PHIL3395: Marx

Novy SP09

Wolff: Chapter1 “Early Writings”

Introduction
  1. Capitalism is not properly fit for human consumption
  1. Three Concepts
    1. Diagnosis of the ills of existing society
    1. Critique of the state of existing treatment
    1. Provide a treatment for the now-identified illness

Religion
  1. The Young Hegelian Theology Debate
    1. Marx: CCH’sPOR:I: “The critique of religion is essentially complete”
  1. To attack religion was also to attack the political authority which takes itself to be founded on religion – why the atheism of the Young Hegelians was considered such a threat
  1. While Feuerbach understood the phenomenon of religion, he didn’t address its cause
    1. Marx: “opium of the people”

 

Historical Materialism
  1. Humans are not passive, they are active in the world
  1. Marx’s big gun
    1. Kant’s ahistorical materialism vs. Hegel’s historical idealism
    1. Humans have individual and collective material needs
    1. It is need, not thought, that provides our primary interaction with the world
    1. To satisfy needs we must labor together which in turn develops richer forms of production and social interaction, which engenders new needs, etc.
  1. A theory re: human interaction with nature is the foundation of a historical theory of society

 

Labor and Alienation
  1. Religious alienation: We do not exercise our most essential features, but worship/ idealize them in an alien form – God
    1. Marx asks about the source of the phenomenon
  1. Adam Smith + Feuerbach = alienated labor
    1. Alienation from our products
    1. Alienation in productive activity
    1. Alienation from our own species-being
    1. Alienation from other humans

 

Money and Credit
  1. Money commodifies, transforms and degrades human relations
    1. Money is corrosive – everything eventually has a price
    1. Money turns all human natural qualities into their opposite
  1. In a credit system, money is abstracted; people themselves become the unit of currency

 

Liberalism
  1. The Jewish Question
  1. Political emancipation is not human emancipation
    1. We live a schizophrenic life – part private, part public
    1. An atomistic real life in civil society & a collective fantasy as citizen
  1. Political emancipation actually presupposes & reinforces our alienation from one another
    1. In a healthy society, we find freedom through our relations with others

 

Emancipation
  1. Without alienation and organized on communist lines
    1. Knowledge, self-knowledge and motivation must all change
  1. Communism can only be achieved by the workers themselves
    1. Only by making the revolution, will people be ready to receive it
  1. In revolution the workers purge & are purged of the old society – fashioned in the fire