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Introduction to Marxism Part One: Philosophy (with Ian Parker)
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The first in a three part series of introductions to Marxism, this episode looks at the philosophical roots of revolutionary socialism. Ian Parker breaks down some of the core concepts and presents them in an easy to understand way that can help enrich our understanding of radical ideas and how change can happen.
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Transcript
Introduction to Marxism
00:00:01
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This introduction to Marxism is in three parts. This is the first part, focusing on philosophy, specifically on alienation, dialectics and materialism.
00:00:13
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The second part deals with sociology and the third part, with a general conclusion, deals with economics. This introduction is quite traditional in structure as an outline of what revolutionary Marxism is, following the lead of Lenin and many since him in its basic structure.
00:00:33
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There are some problems in dividing Marx into three parts. Marx challenges us to think very differently about the relation between these three parts, about philosophy, sociology and economics.
00:00:49
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So it's problematic to separate them. But there are some advantages in doing this because this three part structure keys in to the way Marxism is usually understood.
00:01:01
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We can then explore those understandings and misunderstandings as we go on.
Challenges of Identifying as Marxist
00:01:07
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Sometimes activists say that they don't want to call themselves Marxist because they haven't read Marx and the main texts are then treated as academic hurdles and as obstacles to us being able to think for ourselves.
00:01:23
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And we need to get beyond that to look at the key ideas that are useful to us. The way we find our way into Marxism and the way we're introduced to it and the way we make sense of it will vary.
00:01:38
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Introductions and interpretations of Marx change because the world we want to change is itself changing.
Karl Marx's Life and Works
00:01:49
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Marxism traces its origins, of course, to Karl Marx, born in 1818, died in 1893, and sometimes to Marx and Frederick Engels, who was born in 1820 and died in 1895. Here, I'm going to focus on Marx himself, on his contribution.
00:02:11
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This isn't a biography of the man, but some bare bones might be helpful. Marx was born in 1818 in Trier in Germany.
00:02:23
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He died in 1883 in London. Marx engaged with German philosophers, moving on to write the Communist Manifesto with Engels in 1848, and then Capital, a critique of political economy, the first volume of which was published in 1867.
00:02:44
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There are many other contributions by Marx, many of which were part of the intense, organisational, sometimes sectarian disputes with anarchists and other political rivals in the first international, which was founded in 1864.
00:03:03
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Marxism in Marx's work is incomplete and Marxism is an evolving tradition of work. We need to learn from other non Eurocentric radical traditions and those contributions have been helpful in preparing this introduction.
Analyzing Capitalism
00:03:23
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Marx was a child of his time and place, 19th century Europe, and it's not surprising that he drew on ideas that were available to him. He gives us analyses and methods to grasp the nature of capitalism, but we shouldn't treat these analyses and methods as set in stone. We need to put them to work.
00:03:46
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So I'm going to follow one way of making sense of what Marxism is, but I'm also questioning that as we go along, because there are some limits to it, limits we need to get beyond if we're to be revolutionary Marxists now.
00:04:03
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Lenin set out an article called the three sources and three component of parts of Marxism. It was an article for a Russian monthly journal called enlightenment in 1913.
00:04:19
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And there Lenin sums up the three sources and component parts of Marxism as being first of all, German philosophy, which gives us materialism, including dialectics,
00:04:33
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second french socialism which gives us class struggle as the driving force of development and third english political economy which gives us the labour theory of value There's a lot to unpack in Lenin's attempt to sum Marx up and he risks reducing Marxism in the process.
00:04:56
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In his defense, he's probably writing fast and could write this kind of thing in his sleep, but we need to start somewhere. And so this is a good place to start. So we start with this first part of philosophy.
Philosophical Foundations of Marxism
00:05:11
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So we begin with philosophy, or more specifically with the unfolding of experience. That's what we usually begin with when we encounter Marxism, our experience in the sense of feeling and experimentation, the sense that something is wrong with the world and that things are changing, that they can change, that they should change.
00:05:37
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And this is where Marx himself started. Though there are traditions in Marxism that sideline that philosophical work as being a early Marx or a young Marx, and they claim that we can disregard that in favour of an economically focused late Marx or mature Marx.
