Hello everyone, this is Marx and philosophy session 3 right? 3 yes. Held by Ray Brassier and now I'm gonna pass the mic to Ray. Okay, hi. I think I need to unmute myself. Do I need to unmute? Can everyone hear me? Yep, OK. So did everyone receive the handout for today, which I sent just a couple of minutes ago? Yep. OK, good. OK, and then I see David just asked a question here.
will we be focusing on Volume 1 of Capital Oral 3? Basically, Volume 1, and then a brief, possibly a brief extract from Volume 3. So we'll spend a long time on the section on the commodity, the commodity forum in Volume 1. But yeah, I'm afraid, yeah, again, it's a very, It'll be a very kind of compressed discussion of capital. And I think that that'll be in a couple of weeks, I think. So today, yes, just quickly one thing. Last week I asked everyone to kind of introduce themselves.
And, you know, just so we can kind of, you know, get to know each other. But I know that I think two people joined for the first time last week. Did anyone who didn't kind of introduce themselves last week, I think it was maybe David and Bruce, is that correct? Okay, so Bruce and David, would you mind just quickly introducing yourselves to the class? Just so, very briefly, just tell us what you're doing and what your interests are basically.
you can do it in the text if you want sure yes i'll i'll go first here um just so i can also respond to what bruce is talking about so that echo effect comes from the fact that um ray it sometimes has to do with Ray's mute, I think, right? So that's why people mute Ray. But then right afterwards, he's got to unmute himself if he wants to talk. But I'm not hearing it right now. So wait. That's because my computer is muted. So is there an echo? Can everyone hear me just fine?
Yep. Cool. So I'll just say a couple things. I'm an adjunct instructor at Boise State University in Idaho, in South Idaho, So working on my master's degree, I wasn't planning on getting a master's at Boise State, but it just worked out that way because I'm more interested in experimental alternative living learning communities. And so I'm involved with one here in Boise, and that's what I do. My degree is in cultural criticism and design. and I teach a course on climate change for freshmen here. And I don't know, it seems like Marx is one of the most relevant things
for me to be studying right now. So thanks for having me. Okay, very good. Thanks. Okay, yeah, and Bruce, well, actually, I mean, maybe, yeah, everyone can see Bruce's little text okay that's that's fine that's fine thanks thanks Bruce okay good let's should I should I do an intro thingy as well yes Sorry, Ian, yes. No, no, sorry. Yes, by all means, yes. Thank you as well. Can everybody hear me okay?
I'm on the phone here. Excellent. So I did my BA in philosophy, pretty much did a master's in a program called Aesthetics and Politics, which is contemporary philosophy and critical theory. and I have this really vexed relationship right now with navigating between being interested in digital art and being a digital artist of sorts and working within philosophy and incorporating that into my work I find that when I get too heavy into the philosophy my mind gets sucked in and the institutional system sucks you in really deep and you don't have time and then when I get too heavy into the arts I find I'm not digging into the philosophy enough so I'm really interested in trying to create a practice where I can really work heavily within both fields and
incorporate them through some kind of digital interactive installation work. And the trajectory of philosophy that spawned, I suppose, from, you know, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and Ford into the present and the way it's influencing you, Ray, and many other people's work is really just important to me to dig into and better understand and and put into practice whether it's an art practice or some kind of socially relevant practice where images become powerful on a political level thank you okay thank you great Right, okay, so let's kick off today's session.
Now, I think last week, yes, last week I think we ended discussing relationship between ideology and productive forces in social relations. One of the things I want to suggest in terms of what Marx is doing vis-a-vis traditional philosophy is transforming the classical metaphysical understanding relationship between the sensible and the intelligible. or if you want the relationship between the sensible and the super sensible,
which is inaugural for philosophy. And what I think, one of the things he's doing, if one understands what his concept of the centuries is, as kind of inspired by Feuerbach, then I think that Marx's most radical proposal is that whereas in philosophy it's the you know the sensible that appears and the intelligible that is inapparent that somehow transcends the realm of the sensible Marx carries out an inversion so for Marx it's actually the
intelligible which appears and which is the you know the the elements of social self-consciousness. Whereas the sensible is precisely what is invisible or inapparent from the vantage points of ideological representation. In other words spontaneous consciousness or thinking systematically misrepresents or occludes the sensuous forces and relations that condition its own cognitive activity. So I think that's the first thing in Marx.
