Capital Form or Flow (Session 7)

Hello and welcome to the seventh session of our seminar, Capital Form and Flow, with Professor Ray Bursier. So please, Ray, let me take it on. Yes, okay, so thanks. So yes, at the end of last week's session, there were a lot of people who were waiting to ask a question. So here, please, those of you who weren't able to ask a question last week, if you could just, you know, please go ahead. And I don't know who was, I don't know if there was an order, if we had noted down an order. Matthias?

Yeah, I think Andrew and Arman had questions. Sure, then let's please go ahead. I think I would wait for this lecture and actually I want to hear my question is what marks so I rather for question for now. Thank you. Okay. Is Andrew here? Yes, I am here. that um also to be perfectly honest uh given the fact that we've spent quite a lot of time on dng um and mostly my question is going to be about that since we're going on to marks if you don't

mind i'd rather forego that so that we can move to marks if that's okay sure yes that's that's fine yeah um and if you have a question yes you can still you know you can write you know you can ask the question by email um i will try to respond so so yeah any questions about you know stuff we've covered previously then you know you can also just email me will do okay uh anyone else any other questions from directly kind of related to to last week's presentation

No. Okay, well, if then, you know, maybe we could go. Okay, then let's, you know, let's get going. So finally, you know, we're now finally moving on to marks after a bit of a delay. And so now we move on to an examination of Marx's treatment of or approach to the topic of production in general, which was Deleuze and Guattari's main claim to, they credit Marx with discovering the concept of a production in general. And they do this at a

couple of times when they positively invoke, when they try to establish the parallel between their project and Marxist. So this is what I want to kind of to focus on this week. But then we'll see how if we examine what Marx says about Marx's concept of production and of social production, we'll begin to mark the significance of this analogy, because production for Marx is social. Whereas there are two regimes of production in Dozi and Guattari, there's desiring production and social production.

For Marx, in a way, social production encompasses both, in a way, it articulates both the biological or centrist and the cultural or super centrist. and this is one of the things we'll try to kind of explain. So let's begin by marking the fundamental, what I think are the fundamental divergences between the Deleuze, Deleuze-Glattari, and Marxian concepts of capital. Okay, and I think from what we said last week, we're now in a position

to kind of really to, you know, to grasp the contrast. And the first is the claim, Marx has claimed that capital is the contradictory unity of the class relation and the accumulation process or what sometimes also called the valorization process which is the conversion of money into capital mcm prime and I think this is at the most abstract and schematic level the claim that capital is at once a relation and a process is fundamental for for grasping um you know the marching account of capital the second point is the contrast that marx establishes

with classical political economy for classical political economy capital is merely accumulated labor serving as a means for productive living labor. Whereas, but Marx re-embeds the accumulation process, or let's say, you know, the capitalization process, you know, the accumulation of capital, he re-embeds this process within the social relations that it presupposes. And this is why capital for Marx, thirdly, is not just a means of production, but the social relation wherein what he calls living labor. This is something

we'll return to. We've already mentioned it a couple of times earlier on. But the contrast between living labor and what he calls dead labor is crucial. Capital is a social relation where living labor becomes a means for the accumulation of dead labor or objectified labor so he he writes in wage labor and capital from 1847 it is only the domination of past accumulated materialized labor over immediate living labor that stamps accumulated labor which is a sum of commodified exchange values or sum of commodities with the character of capital." So,

the immediate consequence of this analysis is that the social relation of domination conditions the process of accumulation. In other words, so Marx is articulating a social relation and uh the process of accumulation but he wants to show how one is the condition how they are actually um you know reciprocally presupposing so the the social relation of domination is the condition for accumulation but this um so this relation turns accumulated labor into an independent social power subjugating living labor i.e. capital okay labor produces capital

to which it then becomes subordinated so fourthly this means that accumulation capital accumulation requires domination but domination social domination also requires accumulation. Capital cannot reproduce itself without reproducing labor power. And we'll see this when we look at the opening of capital in the final session next week. But at the same time, labor power cannot reproduce itself without reproducing capital. So this is the sense in which labor and capital stand to one another in this relationship of

of reciprocal presupposition. So the reproduction of capital presupposes the reproduction of labor and vice versa. This means that social relations of production are traversed by the capital labor division, which pits proprietors of the means of production against the proprietors of labor power. And in a way, the emergence of both cases are instances of private property. The capitalist owns is the private proprietor of the means of production, and the worker, the wage laborer, is the private proprietor of labor power, which she exchanges for the wage in order to acquire the commodities she needs to live.

So this means that activating the means of production, activating in the sense of allowing them to kind of to produce the commodities from which capital will be extracted, also requires activating labor power. and I stress the word activity. Marx's crucial concept is the concept of activity and of actuality is crucial for Marx in understanding the conceptual logic of Marx's thoughts. And in a way, labor for Marx is merely, and wage labor in particular, is merely a form of activity.

all labor is activity but not all activity is labor okay and unalienated um you know unalienated labor would be a form of activity which you know obviously you know no longer you know takes the form of wage labor but wouldn't be labor as we recognize it thirdly the conditions under which labor is activated and the ends for which it is activated are determined by the proprietors of the means of production the capitalist class and this so this is the sense in which capital is what Marx calls the alien social power determining those means and ends, the means of production and the ends for which they are

activated in the production process, the ends served by labour power. So what Marx's materialism is a materialism of practice. Marx is not a philosophy of matter. He's not a philosophical materials in the sense that he's committed to the the primacy of materiality over ideality it's uh marx's is a practical materialism that's the expression he uses early on in the 1840s and it means that the dimension of materiality is a dimension of practical effectivity or practical actuality so activity actuality and practice are woven together um in you know the you know the

nexus the conceptual nexus of marx's thoughts and it's only this interweaving of these three concepts that qualifies his thinking as materialist it's not a metaphysical materialism it's not a materialism of substance or of process or saying that everything is full. It says that, you know, it's not a materialism that says that being is material substance or that being is material process. The processes that Marx is talking about are processes of social production, which use material substances and material processes.

But those material substances and processes are shaped and transformed through the social practices of production. So there's no direct kind of transitivity from material process to the social process of production. So if we look at his eighth theses on Farback, Marx writes, all social life is essentially practical, all mysteries which lead theory to mysticism, by which he means to kind of conceptually intractable aporias

or contradictions, you know, which require invoking, you know, the transcendence or, you know, the super sensible. All these mysteries find a rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice. Another way of saying this is that, as Lukács will also note later is that the uh you know the uh the conceptual contradictions um which vitiates you know transcendental philosophy kantian transcendental philosophy and which are speculatively overcoming hegelian philosophy must be practically overcome through social revolution

This is Marx's kind of radical, this is a sense in which Marx is consummating the project of German idealism. The conceptual antinomies cannot be conceptually resolved. They can't be speculatively resolved as Hegel saw to. They can only be practically, which is to say socially resolved. And this resolution inquires a fundamental transformation of the mode of production. But these practices, the comprehension of practice cannot be achieved through self-conscious reflection, because social practice is split between the apparent and the inapparent, or the supercentuous and the centuous.

And here, if we read, this is the fourth thesis on the fireback. Marx writes, contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must therefore in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.

So what Marx is saying here vis-à-vis Farback, who is really the kind of, I think, is decisive philosophical inspiration, or the post-Hegelian thinker to whom Marx is most decisively indebted, Marx says that noumenal transcendence, the super sensible, is merely the alienated or estranged form of human self-consciousness. Human self-consciousness is self-externalizing and religious transcendence is, in a way, the alienated and reified form of self-conscious, of the movement of self-consciousness, of human self-consciousness.

So in Feuerbach, there's still a kind of, Feuerbach wants to re-inscribe religious transcendence within secular eminence, within the realm of what he calls the material domain of human sociality. but as Marx notes Farback doesn't explain he ascribes this process of self-alienation to human self-consciousness so in other words it's human self-consciousness that alienates itself in divinity and the super sensible and the transcendent but this in a way

this, but Feuerbach's account of the self-estrangement of human self-consciousness still unfolds within the ambit of self-consciousness, and it still remains idealist to that extent from Marx's point of view. So what Marx proposes is that it's in fact the self-estrangement of self-consciousness is is the product or the symptom of practical social contradictions to which self-consciousness is oblivious. So in other words, the fourth point here is that the contradiction of the centrious and the supercentrious,

or of imminence and transcendence, or the secular and the religious, is internal to social life. The transcendent contradiction between secular imminence and religious transcendence is the symptom of this internal contradiction. And the key claim will be that the commodity is the centrist encapsulation of this contradiction. So when Marx of the opening of Capital says that the commodity is this peculiar kind of object in that it's both centuous and supercentuous. It's the centuous inscription of the difference between the centuous and the supercentuous.