00:06:00
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But we need to take that early work seriously. There are three key aspects of the working through of experience of the world that Marx discusses as a kind of philosophical groundwork for what became Marxism.
00:06:17
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And I'll look at each of these in more detail in this part. First of all, alienation, then dialectics, and then materialism.
00:06:29
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So first alienation. With the experience of alienation or estrangement in which the world and other people are made strange to us, are separated from us, we are faced with a paradox concerning experience.
00:06:48
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At one and the same time, alienation is experienced by us in our relation to each other and to what is most intimate about ourselves our needs and desires a something missing something wrong and that unease is also covered over so that although we feel that something is wrong We are made to adapt to capitalist society in order to survive in it.
00:07:16
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We are made to convince ourselves that our bad feelings are our own fault. This is one reason why most academic definitions and measures of alienation are so misleading.
00:07:29
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They don't look at the objective causes of our misery. So alienation is separation of ourselves from ourselves.
00:07:39
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That estrangement that makes us strangers to ourselves is what makes us divided and unhappy. This while we're being told that we should be happy.
00:07:52
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Marx points out that in a world composed of things to be bought and sold, commodities, we're confronted by objects of a particular kind.
00:08:03
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And here's the twist. In this world now, we're no longer the kind of human subject who makes objects, but those objects, those commodities, turn us into a particular kind of divided,
00:08:19
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alienated subject as if we too are objects. We can see this more clearly if we look at four forms of alienation or estrangement that Marx discusses.
00:08:35
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The first form of alienation is fundamental to our experience of work under capitalism. It concerns work. because our creative labour is controlled by others, controlled by those we sell our labour power to for a specific period of time.
00:08:56
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We are separated from what we produce, we are estranged from the fruits of our labour, we are divided from ourselves at the point of production. What's most human about us, which is our ability to realise ourselves in creative work, is betrayed.
00:09:15
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So here we need to think of work in its broadest sense to include the creation of all the materially useful and beautiful objects we produce.
00:09:27
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Our experience of work, which should be enjoyable and fulfilling, is systematically distorted. There is a horrible mutation of what we are as human subjects and of our creativity.
00:09:42
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Mutation into object objectification of the things we produce and of ourselves. So what we produce is ripped from us so that from the very first moment of production, what we produce is intended by those who bought our labour power, our employers, to be an object that will be sold for profit to them.
00:10:06
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What we produce is turned from being something useful, materially useful or beautiful, into a peculiar kind of object, a commodity that then exists out there in the world, separate from us and set against us.
00:10:22
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From the moment we sell our labour power, we too are turned into exchangeable objects, commodities, to be bought and sold.
00:10:34
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The second form of alienation is where we divide from our fellow workers. It concerns others. We search for employment, for a place to sell our labour power on the marketplace.
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And that is a competitive process that turns other human beings into competitors.
The Alienation of Workers
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This is the case whatever kind of labour power it is, whether it's physical labour or mental labour or now in the service sector emotional labour.
00:11:03
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So even care for others itself is turned into a commodity. Other human beings are turned into threatening objects that threaten to deprive us of the essential wages we and those we care for need to survive.
00:11:22
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In this way, human nature is distorted so that the necessarily collective nature of creative labour is corroded. Work under capitalism combines the labour of separate individuals in a mechanistic and dehumanising way, brings together those who have fought and succeeded in selling their labour power.
00:11:47
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More complex creative labour requires more human beings to work together to enable that to happen. And that collaboration should provide the necessary context for us to be able to creatively produce something.
00:12:04
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But we're set against each other.
00:12:07
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The third form of alienation is where we not only experience other human bodies as threats, but also our own bodies as separated from us. So this concerns bodies.
00:12:21
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We're estranged from our own bodies. Our bodies are turned into machines that we must take to the marketplace and sell, and that must be sold every day to work efficiently for us and for others.