So for Marx, the sensuous is a domain of social production and reproduction. but this is exactly what is inapparent you know what is in a part in a fancy to ordinary social consciousness which is ideologically you know in valor so to speak so that's social consciousness is necessarily misrepresents social reality so that's and therefore that's why for marks the political economy is ideological through and through because political economy can only perceive you know the the sensuous reality of social productions
through this ideological lens which inverts and distorts its veritable character so already here in you know the economic and philosophical manuscripts and German ideology he's you know setting out his critique of political economy and what he has to do is first of all he has to kind of distinguish between in a way you know the centuries real and the what is ideologically ideal in order to kind of to frame his critical task vis-à-vis classical political economy because the categories in terms of which political economy has sought to understood society or social reality
are themselves are just simply kind of ideological projections. So here in the economic and philosophical manuscripts we see him trying to kind of not begin by taking phenomena like property, money, exchange as simply given. given, you know, as pre-existent determinations, he wants to kind of find a relation, a relational nexus that generates these categories. And for him, it's going to be labor. So for him,
labor or productive activity is what generates property, class, money, etc., etc. And all the categories with which classical political economy usually begins without asking for their how they've come to be generated and I think this interest in the conditions of Genesis the conditions of generation is you know important when one understands what Marx means by critique and what he means by the critique of political economy.
He wants to be able to show how the categories of political economy can have objective purport, they can be about the reality they claim to be describing, but his intervention consists demonstrating that they presuppose a reality that they occlude, that they hide or dissimulate. And that's the reality of labor. So we'll begin, so it's also in this, you know, this early stage that Marx talks the category of alienation is fundamental to Marx's analysis. Now this category I think is one that Marx inherits from Hegel via Feuerbach and the
term you know in both Marx and Feuerbach are kind of Hegelians in a large sense and in In Hegel, we have to understand that the word, what is ordinarily translated as alienation in Hegel's text, actually comprises two aspects, which is the aspect of externalization, which is the German word is enthouserung, and the aspect of estrangement, which corresponds to the German entfremdung. The point is that it's important to be aware that externalization and estrangement in a
way, it's not that they're not two different things, but they are two distinct facets of a movement. In Hegel it's consciousness that externalizes and estranges itself. Whereas in Marx, it's going to be labor or productive activity. So Marx begins his account in DPM with, he wants to, you know, his, the point of intervention for the critique of political economy will be what he calls the basic fact of political
economy, which is that, as he puts it, the worker becomes poorer, the richer is his production, or 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. Labor does not only produce commodities, it produces itself and the laborer as a commodity and that to the extent of which it produces commodities in general. And 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.
The product of labor is a labor that has solidified itself into an object, made itself into a thing, the objectification of labor. The realization of labor is its objectification. In a political economy, this realization of labor appears as a loss of reality for the worker, an objectification as a loss of the object or slavery to it, an appropriation as alienation, as externalization. political economy hides the alienation in the essence of labor by not considering the immediate relationship between the worker or labor and production. So Marx's analysis then is going to kind of distinguish four facets of the alienation of labor.
First, you know, the alienation of the product, the alienation of production, the alienation of species being, and then the alienation of worker and owner, or the laborer and the capitalist. So we're going to try to recapitulate how he distinguishes between these four. So first of all, there's an alienation of the worker or the producer from his product. The producer is alienated from her product. This is number two on the handout.
