PSCI 2302 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Wage Labour, For Marx, Productive Forces
14 Dec 2016
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Marx & Engels: Estranged Labour and the German Ideology (pp. 701-14)
What we think we know about Marx
- Enemy of capitalism?
o Capitalists vs. Marx
- Authoritarian?
o Link mark to Soviet communism and Stalinism
- Proven false?
o Didnt Marx predict the end of capitalism and wasnt he wrong?
- Why are we still reading Marx today?
o Nobody asks why are we still reading Plato today, but we still ask why
were reading Marx
o Because Marx was the first to predict the end of soviet communism.
o He predicted that to start communism like Lenin did would be
problematic, because there wasnt a developed capitalist society in the
first place
Karl or Adam?
- The man whose whole life is spent operations… has no occasion to exert his
understanding, or his invention… He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of
such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible
for a human creature to become. – Adam Smith
- The worker does not affirm himself in his work but denies himself feels
miserable and unhappy, develops no free physical and mental energy but
mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind – Karl Marx
Marx view of human beings
- Hobbes:
o Driven by self-interested passions and selfish motivations.
o Competitive and fundamentally equal
o Seek after power, which is relational
- Locke:
o Fundamental equality and liberty
o Equality: nobody naturally rules over anyone else
o We are naturally free if we dont fundamentally intervene with the
law of nature
- Rousseau
o Natural goodness of human beings
o We dont like seeing other people suffer
- Smith
o 2 important tendencies:
▪ Truck and bargain, inclination to persuade
▪ Seeking to better ourselves
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- Marx
o Productive
o Labour and expression
o Distinguishing humans from animals
- We make and produce things
- We express ourselves and who we are through the act of making things and
producing things
- Human beings are fundamentally expressive and productive beings
- Human beings make things beyond what we need for survival
- We express ourselves through creation, like art
- The process to which we produce things is the fundamental human activity.
o The activity in which we express ourselves as individuals
o The process to which we express our humanity
- When smith talks about the issues of labour, he says we can fix this through
education and leisure
- Marx disagrees.
o Youre talking about people wasting their fundamental human activity
just to merely achieve a certain leisure (weekend)
o He looks more carefully at what wage labour does to the individual
human being
- What Marx was trying to do differently, is that you can sense the frustration
in his writing
o How people can be so blinded by the reality
- For Marx, the point is that people are thinking of labour in really wrong
terms
o That its just something that we do in part of our day
o But its the fundamental human activity, where we express our
individuality and humanness
- Labour is fundamentally grounded in his view of human nature
- The problem with political economy (Smith, Hume) is that they take for
granted what they are supposed to be explaining
- Division of labour, capital and how they get divided with one another. How
did capital and labour become separated from one another?
o Hes going to use the tools of political economy and classical economy
to offer a different perspective of the world
- The starting point for Marxist analysis the economical fact of the present
o The material conditions of life
o He starts with the conditions on the ground, the ways in which
production is organized on the ground… how owners, laborers and
such are living
o To understand the system of politics and power, in many cases
oppression that fall within the material conditions
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