00:12:35
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impairment disability illness then experienced by us as anxiety producing and possibly fatal threats to our need to work so work is thereby turned from being as defining aspect of what it is to be human that's what marx marx describes as our species being it turned into an experience of lost time time from our lives that is sold to others here also is one of the material historical roots of the ideological division between us and our bodies
00:13:15
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These are bodies that carry out work, as if running in parallel to this are our minds, the thinking and feeling that we dissociate from while we're separated from our very selves while we work, and not only there.
00:13:33
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There is a fourth form of alienation that Marx touched upon. It is implicit in his work and has now been brought to the fore by eco-socialists.
00:13:45
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That form of alienation is separation from nature as such. Our species being, what it is to be a human being, is corrupted by capitalism in such a way that we experience not only are our own individual nature, separated from others as threatening, but the realm of nature itself is turned into ah hostile environment that must be tamed, brought under control.
00:14:17
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Now there's an ideological flip side of that process in which our alienated and sickening experience of capitalism leads us to try and escape this miserable human world and then we might try to return to nature as an escape route.
00:14:36
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To romanticize nature in that way, to attempt to simply find ourselves in it, can also be an expression of alienation, an estrangement from the world.
00:14:47
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Simple romantic attempts to return to nature can mean that other people are then seen as the problem, and that's the kind of argument that we see in some Deep ecology complaints about apparent overpopulation there over other human beings are viewed as threats instead of as providing the necessary context for us to be able to be human, part of nature, working creatively with it to transform it and ourselves.
00:15:20
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So these four forms of alienation, estrangement from our own creative labour, from other people as competitors, from our own bodies and from nature as such, give rise to a pathological society peopled by those who experience their distress as their own personal pathology.
00:15:44
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Marx's analysis speaks to the many ways that we are deadened, reduced to the status of animals in our creative work, and how we then look to animal-like bodily pleasures as the only place where we feel alive, as if we are human there.
00:16:01
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So this divided, powerless state of being also divides us from other animal species on the planet. It then seems as if supposedly pure animal-like existence is the only way out from this horrible world, as if we're only fully human there.
00:16:21
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So paradoxically, brute biological images of who we really are then replace and blot out our creative capacity to act together.
00:16:34
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Marx puts it as follows in 1844. He says, what is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal. So you see here a peculiar reversal so that things are turned into their opposites.
00:16:51
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Our relationship with nature, including our own human nature, is then viewed in terms of separation as alienated rather than seen dialectically.
Understanding Dialectics
00:17:06
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We're going to turn to the second aspect now, dialectics.
00:17:12
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The transformation of things into their opposites is one of the most well-known motifs of dialectics. Philosophical discussion of dialectics in the 19th century was the trademark of the work of Hegel, born in 1770 and died in 1831.
00:17:32
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Hegel was one of the main philosophers Marx learned from and challenged. Marx took Hegel's concept of alienation, for example, as the separation of the subject from an object, which was something that Hegel saw as part of a journey of self-discovery, but Marx grounded it in real exploitative relationships under capitalism.
00:18:04
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So Hegel was an idealist philosopher, that is, he was concerned with the unfolding of ideas, of concepts. Marx, in contrast, was a materialist and simultaneously took what was most radical about all of that and revolutionised it.
00:18:27
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At one point in his own development, Marx was a young Hegelian or a left Hegelian and his battle with Hegel's ideas was itself dialectical, preserving what was useful and transforming it, transcending it.
00:18:46
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So dialectics gave Marx, and it gives us, a way of understanding the world that focuses on change instead of assuming social relations to be unchanging or unchangeable.
00:19:01
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We look at the relationship between things in the world instead of seeing them as separate from each other. as separate We reflect on our consciousness of that process instead of experiencing history happening behind our backs, out of our control.
00:19:20
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so Let's focus on three aspects of dialectics, on contradiction, on relations and on consciousness. We start with contradictions.
00:19:34
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Now it's easy to say that everything changes. It's not so easy to analyse those changes in such a way as to also take seriously what holds things in place as they are now, to take seriously what prevents change.
00:19:54
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We need to attend to those two sides of a phenomenon. We need to always notice that there's a continual change and that there are obstacles to change.
00:20:05
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What Marx did was to home in on a key characteristic of change. which is that it operates through contradiction. Dialectical method in Marx's hands was an analysis of contradictions.
