A World to Win

tags : [[Marx]]

source : a_world_to_win

A World To Win is a lengthy and comprehensive biography of the philosopher Karl Marx. It not only provides biographical details but also explores the genealogy of Marx’s own ideas.

3. The Darling of Fortune

• quote:

  No man combats freedom; at most, he combats the freedom of others

5. The Manuscripts

• Marx believed the powerful insight of [[Feuerbach]] was that he saw that humanity transferred attributes they could have attributed to themselves to God

• Marx believed that a person was an individual only after they had come to have a social meaning

  What is more, it is only through others that they can become an individual. ‘Man’s individual and species-life are not different,’ he wrote. It is society that gives the individual access to nature, through the labour and knowledge of others. It is through society that they can be their own distinctive person.

6. The Years of Ruptures

[[The Holy Family]]

• Went from being a small pamphlet to a book
• Written while in France
• Criticism of [[Bruno Bauer]] and company
• First time Marx and [[Engels]] were published together as co-authors, even though Engels only wrote about 15 pages
• The original title of the book was “A Critique of Critical Criticism”, where Marx was making fun of Bruno Bauer’s “pure criticism”
• Marx criticized Bauer of being contemptuous of the masses
• For Marx, the difference between political emancipation and human emancipation is that the former concerns itself with a person’s relationship to the state, while the latter concerns itself with a person’s relationship to their own labor and ultimately to their own egos
• Marx regarded figures from the [[French Revolution]] as the forerunners of communism
• Bauer believed that each individual in society was an atom ([[idealism]]), while Marx recognized that there was a necessity that drove people together. For Marx, a person is a social being before they are an individual
• Marx believed that [[sensualism]] was the basis for [[materialism]]
• Marx excludes [[Spinoza]] from the history of materialism
• Liedman believes that Marx felt it so important to write this because it was a symbolic closing of a chapter of his life: he had broken with [[Hegelian]] thought, particularly that of the [[Young Hegelians]] and needed to put it behind him

A Painful Farewell and a New Life

• [[Guizot]] had Marx deported from [[France]], under suggestion [[Prussia]]
• Marx and company moved to Belgium
• While in France Jenny had learned how to decipher Marx’s handwriting, would copy his writing, became active participant in Marx’s work
• In this time, at the age of 25, [[Engels]] published [[The Condition of the Working Class in England]]
• Marx and Engels had a personal dispute after moving to Brussels
• Engels had read [[Max Stirner]]’s book and was a fan, but Marx was not
• In 1845 Marx and Engels took a trip to [[England]]
• Engels was fluent in English while Marx could only read it

[[The German Ideology]]

• [[The German Ideology]], according to [[Althusser]], is the breaking point between the young Marx and the mature Marx

  • Young Marx was basically Hegelian, whereas mature Marx was properly materialist

• Liedman doesn’t think Altusser is correct, and believes that much of the mature Marx can already be found in earlier works

• Liedman says Heinrich notices that Marx also used the term “alienation” later but it came to mean “alienation of labor” rather than “alienation from the essence of humanity”

• The 11 Theses on [[Feuerbach]] illustrate the intersection between [[praxis]] and history.

• Marx and Engels believed that the way the German philosophers had conceived of the world was upside down: that their idea that ideas shaped the world was dead wrong. Marx pointed out that ideas don’t really do anything on their own

• Marx believed that it was production that made a person a person at this point

  A crucial idea in The German Ideology is that it is production that makes a person a person. Production distinguishes humanity from the animals. The production of ideas is interlaced with material production, and can only provisionally be distinguished from it.

[[The Poverty of Philosophy]]

• For Marx, there were no individuals, only people within society

  According to Marx, we must always presuppose society. Without society, there are no individuals; consequently, no people either. People live in structures they take over from previous generations, and to which they change through their own activity. Even at a somewhat higher level, Marx opposed what we could call Proudhon’s reductionism. Based on the division of labour in the factory, Proudhon could side with the division of labour in the whole of society. Marx objected that it was the affair of management to divide labour in the factory, while competition pushed forward degrees and types of specialization in society at large.

• [[Proudhon]] essentially believed that capitalism was not a bad thing and that it could simply be reformed, and that the furthering of capitalist development would lead to a more fair and equitable world

  Proudhon asserted that producers and consumers were free in their activity. No, Marx said. As long as the producers are subject to the division of labour, they are compelled to sell. In the same way, consumers are bound to their means and their needs. A worker who buys potatoes and a mistress who buys lace can imagine that they are free, but are acting only in accordance with their social position.

