POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 5
MARX
French Rev. - property as human right, bourgeois interests made universal
FEUERBACH: the earthly family made bearable via the absolute heaveanly family; overthrow the heaveanly ideals so people will enjoy the earthly for its own sake
- only change of ideas
MARX: change the world, ideas will follow
- religion as opium of the people
- Feuerbach: religion is the cause of our misery
- Marx: religion is the cure for a sickness
Political Economy:
- human nature is rooted entirely in politics and economics
- opposed to natural law, which is merely historical
Agrarian system: chiefs organize surplus
Slave system: slaves produce surplus for masters
Feudal system: aristocrats exploiting serfs
Capitalist system: worker vs owner, but capitalism reaps its own doom by consentrating working people, creating class consciousness
Superstructures: ideology, legitimizing society and covering up awareness of the mode of production
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Means of prod owned by B
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Labour power by P
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P must sell labour to work and exist, B can set the rules of this engagement
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wage is subsistence, the surplus goes to B
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creative work makes us us
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alienation because no creative work, servicing capital, etc.
4 Forms of Alienation:
1. From Product
2. From Labour Activity
3. From Species Being
4. From Other People
Socialism as a classless society:
- P as self-conscious
- Dict. of P
- abolist private property
- P as universal class
- state will wither away, giving way to communism
Grudrisse: capitalism is based on theft of another’s labour time
- ALLAN WOOD: moral assessments are superstructure-dependent, Marx cannot call capitalism unjust or wrong
- G.A. COHEN: Marxist justice, analytic Marxism, Marx is a theorist of justice in as much as the conclusions we can draw from his descriptions of capitalism
- ORTHODOX MARXISM: all superstructure conflicts are base conflicts, so all conflicts are fundamentally economic ones
Influenced: Lukacs, Gramsci, Zuboff