00:20:22
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The contradictions that are activated by us at certain points to bring about transformations in our understanding of reality and transformations in reality itself.
00:20:34
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So contradiction is the motor force of real changes in the world. It appears first as fractures or fault lines where there are opposing forces set against each other in what becomes an increasingly unstable state of affairs.
00:20:53
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At those moments there is a tension between what seems to remain the same or social relations that seem unchangeable and new possibilities, an opening to another world that now seems possible.
00:21:07
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Then there's a sudden shift from the slowly accumulating small changes, quantitative changes, to qualitative leaps, ruptures, we see the contradictions come clear at times of rupture, social revolution, that is dialectics in action.
00:21:31
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This means when we're turning relations, that an understanding of change for Marx is intimately tied up with analysis of social relations.
00:21:43
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That's the second key aspect of dialectics. It's easy to say that everything is connected with everything else. That's a favorite notion in spiritual and new age thought, but it's not so easy to link things in a meaningful, practical way that takes existing social relations at different historical moments seriously.
00:22:07
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So dialectics is concerned with the interrelationship between different aspects of reality and so with the intersection between different aspects of identity and experience.
00:22:21
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That's also why Marxism is intrinsically interdisciplinary, is refusing the standard academic division of knowledge into separate components. So we'll see, for instance, that Marx's analysis of sociology and the economy needs these philosophical ideas, and he grounds these in his historical materialist analysis of capitalism.
00:22:48
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Marxist analysis is also dialectically linked to change, working to open up the contradictions that it discovers, linking struggles that may be divided from each other by reason of alienation and divide and rule, and intensifying struggles between the exploited and the exploiters.
00:23:10
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That also means that there is a necessary dialectical connection between what is happening as an objective process and the way it appears in the understanding of social actors as agents of change.
00:23:25
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interlinking and conflict-ridden relation between historical social processes on a global scale was anticipated by Marx and was theorised later as a combined and uneven development
00:23:43
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The third aspect of dialectics, consciousness, highlights how we become an active part of an apparently objective historical process.
00:23:56
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Our Marxist interpretation of the world is designed to change it, not to wait for an invisible, immortal dialectical unrolling of history to happen.
00:24:09
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And so the role of consciousness is essential ineliminable. Marx is concerned with our time in history, rapidly globalizing capitalist society, when our consciousness of what is happening to us becomes an all the more essential ingredient of social processes.
00:24:31
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It's often said that for Marx capitalism creates its own grave-dicker. Capitalism creates the proletariat as a material force that's brought together in such a way as to become collectively aware of its task to overthrow capitalism.
00:24:50
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so Capitalism creates the possibility for people to become conscious of the nature of society as something they have a role in creating, as something they can seize and recreate.
00:25:07
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Now here we need to acknowledge some rather Eurocentric limitations in Marx's own writings. For example, Marx's concern with the conditions in which working class consciousness becomes possible leads him to make some disparaging comments about peasants as not having that consciousness of society.
00:25:31
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Feudalism for Marx rests on deeply ingrained assumptions about the natural order of things. And Marx in his 1852 book called The Eighteenth Rumiere of Louis Bonaparte, there Marx refers to peasants as like potatoes in a sack.
00:25:51
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What's then needed, he thinks, is the conscious transformation that working together collectively gives rise to, consciousness of the working class in itself,
00:26:02
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which at times of revolution becomes a working class for itself, then it becomes an active agent in the dialectical transformation of society.
00:26:15
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this dialectical transformation both retains what was valuable in the contradictory situation and it negates what was problematic. So there's a term sublation that is sometimes used in this context to capture how we transcend a contradiction in a dialectical movement forward that both preserves and transforms its object at a higher level.
00:26:45
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This is a complex theoretical issue that philosophically underpins what Marx is up to. Anyway, Marx is also at other moments very positive about peasant communes and about the possibility of collective consciousness being forged there.
00:27:04
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that the key question is how to raise consciousness, how to work with its contradictions, not to disparage people as suffering from false consciousness, that's a phrase Marx himself never actually used,
00:27:19
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Dialectics, then, is the analytic device through which we grasp contradiction, specifically class struggle, as the motor of history now under capitalism, and in that way we are able to consciously act on the world.
