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Marxism

Marxism.

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Marxism

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  1. Marxism “Marxism is the theory of how the normality of our everyday world, … its workday habits and its working day, its monetary stresses and pressures on one end and its leisure and freedom on the other, is riven from within by what Marx called ‘class struggle’ ”(Literary Theory: an Anthology, 231).

  2. Class struggle: a contradiction between those with wealth and those lacking it. This contradiction sustains the society while at the same time threatening to disintegrate it.

  3. Karl Marx (1818-1883) • The German Ideology (1846) • TheCommunist Manifesto (1848) • Capital (1867)

  4. Capitalism Promoting private accumulation of wealth Advocating individual freedom in economic matters Inequality in distribution of wealth Enslaving the working class through economic policies and control of production Class differentiation Severe poverty Works by a “hidden disequilibrium” in the work we do what we get (salary) < what we give (labor)

  5. Traditional Marxism : Some Key Concepts • The BASE: economic in nature, capitalism • The SUPERSTRUCTURE: ideas, beliefs, philosophy, art,… • The economic power holders determine economic policies and have control over the production of goods. The values and beliefs will become the dominant ideology of the society.

  6. Traditional Marxism : Some Key Concepts • “ The enforcement of the ideas of this elite group on the working classes entraps them, mostly unknowingly, in an economic system that decides all aspects of their lives from their wages to their life style and beliefs.” • Alienation: the process as a result of which people become foreign to their human nature and the product of their labor. Work becomes a meaningless circulation of money. Use value (direct value)/ Exchange value (the added value, with the money as the third party equalizer)

  7. Ideology According to Marx, ideology is “the ruling ideas of the ruling class.” In this definition ideology is, more or less, a reflection of the material infrastructure. A more complicated definition offered by John Fiske, “Ideology is not … a static set of ideas through which we view the world but a dynamic social practice, constantly in producing itself in the ordinary workings of these apparatuses [such as the media and education]. It also works at the micro-level of the individual.”

  8. Louis Althusser (1918-1990) “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” • Why do people obey the State? • Why don’t they rebel? 1) RSAs: ensure physical enforcement of the law, primarily work by repression (the police) 2) ISAs: generate beliefs and values (family, schools)

  9. How does ideology work? • How do people come to believe it? 1) Ideologies: historical, specific, various 2) Ideology: Ahistorical, asocial, unchanging, inevitable There is no escape from ideology. It is called, the “Prison-house of language.” (Fredrick Jameson)

  10. “Ideology is a ‘representation’ of the Imaginary relationship of Individuals to their Real conditions of existence” (Althusser, 24). • Why not just understand the real? • The real economic condition= exploitation, alienation • Ideology= the mask, the painkiller, the illusory representation According to Althusser, ideology does not reflect the reality; it distorts it.

  11. “Ideology has a material existence.” • It exists in two places • In an apparatus or practice: a ritual (a material practice) • In a subject, a person (a material being)

  12. How does Ideology enlist individuals as subjects in a belief system? 1) We are born into subject-hood. 2) We are always already in Ideology ( born into specific ideologies). 3) Ideology interpellates (names, addresses, hails) each one of us as its subject (both in subjective and objective senses). subject (person)/ Subject (the structural possibility of Subject-hood, never attainable in reality

  13. Because you’re Worth it.

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