Karl Marx in America: Readings for the Current Global Economic Crisis

Karl Marx in America:Readings for the Current Global Economic Crisis

Joseph W.H. Lough, Ph.D.Filozofski fakultet Tuzla

Blog: http://www.newconsensus.org/MarxInAmerica/Twitter: @jwhlough

email: [email protected]: +387 603375497

http://www.newconsensus.org/MarxInAmerica/

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Review•D Landes, Revolution in Time (Darijan Ajdin)

- Capitalism arises out of a "deficiency" in Western European culture and political institutions

- Capitalism does not arise out of exceptional "greed" or "intelligence" or "foresight"

•EP Thompson, Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism (Адис Садиковић)

- I Kant, Prolegomena (Emin Eminagic)

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Review•EP Thompson, Time, Work Discipline, and

Industrial Capitalism (Адис Садиковић)

- Time and Work Discipline do not come naturally

- Workers naturally resist time and work discipline

- Time and Work Discipline become enforced values

- I Kant, Prolegomena (Emin Eminagic)

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Review•I Kant, Prolegomena (Emin Eminagic)

- Insofar as our experience is structured by the isolation of abstract value from its material form of appearance; and

- Insofar as our interpretive categories correspond to this experience;

- Our interpretive categories reinforce and corroborate the isolation of abstract value from its material form of appearance.

Preview•A Smith, Wealth of Nations (

•GWF Hegel, Philosophy of Right (

•K Marx, Capital (

Preview•A Smith, Wealth of Nations

- the natural propensity to truck, barter, and exchange

- labor the source of all wealth

- labor – like every other commodity

Preview•GWF Hegel, Philosophy of Right

- particularity and chaos

- the universal character of the system

- the conditions for particularity to grasp the universal

- freedom: the goal of the system

Preview•K Marx, Capital

- the social constitution of use value and commodity fetishism

- the central contradiction within capitalism

- the categories of bourgeois economics

- labor and freedom

A Smith, Wealth of Nations

•Why might it have taken political economists so long – 1776 – to recognize the comprehensive integration and interdependence of land, labor, and rent?


•Later, in 1871, C Menger will conclude that human beings are naturally utility maximizing beings; but to what did A Smith ascribe our utility maximization?


•Why might it have taken natural philosophers so long to recognize the natural human propensity to truck, barter, and exchange?


•To what does A Smith attribute individual differences?


•A Smith acknowledges the contributions that knowledge and power make constituting individual differences

•Why does A Smith count individual differences a good thing? Does he like différance? Is he into diversity?


•If all individuals enjoy a natural propensity to truck, barter, and exchange, then to what does A Smith attribute the exceptional advantage England and North America enjoy in the production of wealth?


•If each of us only commanded our own labor, how great would differences in wealth be?

•To accumulate and enjoy wealth, what does A Smith feel we must lay our hands on?


•To whom do we owe the labor theory of value?


•Which did A Smith feel was more dangerous and more common; the combination of employers (cartels and monopolies) or the combination of workers (trade unions)?

•Why?


•Did A Smith feel that laborers should be compensated liberally or modestly?

•Why?


•Later, when we read G Arrighi and J Lowinger, they will adopt K Polanyi’s view that labor, land, and money are “fictitious commodities” since they are not themselves produced by labor.

•Is anything a “natural” commodity?

•What makes a commodity a commodity?


•We have arrived at the comprehensive integration of all parts of the capitalist social formation; which now also includes that commodity: commodified human labor

•A Smith theorizes this integration; he also acknowledges that knowledge and power are children of habit

•But he does not theorize how his own categories arose from the social formation he was theorizing

GWF Hegel, Civil Society

•What do these terms “individual” and “universal” mean for Hegel?

•What is the problem with particularity “for itself”?


•Let us suppose that I am a businessperson;

•What must I know about the world around me in order to maximize the return on my investment?


•What does GWF Hegel mean when he says that the bourgeois individual treats the universal as a mere means?

•The bourgeois individual encounters and acknowledges the universal in a way that individuals not engaged in the world do not

•What does it mean to say that the member of civil society’s freedom and universality of knowledge and volition are formal?


•What role does education play for GWF Hegel?

•What is GWF Hegel’s term for the system that A Smith has described?

•Why does GWF Hegel feel that he must “go beyond” A Smith?


•What is “the actuality of the universal of freedom contained” in the “system of needs”?

•How is “property” freedom?


•How might a particular interest be a common interest?

•How might the police or the corporation care for this particular/common interest?


•If my needs and desires are potentially infinite, then why might this pose a problem?

•How do we escape the problem of potentially infinite needs?


•What end or goal does A Smith find in the division of labor?

•Where is the division of labor moving for GWF Hegel?


•We now have a universal system in which knowledge, power, education, and the social play intimate, mutually constituting roles

•The system is based on labor orchestrated by a non-laboring universal class – the civil service

•It imagines a future in which all workers will be able to step aside and install machines in their place

•If society is mediated by abstract value, when will this occur?

K Marx, Capital•Does K Marx believe a commodity must

be a material or physical thing?

•Is K Marx’s understanding of “usefulness” utilitarian?

•Is a commodity’s “usefulness” proportional to the amount of labor expended producing the commodity?

•What makes a commodity under capitalism unique?

K Marx, Capital

•Why might a commodity whose immaterial value is inseparable from its material form of appearance seem to be a contradiction in terms?

•How do we determine price?

K Marx, Capital

•Why is it possible for us to weigh the relative values of so many disparate commodities with such accuracy?

•What is it that all commodities contain that makes them comparable?

K Marx, Capital

•Is abstract, homogeneous, undifferentiated, universal labor a good thing in Marx’s book?

K Marx, Capital•Does K Marx feel that labor time

expended is social and flexible or fixed?

•Does K Marx feel that value is social?

•Can technology reduce labor time expended?

•Can the cost of a factor of production increase/decrease value?

K Marx, Capital

•Can an artifact be a use-value without having value?

•Can an object have value if no one finds it useful?

•Does labor have a use-value?

•Does labor have an exchange value?

•What is the exchange value of labor?

K Marx, Capital

•What problem did Aristotle try to solve, but could not, and why?

•What is it that grants the commodity its magical character?

K Marx, Capital

•Why does K Marx not reject the categories of bourgeois economics?

K Marx, Capital

•GWF Hegel in his Phenomenology calls attention to the Weltgeist, the Self-Moving Substance that is Subject.

•Some Marxist theorists have identified the industrial proletariat as this Subject.

•With what does Marx associate this Subject?

Immanent Critique

•This means that K Marx is inside the social form that he is theorizing

•He is not theorizing a path outside the form; he is theorizing its transformation into something else

Preview

•The first cycle of capital accumulation: Back to Genoa

•The world system

Karl Marx in America: Readings for the Current Global Economic Crisis

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Transcript of Karl Marx in America: Readings for the Current Global Economic Crisis