capitalism has overcome, whilst communism seems to be more of a ’utopian’ horizon.”
If you look at what Marx has to say about socialism or communism, he says barely anything. He thinks the future generally cannot be predicted. There is no point in saying that society should be x or y.
The materialist conception of history:
”In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.”
This is controversial of course,
but we have to see that they aren’t laws of society or economic determinism, but rather these statements are heuristics.
There are certain historical conditions which make certain options possible, and other impossible.
There is still a kind of necessity in history, but it’s the kind of necessity that makes it impossible to ”go back”. The past is the past and that’s it.
This is why we have to study society, so that we can actually figure out what directions we can really take in history.