And that's why Marx's analysis begins with a commodity, because he thinks and that's why he calls the commodity the cell form of the capitalist social organism because the commodity contains in cell form the contradiction, you know, the fundamental contradiction that vitiates the capitalist totality. okay so um if we continue this um this line of investigation um for Feuerbach's speculative transcendence by which he means hegel he means hegelian philosophy the way in which hegelian

philosophy is the self-consciousness of the absolute or thought thinking itself. So every opposition is, in Hedien philosophy, every contradiction in opposition is overcome but within the concept, the absolute idea. Okay. And Feuerbach proposes to bring this speculative transcendence down to earth, okay, as the fusion of the centrist and the supercentrist, or the phenomenal and numinal, but within human sociality. Okay. So Feuerbach writes in Principles of the Philosophy of the

future we need not we need not go beyond sensuousness to arrive in the sense of the absolute philosophy at the limit of the merely sensuous and empirical all we have to do is not separate the intellect from the senses in order to find the super sensuous i spirit and reason within the sensuous So Feuerbach charges Hegel with subordinating the sensuous to the super-sensuous and thereby still remaining a theologian. Hegel's specters of philosophy simply wholly absorbs and incorporates sensuous particularity within super-sensuous universality, the concept, the notion.

the notion. And Feuerbach proposes instead to show how to incorporate the super-sensuous within the sensuous in human sociality, what he calls the I-Thou relation, the absolute relation between the relation of mutual recognition between two social self-consciousnesses. So for Feuerbach, the sensuous fusion of the sensuous and the super-sensuous is realized human communality whose sensuous root lies in the interpersonal but not intersubjective and the contrast here is with Kant the interpersonal relation the I-Thou relation in Feuerbach is precisely not an intersubjective relation because it's not primarily a cognitive relation

so this interpersonal relation between mutually recognizing self-consciousness So, Farback wants to claim that the social relation is irreducible to the cognitive relation, because when two self, you know, when two human self-consciousnesses recognize one another, they do not objectify one another. and Kantian intersubjectivity is still predicated on the primacy of objectivation. Kantian intersubjectivity is constituted through around the conditions for the objectification of cognizable phenomena.

and against both Kant and Hegel, Feuerbach wants to insist that a relationship to the world and to each other is not primarily cognitive. It's social and sensuous, but Marx, the problem is that Feuerbach still seems to assume that this sensuous dimension of human self-consciousness, of human communality, interpersonal dependence, can still be reflexively accessed by self-consciousness.

And this is Marx's break with Feuerbach. It's his claim that the social relation is irreducible to the interpersonal relation. In other words, it's not reducible to the I-thou relation between two subjects, two kind of self-conscious subjects acknowledging one another, because it is rooted in social practice, which operates behind the back of consciousness, whether personal or interpersonal, whether subjective or intersubjective. So here we have the Marxian inversion of idealism. Supersensuous appearance is contrasted to inapparent.

is so you know for marx it's the super sensuous that appears and the sensuous that is inapparent that is hidden within the appearance of the super sensuous and this contrast then between super sensuous appearance and in apparent sensuous practice is such that from on the marxian account it's the intelligible noumenon that appears while the sensible phenomenon disappears so you know for in marx's kind of you know um materialism of practice um sensuous social practice is precisely what is occluded by um the uh by self-consciousness okay

and by the resources or it's precisely what is occluded within the dimension of mutual recognition as well as the dimension of speculative you know speculative reflection so this is why you know um sensuous practice for Marx is what we do without knowing we are doing it This is his famous phrase from the opening of Capital, when he's talking about the practice of commodity exchange. We do it without knowing what we are doing, because we don't know what we don't really understand the structure of commodities. We don't understand the complex of social relations implicated in the exchange of commodities.

So this sensuous practice is the imminent but unconscious medium of human being. And the key thing for Marx is that sensual social practice is not an attribute of human being. It's not that there is a kind of a preformed human subject engaging in sensuous social practice. It's that human being is an attribute of sensuous social practice. So this is why, and we see this if we look at the sixth thesis on Feuerbach, where Marx writes, the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its actuality, and it's Wichelgeit, this crucial term again that he uses, in its actuality,

the human essence is the ensemble of social relations. Foyerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this actual essence, is consequently compelled to abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract, isolated human individual. It's two isolated human individuals entering into the vision of mutual recognition among themselves. Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only by Farback, can be comprehended only as a genus, as an internal dumb generality, which naturally unites the many individuals.

So, the consequence of Marx's view is that the actuality of essence is the actuality of social relations of production. and these sensuous practical relations determine the scope and nature of human being within a historical mode of production such that you know there's a sense in which for Marx humanity is a process without a subject here I have in mind Althusser's famous claim um Althusser says that history is a process without a subject and this is his kind of counter to what to the humanist claim the humanism of both hegelian idealism and orthodox understanding of

marxian materialism insofar as both are supposed to understand history as a process with a subject. In other words, the subject is spirit or Geist for Hegel, and the subject is labor for Marx. But we see, if you look at Marx carefully, this is precisely not the case. To say that humanity, the human essence, is nothing but the actuality of an ensemble or a complex of social relations, social relations of production, is to say that humanity is a process of production.

It's a process of production which generates a subject. You know, the subject, human subjectivity, is itself a product of this process. It doesn't pre-exist it. So, in a way, for Marx, humanity would be the end result of the process of historical production, but it's not its pre-existing subject. This is why the charge of humanism and of metaphysical humanism that is still routinely leveled at Marx is completely unfounded. I mean, if you just read Marx carefully, he completely kind of, you know, disqualifies these kinds of charges.

And he says, you know, he underlines this, or we get a kind of a more emphatic appreciation of this point. If we look at an excerpt from the German ideology where he writes, you know, the opposition between human and inhuman is itself a function of social relations. So he writes, this so-called inhuman is just as much a product of present-day relations as the human is. It is their negative aspect, the rebellion, which is not based on any new revolutionary productive force, against the prevailing relations brought about by the existing productive forces, and against the way of satisfying needs that correspond to these relations. the positive expression human corresponds to the definite relations predominant at a certain stage

of production and the way of satisfying needs determined by them just as the negative expression inhuman corresponds to the attempt to negate these predominant relations and the way of satisfying needs prevailing under them without changing the existing mode of production, an attempt at this stage of production daily engenders of freshness, which is why, if you think about it, all this kind of the rhetoric of contemporary post-humanism, which claims to be kind of, you know, to have superseded the human and the restrictions of the human, it's quite striking that this supersession does never challenges the capitalist social relation or the existing mode of production. And in fact, it's a detour

because we're supposed to kind of transition from the human to the post-human without exiting the capitalist mode of production. And we see how this is a complete, ultimately I think a completely spurious exit. The truth is, insofar as the contrast between the human and the non-human is, you know, circumscribed by capitalist relations of production, then the post-human alternative, you know, to humanism or to the, you know, the doxers of humanism is simply a kind of a reiteration of ideological tropes

that express capitalist social relations. Whereas, because the boundary between the human and the human is a function of social relations of production. And Marx's claim is more radical because he claims that we don't know what it is to be human. we don't know what the word human means and humanism as a kind of as a as an ideology can easily be criticized but unless this critique factors in the way in which this ideology is manufactured as an alibi for capitalist exploitation then the overcoming of humanism

will still be a continuation of the antinomies of bourgeois humanism. And this is why post-humanism, as we saw when we were looking at it last week, you've got two versions of post-humanism. You've got a kind of a liberal left version of post-humanism, which wants to maintain the possibility of emancipation, which wants to hold on to the rhetoric of emancipatory politics, but then it wants to do so without privileging the human, without kind of, you know, predicating it on, you know, the category of the human. And in order to do this, it has to kind of, you know, engage in these metaphysical maneuvers, okay? It has to talk about, you know, the ethics of, you know, it has to generate, it has to derive an ought from an is.

It has to derive an ethics from its metaphysics, okay? in exactly the way that you know uh can says you cannot do um and the you know the reactionary kind of um you know the right-wing alternative is to celebrate the dissolution of the human and to affirm but then and then to kind of engage in that kind of a fetishistic worship of the superhuman where capital becomes the avatar of you know this kind of superhuman cosmic intelligence you know, assembling itself from these, the remnants of human social production, but which will kind of destroy and, you know, supplant humanity. And this is just kind of

theology. This is a kind of a kind of a gothic, you know, gothic superstition, which simply, again, also derives a knot from the earth. It says, capital is this avatar of cosmic productivity, and therefore cosmic productivity should supplant and supersede the merely the restrictive forms of human productivity. But this is, kind of an arbitrary metaphysical injunction. Okay, now we come to the third movement in

Marx's setting up of his accounts of production in general, which is, from what we've said so far now, we can see how the conditions production is is centrist social production, but it's production by human individuals, by social individuals. And what Marx calls the effective presuppositions of production, you know, consists in the productive activity by social individuals. So he writes, whenever we speak of production, what is meant is always production at a definite stage of social development production by social individuals that's from the grunder see and then

german ideology he writes the presuppositions from which we begin are not arbitrary ones not dogmas either not you know speculative theses metaphysical presuppositions nor merely empiricist assumptions of what Marx calls effective presuppositions, and here the word vichliken is operative once again, from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity.

So this means that the effective presuppositions of production are the relations of production among social individuals whose productive activity is conditioned by what it has already produced. In other words, so this, you know, practical productive activity is always conditioned by the results of previous, of a previous cycle of productive activity. And the logic of historical development is this constant kind of interplay between, you know,

actual effective production and the residues, the means or the resources from which it must proceed that have been generated by a previous cycle of production. of production. This is another way in which Deleuze and Gotari make it, you know, often invoke the kind of the unity of production and product, okay? But, and they talk about this, you know, the kind of the coincidence of production and product in the process of, the primary process of production.

in Marx there's also kind of a coincidence of production and product because all production uses products uses means of production which are you know objects tools instruments which are themselves the products of a previous cycle of production but however in Marx there is a historical there's a temporal hiatus okay in a way separating you know as well as articulating production and product. So in other words, production in the present begins or proceeds from the products of past production. So that there's no kind of pure metaphysical fusion of production

production product, but a temporal cleavage. Production always presupposes the results of a previous cycle of production, but that previous cycle doesn't determine how and what will be effectively produced in the present. OK, so now we get to the discussion of production in general. OK, so we're going to have to. OK, these are lengthy passages, but I think they're worth going through. So this is the first one, production in general. It might seem, therefore, that in order

to talk about production at all, we must either pursue the process of historical development through its different phases or declare beforehand that we are dealing with a specific historic epoch, such as, for example, modern bourgeois production, which is indeed our particular theme. However, all epochs of production have certain common traits, common characteristics. Production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction, insofar as it really brings out and fixes the common element and thus saves us repetition. Still, this general category, this common element sifted out by comparison, is itself segmented many times over and splits into different determinations.

