Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels Sociology 100

1. Karl Marx & Friedrich EngelsSociology 100 A ruthless criticism of everything existing

2. Failures of Marx • Worldwide proletarian revolution never happens • Communist government tyrannical, poor • Class consciousness does not replace national consciousness

3. Failures of Marx • Transformative capacity of capitalism even greater than Marx thought, and it acted in ways Marx did not foresee • Elaboration of stockholder capitalism • The welfare state & success of trade unions at gaining material advancement for workers averts revolution • Containing the revolution to save capitalism • Interests of workers linked to those of the corporation that employs them • While in the 19th century class may have resolved itself into “two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat”, in the 20th century capitalism appears to have developed a more complex class structure

4. What remains? • Analytical framework • Dialectical development • Historical materialism • Understanding institutions and beliefs as arising from control of the means of production and the resulting social organization • “A ruthless criticism of everything existing” • Sociological: Society & politics • Philosophical: What does it mean to be free? What does it mean to be human?

5. Alienation • Labor experienced as alien force of domination • Actions constitute identity • You are what you do • “Labour, life-activity, productive life itself, appears to man merely as a means of satisfying a need—the need to maintain the physical existence. [...] Life itself appears only as a means to life.” (75-76) • Life as a means qualitatively different from life as an end • Alienated from your own life

6. Alienation • Estranged labour thus turns • “Man’s species being, both nature and his spiritual species property, into a being alien to him, into a means to his individual existence. It estranges man’s own body from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual essence, his human being.” (77) • Spiritual metaphors mark this as early Marx • Species life/being: humans must have a relationship with the world (nature) and other humans. • Recall: Humans “begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence.”

7. Alienation • Estranged labour thus turns • “An immediate consequence of of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labour, from his life-activity, from his species being is the estrangement of man from man. If a man is confronted by himself, he is confronted by the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labour and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labour and object of labour.” (77) • Estranged labor isolates the individual. Thus, nature, other humans, and even the self begin to be understood only as means to be exploited

8. Alienation • “The relationship of the worker to labour engenders the relation to it of the capitalist, or whatever one chooses to call the master of labour. Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour, of the external relationship of the worker to nature and to himself.” (79) • Private property as a concept derives from the practice of alienated labor • The bourgeois own the product, but do not labor. Still alienated from their own lives • Their actions do not make their capital

9. Alienation • “The possessing class and the proletarian class represent one and the same human self-alienation. But the former feels satisfied and affirmed in this self-alienation, experiences the alienation as a sign of its own power, and possesses in it the appearance of a human existence. The latter, however, feels destroyed in this alienation, seeing in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence.” (133)

10. Politics and Freedom • The Jewish question: is it possible to treat Jews as political equals? • A theological question • Problem will vanish “As soon as Jew and Christian come to see in their respective religions as nothing more than stages in the development of the human mind—snake skins which have been cast off by history, and man as the snake who clothed himself in them” they won’t be in religious opposition, “but in a purely critical, scientific human relationship. Science will then constitute their unity. But scientific oppositions are resolved by science itself.” (28)

11. Politics and Freedom • Marx: Obvs. Jews can be treated as political equals, look at North American countries • “The question of the political emancipation and religion becomes for us a question of the relation between political emancipation and human emancipation.” (31)

12. Emancipation ≠ Liberation • “The political emancipation of the Jew or the Christian—of the religious man in general—is the emancipation of the state from Judaism, Christianity, and religion in general.” (32) • When the state “decrees that birth, social rank, education, occupation non-political distinctions”, it in fact presupposes the existence of these things • Ex: Right to freedom of religion, property rights

13. False Freedoms • By declaring these things non-political, the state “allows private property, education, occupation, to act after their own fashion, namely as private property, education, occupation, and to manifest their particular nature.” (33) • The apparent non-intervention on these real and important differences is in fact an active support • Making class interests appear universal • What use is a sacrosanct right to private property to those without property? • False freedoms, false equality

14. “Political emancipation certainly represents a great progress. It is not, indeed, the final form of human emancipation, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the prevailing social order. It goes without saying that we are speaking here of real, practical emancipation.” (35)

15. Individualism • Liberal concepts of liberty are “the liberty of man regarded as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.” • “This individual liberty, and its application, form the basis of civil society. It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty. It declares above all the right ‘to enjoy and to dispose as one will, one’s goods and revenues, the fruits of one’s work and industry.’” (42)

16. Liberal Liberty = Bourgeois Liberty • “Man was not liberated from religion; he received religious liberty. He was not liberated from property; he received the liberty to own property. He was not liberated from the egoism of business; he received the liberty to engage in business.” (45) • Thus, the so-called “rights of man” show that “it is man as a bourgeois and not man as a citizen who is considered the true and authentic man.” (43)