The worker puts his life into the object, and this means that it no longer belongs to him, but to the object. So the greater this activity, the more the worker is without an object. What the product of his labor is, that he is not. So the greater this product, the less he is himself. The externalization of the worker in his product implies not only that his labor becomes an object, an exterior existence but also that it exists outside him independent and alien and becomes a self-sufficient power opposite him that the life that he has lent to the object affronts him as hostile and alien so now a couple of things that are worth I think emphasizing here is that what
Obviously, throughout this account, Mark is talking about wage labor, and he's talking about commodity producing labor. And there's a complicated question to ask about whether, you know, how this kind of, you know, the alienation of labor originally occurs. If we understand that for Marx, although all, you know, alienation presupposes externalization, all externalization is alienating and it's important that in a way because
remember that Marxism materialism emphasizes practical activity so what he's saying is that you know labor is a mode of he was the fundamental modality of practical activity. But presumably he seems to be suggesting that not all productive activity is necessarily alienating. So it's the conditions under which this productive activity becomes alienated are what his account needs to explain. The other distinction that's important here and
it's only it only becomes fully ratified in capital is between use producing labor and value producing labor. So all practical activity is an externalization it produces something and what it produces is something that is useful something that is you know that has a function for human life but it's only under very under the conditions of you know generalized commodity production or a commodity, an economy and a society structure around commodity exchange,
that the useful products of labour are subordinated to value. In other words, that use-creating labour is subordinated to value-generating labour. So the distinction between externalization and estrangement corresponds to the distinction between use-creating labor and value-generating labor. But this distinction is not yet formalized in Marx's accounts at this stage, but it's being prefigured in a sense. But what he means basically is that the laborer who produces commodities does not own the
commodities that he or she has produced, precisely because he or she has to sell her labor power in order to produce commodities that are themselves, you know, exchangeable or that will, you know, are produced in order to be sold. So, but okay, that's just, let's get back to the, what Marx calls the immediate relationship between the producer, the production and the product. So in quote number three Marx writes, the immediate relationship of labor to its product is the relationship of the worker to the objects of his production.
So if the product of labor is externalization, production itself must be active externalization, the externalization of activity, the activity of externalization. The alienation of the object of labor is only the resume of the alienation or the externalization in the activity of labor itself. So in other words, here he seems to be saying that the alienation of the product of labor presupposes the alienated character of production as such. In other words, if the labor is alienated from her product, it's because her productive
activity is also alienated. And for Marx, the alienation of production or the alienation of this productive activity is attested to by the fact that as he puts it in the conditions of capitalism, labor is exterior to the worker, that is, it does not belong to his essence. Therefore, he does not confirm himself in his work, he denies himself, feels miserable instead of happy, deploys no free physical and intellectual energy, but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. thus the worker only feels a stranger he's at home when he is not working and when he works he is not at home his labor is therefore not voluntary but
compulsory forced labor is therefore not the satisfaction of a need but only a means to satisfy needs outside itself here again this is this sounds a little bit perplexing unless one remembers of what marks means is that you know The commodity producing labor is also a commodity, it's already commodified. In other words, the labor that produces commodities is itself a commodity which is sold to the employer, the capitalist, for a wage. And what underlies this is a kind of an alienation of labor, understood as productive activity,
because here the goal of productive activity is no longer imminent and intrinsic to that activity. In other words, what is the goal of this production is not something that is determined by the activity itself. It's not something that is, as Marx puts it, freely chosen or selected by the producer. And this is, in other words, the labor is obliged to work in order to live.
The activities, the productive activities that the labor engages in are not chosen, not selected according to needs and interests that he or she has chosen or desires, but they are imposed upon them by social conditions. In other words, we have to work in order to live. And so that when we are, you know, when we're working, we feel as if we are, you know, what it is we're doing and what it is we're producing is something over which we have no control in a sense. So now having, so these are the two aspects, alienation of the product and alienation of the productive activity.