Some determinations belong to all epochs, others only to a few. Some determinations will be shared by the most modern epoch and the most ancient. No production will be thinkable without them. However, even though the most developed languages have laws and characteristics in common with the least developed, nevertheless, just those things which determine their development, i.e. the elements which are not general and common, must be separated out from the determinations valid for production as such so that in their unity which arises already from the identity of the subject humanity and of the object nature their essential difference is not forgotten okay so if we

let's try to kind of work through this passage so by determinations valid for production as such I take Marx to mean the conjunction of social relations and forces of production. All production presupposes a specific conjunction of social relation and productive forces. But that doesn't tell you anything about any particular conjunction. That's just kind of an abstract conceptual determination of production in general. Secondly, By, when he writes elements which are not generally common, I take Marx to mean specific social relations and forces of production.

So it's a very, you know, that's the common and the particular element. The unity of the subject. Marx mentioned the unity of the subject humanity and the identity of the subject humanity and of the object nature. Well, from what we've said so far, it's clear that the unity of the subject humanity is merely an ensemble, a specific, historically specific ensemble of social relations. The unity of this ensemble of social relations with nature is such that social production is compelled by primary natural needs, such as food, clothing and shelter, whose satisfaction creates new needs and desires, as well as a second social nature compelling further production.

and this is to say that social production depends on but is not determined by the satisfaction of natural needs and lastly that the essential difference between the generic unity of homo sapiens and nature and historically specific conjunction of of means needs are or rather the essential difference is the essential difference between the generic unity of humanity and nature and historically specific conjunctions of means needs and desires um okay so um any questions actually maybe we should pause here because any questions so far

Okay, then I'll continue. So Marx writes, all of this must be borne in mind, so in order not to reify specific, historically specific features of social production and turn them into universal, into necessary features of production in general. is precisely what bourgeois political economists do according to to marx so he writes the whole profundity of those modern economists who demonstrate the eternity and harmoniousness of the existing social relations lies in this forgetting for example no production is possible

without an instrument of production even if this instrument is only the hand no production without stored up labor without stored up past labor even if it is only the facility gathered together and concentrated in the hand of the savage by repeated practice capital is amongst other things also an instrument of production also objectified past labor therefore capital is a general eternal relation of nature that is if i leave out just the specific quality which alone makes instrument of production and stored up labor into capital if there's no production in general then there's also no general production production is always

a particular branch of production for example agriculture cattle raising manufacturers etc or it is a totality. But political economy is not technology. It's not technology because it's an analysis of the social relations conditioning production in general and its specific branches and accounting for the connection between the mode of production, the mode of production in general, and the specific branches of production. So let's say feudal production is a historically specific mode of production,

but it involves also particular branches of production, agriculture, cattle raising, manufacturing. But the nature of agriculture, cattle raising and manufacture in the fuel mode of production is very different from its character in the capitalist mode of production. There's agriculture, cattle raising and manufacture in the capitalist mode of production, but it is fundamentally different in nature. because the social relations that underwrite it, that underwrite these branches of production are fundamentally different. And so the specific quality, you know, which makes turns instruments of production

and stored up labor into capital is the subordination of productive living labor to its accumulated products, which is to say the class relation. So he was emphasizing that ultimately for Marx, he wants to root every determination, every kind of characteristic and determination of a mode of production back to a specific social relation. and where capitalism is concerned this specific social relation is the subordination of living labor to dead labor of productive activity

which is to say you know the human practical activity to its accumulated products or commodities Okay, now we can move on, okay? Or we start to see the, we need to kind of, at this stage, once we understand the nature of our production in general is a, you know, a necessary conceptual abstraction that allows us to differentiate specific modes of production then we can also understand what is produced or the nature of the product the results of productive activity

So, productive activity is carried out by social individuals. But the fact that this activity is individual does not entail that its products are individual items of property. Here, why does Marx emphasize, why does Marx say that the effect of presuppositions for all production are the activities of social individuals. Why does he emphasize individuality at all? Well, precisely in order to counter back the fire back in abstraction of

humanity. So Marx wants to say it's not humanity that produces because humanity you know or human self-consciousness is just a speculative abstraction there's no such thing humanity doesn't do anything it is human individuals that produce but again the the you know the the obverse of the the idealist kind of reification of humanity as subjects as social subjects or subject of production is the empiricist reification of individual of the individual and in a way the abstraction of the individual from social relations so

by individual here Marx means a social individual an individual that is always bound by relations of dependence to other individuals. Individuality here is not Lockean or even Kantian. It's not bourgeois individuality. It is simply social individuality. it means an effective activity carried out by social individuals, but those activities are determined by the nexus of social relations.

So, what he's trying to think here is the coincidence of the individual and the nexus of social relations. And both are at work in the concept of productive activity. So, the fact that productive activity is carried out by individuals does not mean that the primary result of productive activity is individual property or private property. So here's the quote.

All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society. In this sense, it is a tautology to say that ownership or appropriation is a precondition of production. But it is altogether ridiculous to leap from that to a specific form of ownership, i.e. private property, which further and equally presupposes an antithetical form of non-ownership. History rather shows common ownership, for example, in India among the Slavs, the early Celts, etc., to be the more original form, a form which long continues to play a significant role in the shape of communal property.

the question whether wealth develops better in this or another form of ownership is still quite beside the point here but that there can be no production and hence no society where some form of ownership does not exist is a tautology an appropriation which does not make something into something owned is a contradiction in term the contradictions in subjective so here i've introduced into this term now um i've modified the translation i hear i think what's fundamental in marx is the distinction between ownership and property okay all to appropriate you know is in a way to take possession of is to own something okay you know to so you know to work on a piece

of land to cultivate a piece of land is to own the piece of land by working by you know by working on the land you own the land but this ownership is a social relation which is not has got you know it is not the it does not institute private property ownership is not the same thing as property um it's hard to mark to nick not to to nail down the distinction terminologically it's It doesn't seem to be a systematic, terminological distinction in Marx's own text, but the conceptual distinction is clear. So he wants to say that all production is appropriation,

and to appropriate is to kind of, you know, to take ownership of something, you know, to own something. The product belongs to the process of production. But this doesn't mean that the product is a piece of private property that belongs to an individual proprietor. For that to happen, there has to be very particular social relations of production, which are in fact those of capitalism. So So this will become apparent.

We'll return to this point shortly when we discuss the alienation of labor or the alienation of production and the expropriation of the product of production, which is how private property arises for Marx. But at this stage, Marx then continues. Marx is criticizing a conception of the relationship between production and consumption, which he thinks is promoted by bourgeois political economy. And this is a conception which falsely emphasizes the apparent unity of production and consumption.

So the next couple of sections are outlining a conception of production and consumption, which Marx wants to attack and reject. The obvious trite notion is that production appears as the point of departure, consumption as the conclusion and distribution and exchange as the middle, which is however twofold since distribution is determined by society and exchange by individuals. The person objectifies himself in production. The thing subjectifies itself in the person. In distribution, society mediates between production and consumption in the form of general dominant determinants.

In exchange, the two are mediated by the chance characteristics of the individual. And thus, on this account, production, distribution, exchange, and consumption form a regular syllogism. Production is a generality, distribution and exchange the particularity, and consumption the singularity in which the whole is joined together. This is admittedly a coherence, but a shallow one. And this here is targeting a kind of, this is a kind of, you know, kind of a caricature of a Hegelian syllogism where you go from, you know, abstract universality and abstract particularity to concrete singularity.

And here, in this schema, consumption is the moment of singularity, which brings together universality and particularity. The opposition between the universality of production and the particularity of distribution and exchange is overcome in the singularity of consumption. On this account, production is determined by general natural laws, distribution by social accidents, and the latter may therefore promote production to a greater or lesser extent.

An exchange stands between the two as a formal social movement. and the concluding act consumption which is conceived not only as a terminal point but also as an end in itself actually belongs outside economics except in so far as it reacts in turn upon the whole point of departure and initiates the whole process anew so here Marx is criticizing and rejecting an account in a way for which consumption is the natural telos of production. You know, that the purpose of production is consumption, and that all production is kind of naturally oriented towards consumption.

It's easy to see that there is an interdependence of production and consumption. Production involves the immediate consumption of subjective resources. When I produce something, I consume my own subjective resources, my physiological and psychological capacities, as well as I might use objective instruments, materials. And similarly, consumption would be the immediate production of subjective resources. When I consume food, for instance,

I produce or reproduce my physiological and psychological capacities. So here, again, this is the account which Marx is targeting, the account which says that production, that all production is consumption and all consumption is production. So he writes,

up not consumed is a railway only in potentia and not in reality not in actuality without production no consumption but also without consumption no production since production would then be purposeless so again continuing this account consumption produces production in a double way because first because a product becomes a real product again or an actual product only by being consumed for example a garment becomes a real garment only in the act of being worn a house where no one lives is in fact not a real house thus the product unlike a mere natural object proves itself to be

so sorry thus the product unlike a mere natural object proves itself to be or becomes a product only through consumption only by decomposing the product does consumption give the product the finishing touch or the product is production not as objectified activity but rather only as object for the active subject and secondly because consumption creates the need for a new production that is it creates the ideal internally impelling cause for production which is its presupposition so thus on this account consumption creates the motive for production it also creates

the object which is active in production as its determinant aim so here we see that on this accounts social production is the production of use values okay so objects are produced to be used okay you must have a use value but use values are produced in potentia you know the use value is only potential in the object but has to be actualized in consumption so therefore using the object actualizes its use value. It also actualizes the production of its use value

since it was produced in order to be used. And lastly, it actualizes the purpose of production. So on this account, using or consumption is actually the final cause. It's both the first or the formal and final cause of production because it's only in consumption that use is actualized. And an object that is produced in order to be used only effectively exists. It only has social reality when it is actually in use.