  Out of Ricardo’s theories, Proudhon seemed to draw his own conclusions that the present society was heading towards increasing equality. This was due to a fundamental mistake, Marx said. He was confusing the value of the labour required to produce a given object and the value of that same labour on the market. In short, he did not see the difference between the use value and the exchange value of the labour. For example: if a given amount of grain costs two working days instead of one, this did not mean that the amount of nutrition doubled – on the other hand, the amount of labour did.

  Increased productivity did not mean, as Proudhon thought, that things would automatically get better for everyone and that what was necessary for the lives of the poor would automatically become cheaper. There were no economic mechanisms that would result in the use values and exchange values of the products meeting. On the contrary, luxuries or items that were dangerous to health could very well be profitable. What generates profit is produced, whether it favours everyone or only a few and regardless of whether it helps or harms the consumer.

  Proudhon’s view of society is optimistic. Just under the surface of injustices and workers’ poverty, the possibilities of an equal and just society open up. Marx is not as optimistic: the antagonism between worker and capitalist characterizes society and is inevitable until the day the workers rebel.

• Marx was beginning to form his early ideas on economics around this time

  No product is useful in and of itself except that it is useful for a consumer, he said. Consumer stands against producer. Consumers always have to be convinced that they need what is being produced. If supply and demand are not at all in balance, the result will be shortage or surplus.

  he had arrived at a distinction that only several years later he would put into his own words: the one between [[concrete]] and [[abstract labour]]. In capitalist society, abstract labour is sold per hour against wages. Concrete labour is the production of a definite product, whether it is a piece of cloth or a machine part.

• For the first time in this text Marx uses the term “social relations of production”, which refers to how owners, workers, and equipment all relate to one another in production

• When Marx refers to a “relation” he uses a term that [[Hegel]] uses: “Verhältnis”, meaning that the relationship between two things has a particular context. The relationship between your brain and your heart, for example. If you remove one, the other dies. But they have a fixed, context-specific relationship. Parent and child is another example.

  The parts in a Verhältnis condition and mark each other; they are part of what, in the language of logic, is called an ‘internal relation’

• It’s around this time Marx began to distance himself from the Hegelian conception of the world, but Marx continued to use the framework

7. The Manifesto and the Revolutions

• Industrial workers, finding themselves in new nightmarish conditions, found themselves dreaming of the ability to have their own plot of land, basically. They dreamed of having a small patch of land to cultivate

• The Manchester liberals only wanted freedom of capital, they had no grand ideas about freedom of individuals in relation to one another

• Engels’s [[Principles of Communism]] was the forerunner to the [[Communist Manifesto]]

• The Principles were written to resemble Christian catechism, as was popular at the time

• Marx was thinking of what the world would be like after a communist revolution

  What will remain of this after the revolution? Would Prometheus and the eternal spirit of revolt he stood for lose their urgency? Would Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Goethe sink into an indifferent past? Would Balzac’s depictions of a cynical social apparatus that bred careerists and losers become only a curiosity? In other texts both before and later, Marx made use of Hegel’s key concept of Aufhebung – sublation – which meant that something was both abolished and raised to a higher level. In that case, the best of the inherited culture would certainly lose its earlier, class-based meanings but at the same time be refined and deepened

• Marx and Engels talked about communism as simply the negation of capitalism. They deliberately did not offer any positive vision at this time

  Medieval philosophy spoke of a via negativa, a road to knowledge that ran through negations. Marx and Engels embarked upon the same road, but in an entirely different area.

• Marx and Engels critique several other kinds of contemporary socialism

  • Christian Socialism

    In this variant, capitalism is criticized for having broken feudal social bonds and also for having called forth a revolutionary proletariat. There are crucial similarities between this kind of socialism and Christianity, and Marx is not surprised: ‘Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the state? Has it not preached in place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burning of the aristocrat.’

  • Conservative, or Bourgeois Socialism, i.e. a bourgeoisie without a proletariat

    • [[Proudhon]] gets lumped in with conservative socialism

• Throughout the manifesto Marx is using a concept of critique that would have been familiar to many of the German philosophers of the time

  The word critical has a central place in Marx’s vocabulary, as it had during his entire Young Hegelian period, and in other respects in the entire tradition from Kant. Being critical did not mean simply being negative. Someone developing criticism in Marx’s meaning illuminates an object or a phenomenon so that its anatomy and method of functioning are exposed. Critical analysis thereby opens the path for a programme of action.