The Legacies of Karl Marx:

Historical Materialism, and Marxian Criticism

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

Hegelian Dialectics

This is often explained as the dialectical movement from THESIS to ANTITHESIS to SYNTHESIS (a unifying, transcendent Absolute, as in Plato)...although Hegel himself never actually used these terms, preferring Abstract, Negative and Concrete.

The process by which self-consciousness is transformed (“sublated”) into Absolute Knowledge or Spirit (which Hegel also

termed “Science”)

For this to happen, one self-consciousness must first come to recognize another self-consciousness that negates or contradicts the first. A struggle ensues until one is subordinated to the other and

they fuse into a third, interdependent form.

In The Philosophy of History (posthumously published, based on lectures given beginning in the 1820s): Hegel’s notion of dialectics is pressed into the service of explaining historical progress through contradiction, negation and sublation.

“Spirit does not toss itself about in the external play of chance occurrences; on the contrary, it is that which determines history absolutely, and it stands firm against the chance occurrences which it dominates and exploits for its own purpose.”

The French Revolution:

I. Revolution (violent overthrow of monarchy)==>

II. Reign of Terror (violence turned in on itself, imperiling the goals of the revolution: note that this negation, as in all Hegelian negations, comes from within the original abstraction)==>

III. The Constitutional State as rational system for guaranteeing freedom and equality.

This is a teleological system: history unfolds according to dialectical processes that progress toward Aufhebung or sublation/“lifting up” (eventually, the transcendence of earthly history; the end of history itself).

This transcendence toward an absolute, unifying Ideal would resolve all contradictions (including subject/object of knowledge, being/ becoming, life/death,body/spirit, etc.

Following Hegel’s death in 1831, the atheistic Left Hegelians (including a young Karl Marx) accused Hegel of “standing on his head” and getting dialectics all wrong. Marx sought to turn Hegelian Idealism “right side up”and insisted on DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM (class struggle) instead as the engine of history.

For historical materialists, such as Marx and Friedrich Engels, social being precedes social consciousness.

Hegel’s ‘Headstand’

Karl Marx• Marx argues that for a given societal organization to remain

in place, the means of production need to be reproduced.

• Labor is reproduced when workers are given a means of sustenance (i.e. wages) in order to ensure that they continue to work.

• In the dialectic of Superstructure and Infrastructure, the dominance of the Superstructure is determined by the complicity of the Infrastructure.

But how does this happen? What makes workers in a democratic society contribute to their own subjugation?

The “House that Marx Built:” How Capitalism Works

[Relations of production and means of production]

“Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential nature. ... Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.” (Comments on James Mill, 1844)

Alienation of laborIn a privately owned system, the worker is an instrument, reduced to a function of his/her labor rather than a subject endowed with individual agency. Marx thus distinguishes four types of alienation [Entfremdung]:

1. Social alienation of people under Capitalism from their “human nature” [Gattungswesen, or “species-being”]

2. Alienation of one worker from another.

3. Alienation of the worker from his/her labor power

4. Alienation from the product of that labor.

Commodity Fetishism

Louis Vuitton advertisement with Mikhail Gorbachev at a remaining stretch of the Berlin

Wall, 2007

The global system of jeans: from cotton field to mall

Raw Cotton: Sourced from/harvested in US, Mexico, Central Asia, etc.

Raw cotton shipped to China for refinement

Refined cotton shipped to Malaysia and spun into yarn

Yarn shipped to Thailand and made into denim fabric

Fabric sent to Singapore for cutting, then shipped to Indonesia

Fabric panels cut, sewn and otherwise assembled in Indonesia (assembly includes labels from India, zippers from Hong Kong, buttons and rivets from Taiwan,

embroidery from Singapore, etc.)

Completed jeans sent back to Singapore, affixed with different brand tags, shipped to world markets

A diamond is forever...

Average wage for a diamond miner in Sierra Leone:50 cents/day + two cups of rice

(Source: BBC, 2006)

Rough diamond exports from Sierra Leone: $98 million/ year (2008)

Globally: 500 million/ year (2006)

Global cut/polished diamond sales: over $14 billion/year

Global diamond retail sales: over $60 billion/year

Diamond-studded iPhone 4: $7, 890,000

Damien Hirst, “For the Love of God,” (human skull, platinum, 8,601 diamonds); Sold for $100 million in 2007

http://www.lifegem.com/

$3,499.00-$19,999.00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcFqqvkSW3Y&feature=player_embedded

Marxian Literary Criticism

This dimension of the text is its ideological construction, or its “political unconscious” (Fredric Jameson) which is “silent”

(Terry Eagleton)

Invested in uncovering what the text hides, i.e. not that which is intentionally concealed, but that which the text

cannot know about itself.

Marxian Critical Questions

Whose perception is voiced/empowered/central and whose perception is

silenced/disempowered/marginalized?

Do characters affirm or resist bourgeois values?

Does the text reflect or resist a dominant ideology?

What are the economic and political conditions for the production and dissemination of the text?

The text emerges not as a pure outcome of authorial intention, but

rather as a symptom of a field of largely unconscious political and economic

forces.

The Frankfurt School• Began in 1924 at the Institute for Social Research at the University of

Frankfurt.

• Initially concerned only with studying the work of Marx and Engels and promulgating Marxism as a revolutionary ideology.

• Max Horkheimer assumed the directorship in 1930, shifted focus from orthodox, ahistorical Marxism to what he termed CULTURAL STUDIES and CRITICAL THEORY.

• Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno co-wrote The Dialectic of Enlightenment (in which “The Culture Industry” appears) in 1944/1947 as an extended critique of mass culture as both a direct outgrowth of and a betrayal of Enlightenment ideals.

• For Horkheimer and Adorno, the culture industry must be understood as disseminating false consciousness in the service of the totalitarian impulses that subtend all modern capitalist societies.

• This hegemonic power derives chiefly from the extent to which the companies responsible for producing and broadcasting/distributing information and entertainment are economically bound up with other capitalist interests (e.g. defense, industry, finance).

• Given this industrial

Hegemony

The domination and control of one group of people over another.

“...refers to the pervasive system of assumptions, meanings and values—the web of ideologies, in other words, that shapes the

way things look, what they mean and therefore what reality is for the majority of people within a given culture.”

—Antonio Gramsci

"To the extent that the ownership of and control of...broadcast stations falls into fewer and fewer hands, the free dissemination of ideas and information, upon which our democracy depends, is threatened."

—FCC Chairman James Lawrence Fly, 1939

According to Fortune, as of 2012, The Walt Disney Company is the largest media conglomerate in the US, with News Corporation, Time Warner, Viacom, CBS Corporation, and Comcast’s NBCUniversal ranking second-sixth respectively.

The Media Oligopoly (from The Nation, 2006)