So, on this account, producing and consuming use values institutes the social nexus. The reference to a consumer is constitutive of the act of production, just as the reference to a producer is constitutive of the act of consumption. So Marx continues, production produces consumption first by creating the material for it, secondly by determining the manner of consumption, and thirdly by creating the products initially posited by it as objects in the form of a need felt by the consumer.

consumer. It thus produces the object of consumption, the manner of consumption, and the motive of consumption. Consumption likewise produces the producer's inclination by beckoning to him as an aim determining need. okay so summarizing then these you know um this account um the production of consumption so marx is instead going to emphasize the primacy of production productive activity and this is important because there is also a sense in which marx endorses the production of production the claim that all production is the production of production is also a characteristic of what

of the Rosenblatt article production in general. But again, Marx, it has a very different sense. This claim has a very different sense in Marx's account. The production of consumption is the production of production because the production of the use value produces the difference between the potentiality and the actuality of a use value. In other words, when you produce a commodity as something to be used, as something that has a use, you're also producing the difference between the potency, the potentiality and the actuality of this use value.

productive activity is the prime mover for the distribution exchange and consumption of use values but the unity of the production process masks the social division of labor so in other words marsh is going to argue that the production of usable objects you know useful commodities is has a fundamentally determining character and it outweighs the significance of consumption. Consumption is in this sense subordinated to production.

There's a primacy of production here, but this This primacy of production also entails a division in the relations of production. So there's a primacy of production, but this primacy also implies a splitting of productivity or of the fundamental split in the process of production, the split between the proprietors of the means of production and the proprietors of the labor power required to activate the means of production.

So Marx writes, as moments of one process in which production is the real point of departure and hence also the predominant moment. Consumption as urgency or as need is itself an intrinsic moment of

productive activity, but the latter is the point of departure for realization and hence also its predominant moment. It is the act through which the whole process again runs its course. The individual produces an object and by consuming it returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self-reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production. So the actuality of production is the production of actuality. And this is the social process of self-actualization.

In other words, what is produced, you know, in a way in the moment of, the reason why the moment of production predominates over the moments of distribution, exchange and consumption is because, you know, what is produced and how determines all those other moments, those three other moments. and it does so because what is being produced is something to be used because in a way the logic of using, the use of the commodity is also encoded in its

the production of its use is implied in its mode of distribution, exchange and consumption. Very simply. So that's why the actuality of production is the production of actuality. And this is a social process of self-actualization. But this process is bifurcated between the self-actualization of capital, you know, reproduction of capital, and the self-actualization of labor. Each is a necessary moment for the other. So, therefore, the social totality is split. The contradiction between capital and labor,

the contradiction between the process in which capital actualizes itself and the process in which labor actualizes itself, envelops oppositions between the sensuous and the super sensuous, between use and exchange, as well as between the concrete and the abstract. Okay, I'll pause again here. This would be a good point to pause for questions about what we've covered so far. I have a quick question. Can you explain a bit more the domination of labour over living labour?

Domination of dead labour over living labour. Yes. This means what is capital? What is capitalist production? It is commodity production. Okay. What is produced under capitalism are commodities. And what is a commodity? A commodity is something that is produced in order to be exchanged for a price. It has an exchange value. But the claim is that the exchange value of the commodity, in a way, dominates its use value. The utility of the commodity is subordinated to its exchangeability.

And that's what motivates its production. So what does this mean? this means therefore that if the goal of that the goal of commodity production is the maximization of exchange value which is also to say of you know of uh the money that can be you know um exchange for uh you know in the buying and selling of these commodities um and And if the process of production is already oriented towards the maximizing of exchange value,

This means that the goal of what living labor contributes to the production process is determined by what it has already produced commodities. So the idea is very simple. It's simply that in the capitalist production process, which is the process of commodity production, you need, you know, labor's only role is to convert commodities into money.

to turn a sum of commodities into a sum of money whose value is greater than the sum, you know, than the value of the sum of commodities that were produced in the labour process. and money is you know the money is a measure of the value of the commodity and this is for Marx simply the value that has already been produced by living labor in other words it's dead labor okay

The distinction is simply between production and product. Production for Marx means actual, effective production. What is enact? Whereas the product is what has already been produced. And the distinction between living and dead labor is simply that. Okay, so it's simply that in under capitalist production, what is being produced is determined by what has been produced, but not only that, you know, what is being produced and how it's being produced is entirely determined by what has already been produced and what has already been produced is, you know, simply there to

to maximize to allow money to facilitate the accumulation of money to convert money into more money the means of production the capital invested in production is a sum of money and then you produce a commodity but the point of producing this commodity C is to turn it into more money, M prime. And labor power is used in this process to convert, is in a way what converts M into M prime by producing

C. Okay. Labor power is the commodity that produces every other commodity, but it's in the the the use the capitalist use of labor power that's one sum of money m originally invested in production um is converted into a greater sum of money m prime okay and capitalism is always um you know you know capitalism is capital is an investment and the point is it's an investment that is always kind of aimed you know geared towards a return on that investment and the the condition of capitalist production is the

the convertibility of M into M prime, which is why the role of living labor is simply to increase the sum of commodities or dead labor. This is what Marx means when he says that under capitalism, the dead grips the living. simply to say that dead accumulated labor, the result of a previous cycle of accumulation, dominates and determines current productive activity.

And all that is being produced, everything that is being produced, is simply something that will increase the sum of what has already been produced, because that's all that capital is. Capital simply reproduces itself, you know, because it's simply a kind of a sum of commodities, it's a sum of exchange values. And living labor is simply there, you know, is used simply as an instrument to allow capital to increase itself. So living labor is a means for dead labor to expand itself. And this is where the vampire metaphor comes.

When Marx says that capital vampire-like drains the blood from living labor, he means that capital is dead labor that feeds off living labor and simply perpetuates itself and expands itself, but without ever acquiring, without ever kind of becoming alive. It can't. This is why capital needs labor. It has to kind of subjugate and control and dominate labor, but it can't do without it.

And the fantasy for Marx, the idea of capital producing itself from itself, of capital being able to dispense with living labor altogether is a fetish, is a phantasm, which in a way is a hallmark of capitalist ideology. money generating more money without the intercession of living labor but this is it's nothing but a phantasm for for marx um yeah sorry i kind of um went on but that's yeah the the key thing though there's a word of warning if you read this distinction between living and

dead labor some philosophers do in terms of like if you substantialize it you turn it into a metaphysical opposition between where living labor is kind of you know vital human activity and dead labor is kind of this you know what is um reified represented objectified etc And that is to metaphysically overhaul what is in fact, I think, a kind of a simply unnecessary formal conceptual distinction in Marx. OK, because living labor. What Marx means by living labor, I think, is simply practical human activity that is not kind of already kind of subordinated to a transcendent telos.

It's simply practical, productive human activity. And that activity is necessarily social. It's only when that activity becomes subordinated to an extrinsic purpose or goal that the distinction between living and dead labor becomes operative. and um the point is it's not it doesn't involve any kind of vitalism okay he's not saying that he's not at all saying that um you know living labor is the you know the the channeling of a vital force um he says it is the manifestation of what he calls generic uh genus life you know

a generic life but this life is an unnatural life okay generic life the life no life producing life as we already kind of saw in the first session is precisely life that is capable of overcoming the distinction between the organic and the inorganic as we'll shortly see and this is why the earth becomes humanity's inorganic nature. And I think what's really interesting about the contrast between living and dead labor in Marx is that it allows a conception, it denaturalizes and desubstantializes the concept of life as productive activity,

as generic productive activity, where it no longer requires any kind of biological substrates, but it does require a social kind of, some kind of social infrastructure, because life producing life for Marx is social life, human social life, generating itself um in in ways that are unforeseeable that should be unforeseeable honey yes perhaps we should make an our five minutes break now and then sure okay okay

see you in five minutes okay All right, back from the forward. Okay, so now we begin. Okay, so now I think we need to understand how private property, property, the privatization of collective productive activity arises as a consequence of what Marx calls the alienation of labor. So the question that needs to be asked is if productive appropriation is originally collective, what explains its privatization or how does private property arise?

So Marx writes, political economy starts with the fact of private property. It does not explain it to us. It conceives of the material process that private property goes through in reality, in general abstract formulas, which then have for it a value of laws. It does not understand these laws it does not demonstrate how they arise from the nature of private property so for Marx private property is a consequence of historically specific social relations and not a natural law contra all you know bourgeois ideologues like Locke and others who try to claim that there is a kind of a natural God-given right to private property.

Private property is not the result of economic laws. Economic laws are the result of private property. It's once private property is instituted that laws are generated to defend it. It's the other way around for Marx. And this, here we see kind of the characteristic inversion. So what Marx's general kind of approach, general kind of stance towards political economy is that political economy, in a way, is this topsy-turvy world. It has everything upside down. It presents as conditions of production what are, in fact, conditioned products.

and it then tries to contrive eternal laws and principles of economic production, distribution, exchange and consumption without realizing how the phenomena that it takes to be necessary and universal are in fact contingent and historical. So there's a rejection of givenness, of brute data.