00:27:35
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So we need to differentiate this open Marxist understanding of dialectics from the fixed Stalinist formulae that reduce it to unity of opposites or to a closed sequence of theses, antitheses, synthesis.
00:27:54
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That's a closed sequence that Marx never himself specified in that way. There's no closure in dialectics, for we're always acting in the world, either to keep the social order going or to challenge it.
00:28:11
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So the role of consciousness is crucial in dialectics, and this is an aspect of it that tends to be forgotten in the attempts to find dialectics in nature.
00:28:22
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That sometimes turns dialectics into a kind of religious worldview, turns it back into classic philosophical idealism.
00:28:34
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Well, let's turn to materialism. Marx was materialist.
00:28:42
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Marx battles away against Hegel's idealism, against the claim that all that matters are our ideas about the world, and against the assumption that history unrolls through a dialectical process of self-alienation and unfolding of what Hegel called the world spirit.
00:29:07
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Hegel terms this world spirit as an absolute consciousness that he thinks appears at the end of history. So Hegel does, at the same time, edge toward a account of change and even to a collective rather than individual understanding of that dialectical process, but his focus on concepts that disregard material reality needed to be tackled.
00:29:37
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It is often said that Marx took Hegel's upside-down account, a topsy-turvy idealist image of development, and put it the right way up, stood it on its feet, on the ground, grounded it in material reality.
00:29:55
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There is for sure subjective understanding of the world that's necessary to keep the social order operating under capitalism. Marx argued in his book The German Ideology that, i quote, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class.
00:30:14
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and he drew attention to the importance of those ideas. That's why some later Marxists have rejected the rather pathologizing individualizing descriptions of false consciousness.
00:30:29
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They argue instead that there is a necessary false consciousness that enables us to make sense of this world to survive. Our subjective understanding of the world is of a world that is objectively real, mostly independent of our consciousness, and our understanding of the world is fraught with contradiction.
00:30:54
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It's in that sense that we are materialists, and because we emphasise change, transformation, we are historical materialists.
00:31:06
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Marx's historical materialism is foundational. And it includes a way of grasping what is objective, emphasizing our practical engagement with that reality and the standpoint from which we act on the world.
Materialism and Reification
00:31:23
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So we can take those three aspects of historical materialism, objectivity, practice and standpoint in turn.
00:31:35
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First, objectivity. Marx speaks about the role of objectification in our understanding of the world and our intervention in it.
00:31:49
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This is positive, it's useful. Science, for instance, requires us to grasp natural and social phenomena as if they are kinds of object, as if there are causal mechanisms and laws, and this means that there is a necessary degree of objectification involved in that kind of empirical and analytic work.
00:32:13
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Well, there's a tricky philosophical issue here concerning the abstract and the concrete concepts like alienation, dialectics, even materialism are rather abstract concepts.
00:32:30
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They're ways of getting a handle on the world. They are necessary for us to think, but we need to understand how they work concretely in the world.
00:32:43
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in context. That's what concrete means for Marx. We move, Marx says, from the abstract to the concrete.
00:32:53
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We move from things viewed separately, abstractly, to things in their context, concrete. When we grasp something in the world, it includes our reflective, thoughtful activity, and then we can step back and analyse it.
00:33:13
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So the objective world outside us, mostly independent of us, is in this way examined concretely and is held in consciousness, the better to define and analyse it.
00:33:27
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Marxist social science, if you can call it that type in that it insists on our interpretation of the world.
00:33:38
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What we hold and discuss in our conscious awareness of the world is not merely a reflection of the world but is moulded by our interests in it and what we want to do with it.
00:33:52
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This means that there is a difference between objectification as the entwinement of our subjectivity with the objective world and the widespread reification that we suffer under capitalism.
00:34:12
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Reification or thinification is what happens when social relationships are reduced to things, to objects, in which we are reduced to the status of mere objects.
00:34:27
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That is a world in which we have no say, no stake, as if we must be helpless in it. So we make our place in the world concrete when we engage in practice.
00:34:41
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Let's look at practice. The positive necessary entwinement of objectivity and subjectivity is pointed to by those who link theory and practice in the term praxis.
00:34:58
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In a sense this term praxis isn't necessary, it's a kind of tautology in Marxism because Marx's understanding of practice was already of it as something required theory.
00:35:15
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We can see this in Marx's famous theses on Feuerbach which were written in 1845, which were a response to the limitations of the kind of materialism that the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach was advocating.
00:35:35
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was born in eighteen ah four died in eighteen seventy two what ludwwick feuerbach was advocating So it's in the 11th thesis of the thesis on Feuerbach that is often quoted that, and I quote Marx, the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways.
00:35:56
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The point is to change it. Now Marx opens his critique of Feuerbach by pointing out that we need to be able to understand reality not as a thing that is entirely outside of us.
00:36:12
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Yes, this objective reality is mostly independent of us. It is particularly the case when we're alienated from it under capitalism. But Marx insists that we need to understand this reality as sensuous human activity, practice.
00:36:32
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So he points out in the first paragraph, in the first thesis on Feuerbach, that the kind of materialism that disregards our subjective involvement in it is no more than the mirror image of idealism, idealism which itself doesn't know real sensuous activity as such.
00:36:53
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So practice as sensuous human activity is a defining feature of what we Marxists mean by objectivity.
Perspectives and Misinterpretations
00:37:05
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The objective world includes us and our practice is always in the world from a standpoint.
00:37:15
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Ideology is defined by Marx as the ideas of the ruling class, the world as experienced from a particular limited class standpoint.
00:37:29
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Every understanding of the world is infused with the particular interests of those who are embedded in the world and viewing it from different standpoints. That's why standpoint is important here.
00:37:42
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Marxism is in this way an early version of what later came to be described by feminists as standpoint theory. Marxism is a theory and intervention in the world from the standpoint of the working class.
00:37:59
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That's something we now also understand as being composed of many different standpoints of the exploited and oppressed of the working class operating alongside and intersecting with each other.
00:38:13
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Now. There is a kind of anthropological fairy tale that Hegel tells about the dawn of consciousness. It's an idealist story that Marx reworks as historical materialist analysis.
00:38:30
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For Hegel, the story concerns the dialectical encounter between a master and a slave. the slave who the master puts to work the master is a conscious agent while the slave is turned into an object an object that works the slave who works, is, however, thereby able to grasp the world as it is and they become conscious that the master is dependent on them.
00:39:01
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It also dawns on the master that they are also dependent on the slave. And it's at that point that a dialectical reversal of positions takes place and the slave seizes control, becomes the master.
00:39:16
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So, We can think of the relation between the capitalist ruling class and the working class in these terms. However, we need to notice about this story, what we need to notice is is that Marx is interested in the material conditions in which wage slaves collectively become conscious of exploitation and move into action.
00:39:44
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Consciousness is necessary to the dialectical movement through which the working class comes to overcome alienation and bring about a world in which the division into different classes no longer holds.
00:40:00
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After Marx died in 1883, there were ah series of misinterpretations of what he wrote about materialism, misrepresentations that were not accidental, they were not merely misunderstandings of his ideas, but they were bound up with the objective material conditions of the working class organisations in Europe.
00:40:26
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The second international, which was formed in 1889, included many politicians who thought of themselves as Marxists, but they turned Marxism into a caricature of historical materialism, and that mechanical materialism was a mere flipside of the idealism that Marx tackled in classical German philosophy.
00:40:52
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Those social democrats of the Second International made it seem like there was an inevitable historical process through which the concentration of the working class in industrial centres would automatically lead to the collectivisation of production and so to a transition from Marxism, from capitalism to socialism.
00:41:17
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Now that misrepresentation of Marx's historical materialist analysis of the emergence of capitalism out of slavery and flu feudalism was accompanied by ah mechanistic and determinist view of history, a view of history that was eventually crystallized in stage theories that then tried to make political processes correspond to that account.