And these are not simply empirical data. they are kind of rationalistic kind of posits developed to explain or ground you know empirical data but they are still for Marx they are still these posits or postulates are illegitimate abstractions and illegitimate, but they serve a very precise ideological function. The other key thing is that these occlusions or the masking operated by political economy

is not accidental, it's necessary, it's systematic. And once one realizes that this inversion, the inversions of political economy are necessary systematic, then this provides the point of leverage for a critical perspective that allows one to kind of to turn, you know, to turn the inverted image the right way up and to try to understand how that image has been produced. And if you remember the analogy, you know, the metaphor of the camera obscura, Marx wants to explain how there is the subjective misrepresentation of social reality is conditioned by an objective inversion, an objective inversion, which is itself, you know,

tributary to, you know, these objective movements, the objective laws of motion of the capitalist social organism. So, political economy starts from the division of social wealth into labour, capital and land. It takes this tripartite division. The three sources of wealth are supposed to be labour, capital and land, wages, profit and rent. But Marx wants to show how this, all these are in fact capital and land are ultimately tributary to labor.

and that labor is the source of social wealth, which then presents itself as independent and autonomous and makes labor into one of the three sources of this wealth, but also makes labor into an eternal kind of God-given social necessity. And Marx will distinguish between useful work and valuable labor. There's a useful work which is required in humanity's metabolic exchange with nature,

but value creating labor you know commodity producing labor is in fact peculiar to the capitalist mode of production and will be abolished according to Marx and should be abolished and the question is after that abolition whether that abolition also abolishes the traditional distinction between, for instance, work and play. And it's in a kind of utopian, one of the utopian possibilities opened up by Marx's perspective is that once you abolish the subordination of useful work to valuable labor, commodity,

you know, commodity producing labor, then you create social relations in which useful work is no longer compulsive, it's no longer kind of, you know, it no longer has to be enforced and therefore it becomes spontaneous. become spontaneous and therefore the you know the categorical opposition between work and play is undermined. Okay that's a kind of a digression. So when okay political economy throws no light

on the cause of the division between labor and capital and between capital and land. When for example it defines the relationship of wages to profit it takes the interest of the capitalist to be the ultimate cause. It takes for granted what it is supposed to explain. And similarly, competition comes in everywhere. It is explained from external circumstances. As to how far these external and apparently accidental circumstances are, but the expression of a necessary course of development, political economy teaches us nothing. We have seen how exchange itself appears to it as an accidental fact. The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are greed and the war amongst the greedy or competition. So political economy assumes egoism or individualism

and then has to explain altruism. It assumes the capitalist pursuit of profit to be a basic fact of human nature, just as it assumes competition and presents commodity exchange as the best way to prevent social conflict. So political economy explains social relations in terms of competition and exchange, whereas the critique of political economy explains competition and exchange in terms of social relations. Competition and exchange are effects of a fundamental antagonism, the class relation. The class relation pits the capitalist who owns a means of production against the worker who owns only her labor power.

The class relation separates the producer from her products as well as from the instruments of production. the class relation is one in which the worker must sell her labor to live and thus labor itself becomes a commodity and this is under capitalism it's only under capitalism that labor is commodified as labor power, which is exchanged for a wage. The worker sells her labor power to the capitalist, but her labor power is her capacity to produce.

In a way, it's abstract labor power. It's this generic capacity to produce, not to produce anything in particular, although we can discuss this, but it's actually important that in order to be exchangeable, labor power must be generic. It can't simply be the capacity to produce a single type of commodity. No, that would not be, that is increasingly disqualified in the capitalist economy because capitalism requires workers capable of de-skilling and re-skilling, capable of acquiring, unlearning what they have learned and learning how to do new things.

So labor power is simply this abstract capacity to produce, and it's not the workers' production or its product. So this is why the only thing that the laborer owns is her labor power, this abstract productive capacity, but not her concrete production or its results. And the capitalist will use this labor power to produce commodities. And the worker must give up both her productive activity and its products in exchange for the money that she needs to buy the commodity she needs to live.

So this commodification of labor as labor power is what Marx means by the alienation of labor. The worker becomes poorer, the richer is his production, the more it increases in power and scope. The worker becomes a commodity that is all the cheaper the more commodities he creates. The depreciation of the human world progresses in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things. Now, in this passage, Marx talks about labor and the worker becoming a commodity, because he hasn't yet introduced a distinction between labor and labor power, which is absolutely crucial, because clearly the worker is not a commodity.

Because if the worker was a commodity, then the worker would be a slave. It would be the worker that would be bought and sold by the capitalist. But capitalism doesn't proceed. It's not the worker doesn't sell herself to the capitalist. She sells her labor power to the capitalist in exchange for a wage. and in selling her labor power to the capitalist, she effectively gives up any right of ownership to the products of that labor power, how that labor power is used by the capitalist or what it's used to produce. but the basic point is simply that the commodification of labor as labor power

reduces the worker to a bearer of labor power okay each you know the worker goes onto the you know the job market and will try to sell her labor power to a capitalist you know in exchange for a wage. But this, in a way, the commodification of labor power entails the depreciation of the value of labor, because in order for labor power to become a commodity, it has to be exchangeable, both within the production process.

it can't simply be um you know it can't simply be used you know in one way okay labor power that can only be used in one way to produce one thing is less useful less valuable to the capitalist than labor power that can be used in different ways to produce many things but the paradox is that in a way the more valuable this flexible or kind of fungible labor power is more valuable to the capitalist only because the capitalist can use it to produce um you know greater surplus value um and this instead of this doesn't um this also reduces um the price of

the wage. In other words, the more valuable labor power becomes to the capitalist, the more the capitalist strives to keep the price or the cost of labor power down. Okay, so labor does not only produce commodities, it produces itself and the labor as a commodity. It produces labor, what Marx really means or should write here is labor power does not only produce commodities, it produces itself and its bearer you know the labor as a commodity and to that extent to the extent to which it produces commodities in general therefore the value of labor power is gauged

in terms of the values of the other commodities that it produces labor that has to produce commodities to produce itself to reproduce itself as a commodity is alienated labor and this alienation of labor has four facets from arts it's alienation of the producer from the product alienation of the producer from the production process alienation of the producer and the production from human genus being, and alienation of producers from each other and from the proprietors of production and product. And this fourfold alienation corresponds to,

or I think it corresponds to these four social forms, the commodity form, because the alienation of the product from the producer is the commodity the commodification of labor the alienation of the producer from the production process is wage labor because when you work for a wage you have no control in you know what you produce or how it's produced so you're alienated from the production process and the alienation of the producer and producer from human genus being is money. When Marx writes in the manuscripts that money is the, you know, the estranged form of human genus being, of this kind of generic, you know, productive capacity,

he means that because money can be exchanged for anything, and anything is all commodities are exchangeable for money, and they're all fungible in and through the medium of money, This is the alienated form of the infinite qualitative fungibility or transformability of generic human productivity, of human genus being. And finally, the alienation of the producers from each other and from the proprietors of the means of production is class. Okay, so each of these four forms of alienation corresponds to a social form.

So we begin with the first, with the alienation of the product. What this fact expresses is merely this, the object that labor produces its product confronts it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer. Thus the product of labor confronts a producer as something not only independent of, but opposed to her needs and desires. In other words, the wage laborer produces something that she neither needs nor desires in exchange for the money that she can use to satisfy her needs and desires. This first form of alienation has a kind of a subspecies. It also involves the alienation of nature.

And so the commodification of labor and the use of commodified labor in in commodity production involves entails an alienation from nature what Marx calls nature here is the sensuous exterior world which is the meat which is that out of which and through which labor produces okay nature is the center of you what what he all he means here is space time okay nature here is not a kind of a region of being, you know, it's not, he's not opposing the natural

to the non-natural, he's not opposing the natural to the artificial, he's simply saying nature is the spatial temporal, the centrious domain as the spatial temporal domain, which provides, you know, which is the original source of the raw materials of social production. All social production, you know, originally begins, you know, by drawing, you know, by using raw materials which are not, which have not themselves been socially produced, and that's nature, okay? So nature is that out of which and through which labour produces. Nature provides the raw materials for production,

but is transformed through production. So nature is formed through labor, while labor materializes itself in nature. So Marx writes, the worker can create nothing without nature, the sensuous exterior world. It is the matter in which his labor realizes itself, in which it is active, out of which, and through which it produces. Marx is using the form matter here is Aristotelian. When Marx talks about matter or material, he means matter in Aristotelian. He's not talking about matter in an empirical or metaphysical sense.

Anything can be matter or material for production, whether it is soil, whether it is wood, rock, stone, but also whether it is uranium or radioactivity. Okay, this is, you know, all of these are materials, are natural materials for social production. But as nature affords the means of life for labor in the sense that labor cannot live without objects in which it exercises itself, so it affords a means of life in the narrower sense, namely the means for the physical subsistence of the worker himself.

so nature is the material of labor in two senses first as the sensuous exterior world in which human activity manifests itself and second as the source of the material food shelter clothing upon which that activity depends in order to continue. The alienation of labor alienates labor from nature because both the material and the form of labor are used to produce commodities for profits instead of objects for human use. So this is why Marx writes, thus the more the worker appropriates the exterior

world of centrist nature by his labor, the more he doubly deprives himself of the means of subsistence. Firstly, since the exterior centrist world increasingly ceases to be an object belonging to his work, a means of subsistence for his labor, and secondly, since it increasingly ceases to be a means of subsistence in the direct sense, a means for the physical subsistence of the worker. Okay. Secondly, now we come to the second phase or the second aspect of the alienation of labor, the alienation of production. So Marx writes, until now we have been considering

the estrangement, the alienation of the worker only in one of its aspects, the worker's relationship to the products of his labor but the estrangement is manifested not only in the results but in the act of production within the producing activity itself how could the worker come face to face how could the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger were it not that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from himself the product is but after all the product is but after all the summary of the activity of production. If then the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation,

the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the object of labor is merely summarized the estrangement, the alienation in the activity of labor itself. So this means simply that the producers have no control over what is produced or how it's produced. And the productive capacities and the production process are both geared towards maximizing exchange value, which means maximizing profit, rather than satisfying the needs or desires of producers.

Instead of producers collaboratively producing what they collectively need, so each is then free to produce what they individually desire, the majority are forced to produce for the benefit of a minority whose desires are not only more than they can possibly need, but prevent the majority from satisfying their material needs. So, and this is because the desire of the capitalist is the desire of capital, which wants only itself. The capitalist is merely the bearer, you know, he executes a social role, but he's there to represent the interests of capital, which is this alien social power.

which uses human labor for its own limitless expansion. The capitalist desires profits, but profit is only the means whereby capital reproduces and expands itself. And capitalist production is incompatible with satisfying the needs of producers, because the desire of and for capital can only be satisfied by frustrating those needs. It's fundamentally, you know, capitalist production is fundamentally incompatible with the satisfaction of elementary human needs, let alone human desires. And although, I mean, capitalist ideologues often

as the standard of living for certain wage labor rises, campus production always entails an increase and an amelioration in the standard of living for a certain for a certain, you know, kind of stratum of the working population, for a certain kind of segment of wage laborers, but at the cost of emiseration for the majority. So, you know, the kind of, if you look at the classic account,

so the standard of living, so the American worker begins to kind of, has a higher standard of living in the mid-20th century, let's say than the kind of the European bourgeoisie had, you know, at the end of the 19th or early 20th century. They have, you know, automobiles, refrigerators, televisions, etc. Okay. But, you know, the rise in the standard of living for, you know, the American wage labor is conditioned by, you know, colonialism by the immiseration of workers in, you know, in the third world, in other kind of zones of production. So the same logic always

plays itself out that um um capitalism can improve the lots of some workers but only at the cost of worsening the lots of others and that's again that is built into the logic of capitalism according to marks um okay um here's another quotation um what then constitutes the alienation of labor first the fact that labor is external to the worker it does not belong to his intrinsic nature that in his work therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself does not feel content

but unhappy does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind the worker therefore only feels himself only feels himself outside his work and in his work feels outside himself he feels at home when he is not working and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced. It is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need. It is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. Again, this is simply kind of, you know, once again,

the idea that wage labor is a means to an end. You work, you sell your labor, you sell your labor to the capitalist in exchange for the money that you need to get the things that you want. But the activity that you engage in at work is, you know, at best tedious and at worst, you know, horribly unpleasant. Now we can talk about during the discussion, I mean, people always, you know, the objective is always, yeah, but what if you enjoy your work? But in a way, what Marx is saying here is that alienation here is not a psychological phenomenon.

In a way, what Marx will say is that in a way, the more you enjoy your wage labor, the more alienated you are. And whatever enjoyment you derive from wage labor, commodity producing wage labor, shows only how deeply alienated you in fact are. Okay. And now there's an interesting observation he makes. Animalization and humanization. the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own but someone else's that it does not belong to him that in it he belongs not to himself but to another as a result therefore man or the worker only feels himself freely active in his animal functions

eating drinking procreating or at most in his dwelling and dressing up etc While in his human functions, he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human, and what is human becomes animal. And certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc. are also genuinely human functions, but taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of all other human activity, and turned into soul and ultimate ends. they are animal functions so humanity is animalized at work because thinking and acting become

automated and stereotypes they become reduced to a series of repetitive and inflexible gestures whether those gestures are physical or psychological from assembly line to call center it's the same kind of automation and kind of you know stereotyping of human physiological and psychological capacity that is operative and the converse is that you know so humanity is animalized at work but animality is human and is humanized in play workers try to recover their human spontaneity by indulging in their animal appetite.

So in a way, the compensation for the repetitiveness of the activities engaged in at work is the resort to animal activities, eating, drinking, um coupling and these become outlets for the spontaneity for the kind of um you know the expressions of human spontaneity which are foreclosed in the in the workplace um okay now we come to the third aspect alienation from genus being and this is

where marks this is the one i'll go over the longest because he says some very very interesting things here okay um so we know already that the key thing is that gettoons vision should be translated as genus being not species being again precisely because a genus is unlike anything else okay species are encompassed species are contrasted and distinguished from another within a subsuming genus, but a genus isn't subsumed to any higher category or identity. It is, you know, sui generis. So man is a genus being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the genus,

sorry, that should be the genus as his object, but and this is only another way of expressing it also because he treats himself as the actual living genus because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being so to say that in theory man is a genius being because in theory in practice he adopts his own and other genera as his object is to say that humans can think and make other kinds of things. Humans don't just reproduce human beings or they don't just

reproduce humanly, they produce, you know, they can, they have learned, they have acquired the capacity to understand and to reproduce other kinds of beings, including organic and inorganic beings. And this is the peculiarity of human practical capacity. The life of the genus, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man, like the animal, lives on inorganic nature. And the more universal man or the animal is, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives.

Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc. constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science and partly as objects of art. so his spiritual inorganic nature spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible so also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity and physically man lives only on these products of nature whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, et cetera.

So Marx's suggestion here is that the capacity to comprehend the nature of um you know animal vegetable mineral to comprehend the different facets of organic and inorganic nature um is peculiarly is you know is unique you know and but this comprehension is not only cognitive it's also practical because human beings learn to manipulate um and engineer um their you know organic and inorganic environments okay

um and this is why marx also says in the manuscripts at one point that um industry industrial production is in a way that kind of exemplifies the mediation of the human and nature. Industrial production, what is industrial production? It's production that is capable of encompassing elements of the organic and the inorganic. It's producing you know, when Marshall is producing minerals and metals, inorganic materials that are required

in the production process. And in the 20th century, you know, human beings have acquired the capacity to produce organic materials as well. So this is a sense in which human activity now comprises the organic and inorganic dimensions. They become part of human productive activity. And this is a sense in which nature becomes humanity's inorganic body. so marx writes the universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which

makes all nature his inorganic body both in as much as nature is one his direct means of life and to the material the object and the instrument of his life activity nature is man's inorganic body, nature that is insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature. This means that nature is his body with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature. In estranging from man one nature and to himself, his own active

functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the genus from man. It changes for him the life of the genus into a means of individual life. First, it estranges the life of the genus and individual life, and second, it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the genus, likewise in its abstract and estranged form. So, this final sentence is very kind of significant, I think. Marx is pointing out that it's an alienated labor, just to see under capitalist production.

Individual life, it's the abstracted form of individual life that prevails and that is juxtaposed to the abstracted form of generic life. So in a way, the opposition between the interests of the individual human being and the collective interests of the human genus, of humankind as such, is itself an artifact. You know, it's of capitalist social relations. And communism, by abolishing those relations, would reunite the concrete individual and the concrete genus.

So individual human activity would be continuous with generic activity. And no longer opposed to it or incompatible with it. in the human animal animality so it's also what's interesting here is that marx is precisely not simply kind of um asserting you know exempting humanity from nature or or claiming that humanity has this kind of capacity to transcend nature through its spiritual or merely intellectual capacity, it's through its practical, its sensuous practical capacities that humanity

in a way is both a part of nature, but a part of nature that begins to, you know, that exceeds the rest of nature. It becomes this excess over nature as such or nature as we know it. And in the human animal, animality relates to itself as such as a genus. And as self-relating animality, humanity becomes both less and more than an animal species. Less because it loses its specific ecological niche. humans are more vulnerable than many, if not most, many, if not all other biological species,

because our conditions of existence are so artificial. So we are collectively extraordinarily vulnerable. Because what a human being, you know, what human beings depend on now, you know, in order to reproduce themselves is precisely not simply immediately available. It's not given biologically. But at the same time, humanity is more than an animal species because through social production, it enters into a metabolic exchange with nature as such, both organic and inorganic. Okay.

And now, so now we can revisit the passage that we looked at in the very first session about generic activity, or the sense in which human activity, human productive activity is generic productive activity. Production as such, but not production in general as a mere cognitive abstraction. For labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need, the need to maintain physical existence. And yet the productive life is the life of the genus.

It is life engendering life. The whole character of a genus, its generic character, is contained in the character of its life activity, and free conscious activity is man's generic characteristic. Life itself appears only as a means to life. And the way in which generic life appears as a means, as its own, you know, as an end in itself, both as its own means and end, is precisely because it is life producing life independently of predetermined means and ends.

So in other words, every other kind of biological life produces and reproduces itself in terms of not strictly predetermined means and ends, but it is tethered to biological and ecological factors. The ways in which it can reproduce itself is circumscribed by its relationship to its environment and to other organisms.

So Marx here is suggesting that with this generic, well, no, it's not that human activity is generic, it's that sensuous practical activity, which is social activity, becomes generic. becomes generic insofar as it begins the specific restrictions. Again, so it's not that there is a generic human subject which transcends biological determination. That would be the idealist thesis. Marx's claim is that in the process of material production,

there is a sensuous social practice gradually weans itself from the constraints of, you know, specific types of activities, you know. and that's so this this is a kind of an emergence okay an emergence an emergence whose means and ends are as yet unknown okay whose means and ends are precisely still as yet unknown, not determined. And it is up to, but you know, will be, you know,

are determinable in and through kind of human activity if it persists. Okay, let's continue the rest of the quotes. Okay, the animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a genus being, or it is only because he is a genus being that he is a conscious being, that his own life is an object for him.

only because of that is his activity free activity estranged labor reverses this relationship so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity is essential being a mere means to his existence so two things to note here first of all that i think that marx is not saying that generic activity in this sense transcends nature. In other words, it simply kind of floats free of certain kind of physical, biological constraints.