00:41:44
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so The bureaucratic apparatus of the Stalinist states and the third international then had a material interest in promoting that stage account as part of the diploma of diplomatic alliances that they sought with other regimes that were supposedly not yet ready to move on to socialism.
00:42:07
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Some of the clumsy metaphors that Marx briefly used to explain the relationship between different modes of production and ruling ideas didn't help. Classic example is the opposition between a material base and an ideological superstructure.
00:42:25
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Some Marxists then got trapped in that metaphor, forgetting all of the other things that Marx wrote. For example, when Marx wrote about religion, it's true that he was quite scathing about it and emphasised its reactionary role, but if we read what he wrote carefully, then we see something more complex, more dialectical,
00:42:50
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It's too simplistic to write off religious yearning as the opium of the people and forget that Marx saw this yearning as the heart of what he called the heart of a heartless world and the soul of a spiritless condition.
00:43:07
Speaker
So here is an indictment of capitalism and its miserable reduction of life to objectivity shorn of subject subjectivity. So those who reduce Marxism to base economic analysis forget that for Marx it's precisely capitalism itself that reduces our lives to an economic level.
Revolutionary Change and Historical Materialism
00:43:31
Speaker
Economist reductionism is the name of the game under capitalism. It's symptomatic of what it does to us. It's not a way out.
00:43:41
Speaker
So some conclusions to this discussion of philosophy. Lenin's schema of the three component parts of Marxism was written in 1913 and that schema emphasized historical materialism as an alternative to Hegelian idealism.
00:44:03
Speaker
However, in the four years between then and the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin spent great deal time reading banter greatpe deal of time reading hey and lenin's notebooks on hegel reveal a transformation in his conception of revolutionary change that actually brings him back to what Marx actually wrote.
00:44:29
Speaker
Lenin realised that it's not possible to take over the state to use it to manage a supposedly inevitable transition from capitalism to socialism as the second international social democrats proposed.
00:44:45
Speaker
Lenin went back to a dialectical understanding of ruptures in which as Marx himself wrote The state machine had to be smashed, broken up and replaced by new forms of democratic, self-organised working class rule.
00:45:05
Speaker
Another consequence of Lenin's Hegelian influenced return to Marx was an understanding of the importance of resistance to colonialism and self-determination of the oppressed nations against imperialist domination.
00:45:22
Speaker
This is in contrast to simply relying on some kind of stage model of development that saw capitalism as necessarily always progressive.
00:45:36
Speaker
We can see in the case of eer alienation how ideological aspects of our experience of life under capitalism are embodied, material.
00:45:47
Speaker
So Marxist historical materialism is therefore not simply a crude reductionist mirror image of idealist approaches.
00:45:58
Speaker
Marx did not simply oppose Hegel, but learned from the dialectical account that Hegel had developed, and Marx transformed that account. Now Marx himself never used the phrase dialectical materialism and we should be careful not to turn that phrase into a kind of ideology.
00:46:22
Speaker
This is one lesson of the disastrous attempt to build a so-called Marxist science of nature in the Soviet Union that demanded matter operate according to predefined dialectical laws.
00:46:37
Speaker
Marx's analysis and methods were thoroughly materialist while taking seriously the dialectical relationship with ideas, with theories we have about history, about ourselves.
00:46:51
Speaker
There's also the problem of recuperation of Marx's work, the neutralizing and absorbing of his ideas. And that ideological recuperation is something we see increasingly at work in the turning of critique into just another part of a media spectacle that dissolves the difference between truth and lies and instead circulates shallow and enjoyable images of the world and theories about it.
00:47:21
Speaker
That's also something we've seen in many academic representations of Marxism. There is a continual danger that Marx's analysis can be turned back into mere ideas, mere philosophy, made abstract, useless.
00:47:41
Speaker
There is a Hegelian tradition in Marxism, in discussion of praxis, the linking of theory and practice, in the work of the Frankfurt School, for example, but we need to take care.
00:47:53
Speaker
We can learn from those traditions but we always have the aim of emancipating ourselves from ideology and grounding our account of alienation and dialectics in the material reality of life under capitalism.
00:48:09
Speaker
In the next part we will look at Sociology.