He's not saying that. He's simply saying that its means and ends are not physically or biologically predetermined. So this is entirely compatible with kind of, you know, ecological kind of considerations. This doesn't mean that you can simply kind of use up and consume natural resources in an entirely arbitrary way. And secondly, at the close of this passage, the suggestion is that it's precisely the alienation of labor which simply treats which reverses its order so that it's because consciousness

turns the privileging of consciousness as this essential human attribute, then makes life activity a means or generic capacity, a means to an end, a means to self-preservation. In other words, I think what Marx is saying is this, and I think it's this thought that is taken up by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, is that it's actually capitalist production that in a way subordinates, makes survival, you know, kind of individual survival

and collective survival an end in itself with destructive consequences both for human beings and for you know non-human nature. The overcoming of you know the de-estrangement of labor and the you know the actualization of generic human activity would no longer, you know, fusing individual and collective satisfaction would no longer make activity, you know, so ordinate activity to survival, to kind of simply kind of self-preservation.

self-preservation individual and collective will no longer be you know the the ultimate t loss of all production and in a way individual and collective self-preservation under capitalism mine in a way kind of simply mimes the senseless accumulation of capital as such, which simply wants to grow and expand limitlessly for no reason. So, I think Marx is clearly suggesting here that this kind of, you know, the premium on self-preservation, social self-preservation,

individual and collectively, is simply the obverse of capital accumulation. And it's completely irrational and ultimately self-destructive. Okay. Now we're almost running out of time, but let me see if I can just quickly summarize Okay, I'm not going to read all this passage, but this is simply elaborating on this point. So humanity produces, okay, animals produce one-sidedly, humanity produces universally,

humanity reproduces the whole of nature. This is interesting. and it's very clear what he means here he means that all of nature both organic and inorganic becomes reproducible in and through this generic activity man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object the object of labor is therefore the objectification of man's genus life. So what he's saying is that both the object of human, of unalienated labor

would be the objectification, the positive objectification of man's genus life. Objectification has an entirely positive sense here because this would be a life producing life. Humanity no longer simply reproducing itself but producing new forms of life. For he duplicates himself not only as in consciousness intellectually but also actively in reality. And therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created.

So this is what the alienation of labor is, you know, in a way blocks this kind of, you know, extraordinary generic capacity, this generic, you know, productive potential, which is, you know, latent in sensuous social practice, according to Marx. Okay, we've covered this. I think we've also covered all this. Okay, finally, the fourth kind of alienation.

Alienation of man from man, okay? So the proposition that man's generic nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other as each of them is from man's essential nature. The estrangement of man and in fact every relationship in which man stands to himself is realized and expressed only in the relationship in which a man stands to other men. If the product of labor is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom then does it belong? If my own activity does not belong to me, if it is an alien, a coerced activity, to whom then does it belong? To a being other than myself. But who is this being? And here Marx has an interesting claim why it can't be understood. The alienation of labor in this sense

is the alienation of the human from the human. It's kind of a social alienation. And it can't be understood in terms of alienation in the divine or the superhuman. even when humans offer up their work to the gods, as in Egypt, India, and Mexico, the gods are not the masters of work. Why? Because the privilege of the gods is not to work, okay? The gods are not served by work and do not enjoy its products. They do not own labor or the products of labor. The alienation of labor manifests the self-alienation of man, of individuals from genus and of individual from individual.

And the alienation of labor is a function of a social relation in which one man owns what another produces. And here, so now we get to the distinction between using and owning, or the relationship between using and owning. Producing is owning, it's the appropriation of nature. And this appropriation produces useful things. And because humans are social, what is useful for one is useful for others. Producers are free to use what they've produced. This is why all production is appropriation and the producer is entitled to use what he or she has appropriated. Producers are also free to let others use their products, but using does not confer ownership.

Taking possession of what one has not produced is expropriation. Expropriating what others have produced and reserving its use for oneself is privatization. Appropriation is ownership. Ownership is a social relation that includes others. Expropriation creates property. And property is a social relation that excludes others. So capitalist production is the expropriation of human labor. and the capitalist proprietary relation to labor and its products presupposes the alienation of labor but the expropriation of labor is man's alienation from man okay and this is why

the origin of capital is the expropriation of what has been collectively appropriation okay so the what Marx calls originary accumulation the condition for capitalist accumulation is the separation of the producers from the means of production, the enclosure of the commons, et cetera. And this is the process of expropriation. It's the expropriation by one class, one group, of the means and the resources of production owned by another. So if the product of labor, labor objectified, is for the worker an alien, hostile, powerful

object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, independent of him. Private property is alienated labor. This is the upshot of this analysis. Private property is simply alienated labor. private property is the product, the result, the necessary consequence of alienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself. So for political economy, private property is the condition of labor, whereas for the critique of political economy, labor is the condition of private property.

Labour does not produce private property. Private property is expropriated labour, and this expropriation is a consequence of the class relation. Production and its products become the private property of the capitalist, but all private property is estranged labour. And because wage labour is alienated, labour, the end of alienated labor is the end of wage labor um that's the uh so mark's right wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property the downfall of the one must therefore involve the downfall of the other um incidentally this is why um you know the struggle

you know, for Marx, the overcoming of capitalism, this is why there's no such thing as a fair wage. Okay, all wage labor is exploitation. There is no such thing as even the so-called the living wage, the wage which is supposed to fairly remunerate the wage labor is still exploited and still predicated on alienation. So the point of the abolition of exploitation is the abolition of alienated wage labor as such. It's very clear. So there can be no question of a kind of equitable kind of, you know, remuneration for alienated labor.

It must simply be abolished. Okay, so once again I've gone over, but I think we can still have a little bit of time for questions. Yeah, maybe we can have one question and then we wrap up. Aaron? Aaron? If anyone else would like to go, I'm happy to see it, but... No? Okay. I guess the big one for me here is your invocation of Althusser and description

of production as a process without a subject from toward the beginning of the lecture. And I guess I have trouble with this. I'm not great on Althusser, so maybe this is my misunderstanding, but there's definitely some sort of... So when Althusser says that something is a process without a subject, I don't know whether he means like Deleuze and Guattari that there are no subjects ontologically, or whether what's important about the claim is that for this particular process, there is no the subject, who is the subject of the process.

right yes um go on um i mean so this this whole account that you've given um is so reliant on categories of practical reason right uh every step of the way the fact that it's a materialism of practice. I mean, you can't even think about practice as a category without subjects engaged in practices, right, for whom their actions and practices are actions and not behaviors. And a materialism of practice seems to me incompatible and precisely distinguishing itself

from a materialism of substance like in Spinoza, right, which is where I know Althusser, is looking for an alternative to the Hegelian framework. And so I don't really see, at least from my perspective here, how Marx is really doing that much of a departure from Hegel on this question, where spirit, in some sense, is subject. that there is some kind of, right. I guess I did share in both the Google classroom and in the Discord, the William DeVries paper on teleology, right?

Ray, are you familiar with that paper? No, actually, no. I have not had a chance to read it yet, no. I mean, it's just a very simple kind of juxtaposition of a sort of Kantian, what he calls the intentional model of teleology and Hegel's, what he calls a functional model of teleology, but it basically described how Hegel gets this concept of species being or generic being, right? It's like his ontology is to be a certain kind of being is to be purposively directed and self-maintaining. Right. So the concept of being any kind of species is being the kind of thing that depends upon

a set of material structures that maintain your life in that, like as that sort of being, right? It is not reducible in any sense to a specific genetic code or any kind of like empirical quality. It's a process that maintains itself as a population of organisms over time, right? And so it seems to me like in order to even have this concept of a generic being and human being as a generic being, we're depending on a teleological category, right?

right uh which was why i why i shared that that article um were depending on on an understanding of a process that is sort of end directed in that its end is maintaining and reproducing itself um and there are ways in which human human generic being is unique that that you sort of outlined but I don't see how that fits with the claim that I guess production is a process without a subject or I mean I guess for Althusser it's more that history is a process without a subject which seems also to me a different claim than production is a process without a subject right okay thanks

very very you know very interesting question so the claim there also on this this is a slide where where I said, you know, humanity is a process without service. So when Althusser accuses or, you know, chastises the young, you know, Marx, you know, for still being enthralled to kind of, you know, Hegelian humanism, he simply defines humanism at one point in the, you know, the humanist controversy. the nub of his account of humanism is that a humanist is someone who claims that history is a process with a subject. So Hegel is a humanist. Why is Hegel a humanist? Because Geist is the

subject of history in Hegel, according to Althusser. And if labor is the subject of it. If labor is the subject of production, and therefore the subject and history is the history of successive modes of production, then Marx would still be a humanist in this kind of straightforward Hegelian sense. Now, and that implies on equating labor in Marx with Geist in Hegel. Geist is the subject of history. Geist, I mean, this is a kind of a caricature of Hegel, but the answer is there, does caricature of Hegel. So history is simply Geist coming to self-consciousness, kind of,

you know, coming, realizing its own freedom. And if Marx is still a Hegelian humanist, all he has done is substituted labor for Geist, and labor is this productive activity, this generic productive activity that gradually kind of becomes, well, I guess becomes aware of itself when the de-alienation of labor would be, you know, labor no longer allowing itself to be dominated by an alien social power, i.e. capital, but simply kind of being, you know, being free,

kind of recognizing that it would be another subject-object identity, or not, you know, the reunification of subject and object. The claim that humanity is a process without a subject, if the human essence is an ensemble of historically variable social relations oh sorry just to finish the altruzerian it's for altruzer the altruzer's counter to this humanist to this kind of philosophical humanism whether hegelian or or marxist is the claim that there is no subject of history because history is simply constituted by discontinuous modes of production. Okay, it's a mode of production that kind of fixes, you know, a social

structure, and the mode of production is, you know, a combination of elements. It's a structure. Okay, what is the mode of production? It's a structure. So Althusser replaces the subject with a structure. He says, you don't have a subject, there is no subject of history. History is structural, but it has no kind of chronology, and these kinds of modes of production can simply be, they're not kind of, you know, they don't follow one another in a kind of linear succession. Whether history is still intelligible in this sense is I'm not sure what an altruzarian would say. but okay on the account that I'm proposing Marx says that

you know human essence is an ensemble of historically variable social relations relations of production which is to say that what is produced and how it's produced is historically variable and humanity itself first of all Marx is clear he talks about individuals When you talk the effective presupposition, he's saying real individuals. There's no, and Marx, you know, kind of takes Farbach the task about, for his talking, for reifying humanity, saying, and history, interestingly enough, Marx already, like he wants to be able to do without a kind of a hypothesized humanity or hypothesized history, and say

that the fundamental, the effective presupposition for his historical material second is the activity of social individuals, okay, bound together by these relations, you know, of production. And it's in this sense, so it's because, in a way, the actuality of this ensemble of social relations is never, you know, it's never definitive and it's also kind of variable that there's no kind of common subject, okay? There's no common, there's no single ensemble of relations and if there is, the variability of the relations means that there can no longer

be there can no longer there can't be a single um fixed subject they don't constitute it's remarkably similar to kind of you know altuzer's structural account except that altuzer thinks that you can do without um you know you can do without um you can do without a collective um you know know subjectivity is simply an ideological category it can be kind of completely dispensed with um and the key question is is there a subject of activity in marx once he's gotten rid of humanity as this kind of metaphysical abstraction okay because these social relations are woven

from practical productive activity which has to be kind of effective in marx and the question is are these individuals subjects well this is a tricky question because they're not um you know they're not they're not okay they're not cartesian subjects for a start okay but they're not kantian subjects either they're not kind of autonomous kind of um you know ray can i uh sure go on go Can I try to respond or direct this? So yeah, so I think that helps. But I'm not sure it, I think it sort of brings up the question from last week, actually,

whether Althusser is also sort of claiming that Marx is rejecting society as a totality. Right? The idea that there is a coherent space of reasons in which we're all engaged. in terms of, right, I guess I'll just quote my favorite little bit from the preface to the phenomenology. This is the sort of famous part about trampling the roots of humanity underfoot, for it is the nature of humanity to press onward to agreement with others. Human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds. The anti-human, the merely animal consistent staying within the sphere of feeling and being able to communicate only at that level right like hegel's

pretty pretty explicit also that like he's not a metaphysical humanist humanist there is no empirical quality of it's it's just that as rational propulsive actors engaged in this mutual activity of being rational propulsive actors we have a responsibility to one another to try to to try to reconcile our reasons with other reasons, which ought to lead us down the path of doing more reasoning and less coercion, less violence and less killing, right? Like, it is trying to put this Kantian universal history in a framework of concrete social institutions. And I understand how Marx is then sort of reapplying this to the private sphere of

bourgeois civil society that Hegel had excluded from spheres like the family and the state, How Marx is saying that in some way the goal under communism is to allow society, like, to allow us with the background framework of having abolished class conflict and the need for violent coercion. we can have free association, but it does seem to depend on this social background, right? It seems to depend to me on the idea of a coherent and unitary space of reasons in which we're able to resolve disputes through rational mediation.

Does it's, yeah, am I right in thinking that Althusser also seems to want to just jump to communism? Or is sort of rejecting the idea of society, right, as rationally justified social order? Althusser, I think, I mean, yes, he wants to say that, you know, the idea of a contradictory totality is precisely a rejoinder to idealist organicist kind of paradigms of a social of the social whole so the totality for Althusser is contradictory and it's opposed to the whole

so totality and contract and and whole are kind of opposed to or incompatible and Marx is kind of of, so Marx for Althusser is not an idealist because he's emphasizing the contradictory nature of what he sometimes calls the kind of, you know, the capitalist social organism, but he's not bound to this organicist metaphor because it's a contradictory, you know, it's a totality. and the way in which this contradictoriness vitiates every element of the totality. But, so Althusser doesn't like the idea of...

So Althusser, look, will dismiss appeals to sociality in terms of, like, I think this, the far back thing, the thing about, about it's really about whether um where one situates uh sociality or how one characterizes it and in Feuerbach okay it's clear that Feuerbach is Hegelian to the extent that he still privileges mutual recognition a mutual recognition is the fundamental social bond He calls it the absolute relation between one self-consciousness and another self-consciousness, except for Feuerbach. And Feuerbach's critique of Hegel is not that persuading.

It's not very convincing. But he claims that already this kind of this mutual recognition is is not strictly. It doesn't involve. You know, doesn't imply a space of reasons. It doesn't imply recognizing one another as merely rational agents, because he thinks it involves a... Well, again, I don't know enough about, I mean, the bits of Feuerbach I've read about this is very vague.

He wants to insist that it's not Hegelian kind of mutual recognition, and therefore it's mutual recognition, but kind of shorn of its, you know, the integration, the ideal integration of all the eyes into a kind of uh into a we that would be purely spiritual okay because if if if the eye if mutual recognition consummates itself in you know the eye you know the eye that is we okay

then this is a kind of a spiritual self-consciousness okay um and Feuerbach seems to want to say that spiritual self-consciousness is still um you know sensuously conditioned okay and his emphasis on the sensuous is that there are kind of you know the concrete particularity is can simply be absorbed by spiritual self-consciousness okay and he may be his account may be incoherent or inconsistent okay um that's not something i'm you know it's only relevant insofar as marx's critique of farback is to say that farback is still um you know his critique of

hegel has his he's still too hegelian his account is kind of uh incoherence and that what's required to make it coherent is simply to kind of to say um that the social relation is operates behind the back of self-consciousness it is fundamentally it can't be reflexively recognized so it doesn't unfold um you know in the relation between two mutually recognizing self-consciousnesses and Why not? Because it is simply, it is constantly generated and regenerated by these social relations, which are, you know, practical.

Okay, and now we get to the crux of your question about whether it makes sense to describe an activity as practical if it doesn't involve reasoning, if it doesn't involve practical reasoning. And here, okay, what I think, you know, Marx or one way of kind of, you know, defending Marx or salvaging the plausibility of his claim is to say that there is, I would say humans kind of, I mean, he doesn't want to deny that kind of the capacity of, the rational capacity is decisive in, he says it's decisive for labor because when he

distinguishes the human labor from animal labor, it's intentional. Human labor is intentional and voluntary. And he says, you know, the human architect envisages constructs a plan in advance, whereas, you know, no bee or beaver does so. You know, bees and beaver they built, they might build these kind of elaborate kind of constructions, but it's not, um, they are not, uh, you know, they're incapable of, um, envisaging, of consciously rehearsing and entertaining, um, the, um, the, you know, the, uh, the intentions motivating them to,

you know, to construct something or produce something. So obviously intentionality is factored into human productive capacity. But I think. Oh, right. Yeah, go on, go on. So this is where that De Vries article was really something, I think, because it's really in the difference between in the in the sort of content teleological framework that we sort of still dominates philosophy and my intentionality sort of ought to be. to be this empirical or like psychological quality, right? Whereas in the Hegelian one, and this is also true of the kind of like, not of the Dreyfus Heideggerians,

but of the like the Hoagland Heideggerians. We should be wrapping it up already, I think. Sorry to interrupt you, But I think we should wrap up by now. Can I just finish this statement and then? Yeah, finish this one. Yeah, I'm just, yeah, I also think intentionality is central to this and that the difference is viewing intentionality as a normative status as part of the social relation or as an empirical or psychological quality that ought to be in a mind is the distinction between the Kantian and Hegelian. ways of thinking about teleology no i think that's that's crucial i mean i'm happy you know i think

this is an incredibly you know important issue i'm happy to continue discussing it with you after class if you want um but yeah everything hinges on this you know again um what marx means when he thinks that there is um there's a practical activity which operates behind the back of spirits okay that's whether that idea even makes sense is is what is uh is crucial i think so all right then um i think i just want to remind everybody that next class on saturday we will start a bit later 2 p.m eastern time um yeah do you have anything else to say before we wrap up

right um just two things one is um that's um so i'm still i'll try being you know in my iron suggestion next week after given that you know we're very short of time and still quite a lot of stuff to get i'll try to um record a kind of a talk um that just to be put online so that people can listen to um in addition to the final kind of scheduled session next saturday so i'll do that i'll try to do that in the course of the next week um it probably be you know and it wouldn't be as long it wouldn't be like two and a half hours it would be kind of shorter but just just covering what i won't be able to cover in the uh in the final session and secondly that for the final um

my understanding is that you know people would be submitting a piece of coursework for the final um an essay for the final coursework and um you know i i've only heard from a couple of people so i'm still please let me know if you intend to do this or if if you don't intend to do this but just so i have a rough idea of you know um how many people will be you know submitting a final piece of coursework if you have another idea for your final piece of coursework then just also let me know um it's not because it's you know it's it's negotiable um if uh yeah so but just just I'll send a message about this just to remind people and also that we need to discuss what

kind of deadlines are feasible for people to produce the coursework. All right, right then, perfect. So see you all next Saturday. Bye bye. Okay, thanks.