And then Marx writes, this is number five on the handout. So Marx writes, so we have treated the active alienation of practical human activity or labor from two aspects. One, the relationship of the worker to the product of his labor as an alien object that has power over him. This relationship is at the same time the relationship to the sensuous exterior world and to natural objects as to an alien and hostile world opposed to him. And two, the relationship of labor to the active production inside labor. this relationship is the relationship of the worker to his own activity is something that is alien and does not belong to him it is activity that is passivity power that is weakness procreation that is castration the worker's own physical and intellectual energy his personal life
for what is life except activity as an activity directed against himself independent of him and not belonging to him. It is self-alienation as above it was the alienation of the object. So now, again what Marx is not kind of in the background of this whole account is, the fundamental question that Marx has raised yet is what, under what social conditions does this, does the productive activity which is fundamental to human existence become estranged from itself in this way?
That it, you know, this estrangement has a third aspect which is that it's an estrangement or an alienation from human species being which Marx defines as free conscious activity. This is number six. While alienated labor alienates one nature from man and man from himself, his own active function, his vital activity, it also alienates the species from man. It turns his species life into a means towards his individual life. Firstly, it alienates species life and individual life and secondly, in its abstraction, it makes the latter, i.e. individual life, into the aim of the former a species life which is also conceived of in its
abstract and alien form for firstly work vital activity and productive life itself appeared to man only as a means to the satisfaction of a need the need to preserve his physical existence but productive life is species life it is is life producing life. The whole character of a species, its generic character, is contained in its manner of vital activity. And free conscious activity is a species characteristic of man. Life itself appears merely as a means to life. And here, the footnote here is the long quotation which we actually looked at last week from the EPM,
from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, where Marx talks about the relationship between the human relationship to species life and the animal relationship to species life, and nature as man's inorganic body. But here I think the point he's making in number six is that when work becomes, when you have to work, when you have to work in order to live, life is estranged from itself. It's strange because this estrangement is symptomatic of a split between one's individual activity, the activities in which one engages as an individual, and the activities which
are characteristic of one's species being. It's a split between essence and existence in philosophical terminology. And this means that whereas species activity should be as an end in itself, productive activity is in a way kind of autothelic or self-governing. Once this alienation unfolds, then there's the goals for which we work and the goals that we're trying to satisfy in our labor are themselves merely means to an end, which is simply kind of survival or reproduction.
appears merely as a means to life as opposed to being an end in itself. So that's the third aspect. Now here, I'll skip open, seven, eights, seven, eights and nine are Marx are important because in a way they're Marx elaborating on what he thinks is the fundamental difference between human vital activity and animal vital activity and in number seven he says it's human vital activity is not immediately identical to any of his characterizations conscious vital activity differentiates man immediately from animal vital
activity it is this and this alone that make that makes man a species being he's only a conscious being that is his own life is an object to him precisely because he is a species being and this is the only reason for his activity being free activity. So the word free, the invocation of free conscious activity recurs frequently in these early texts. Can I ask a quick question? Yes. So it seems sometimes I'm confused about the different ways Marx uses the term consciousness, because I think in the German ideology, for example, so sometimes he's, you know, obviously denigrating consciousness kind of as and identifying it with ideology and superstructure.
and but in cases like this it sounds like he's sort of positing a more essential relationship between consciousness and productive activity as such and I'm wondering how how those two notions of consciousness fit together for him okay I think there's two okay I think the term activity is crucial here. I think he distinguishes between active consciousness, which he thinks is involved in all practical activity. All practical activity for Marx is conscious activity as doing something,
and consciousness as contemplation or as a passive registration or representation of some kind of distinct or external reality. So I think in a way, remember in his critique of Feuerbach, he's saying that even Feuerbach hasn't gone far enough in reintegrating consciousness and sensual life or sensual being. What he means by that is that philosophers have artificially kind of privileged theoretical consciousness or a kind of, if you want, a kind of knowing
that theoretical consciousness or representation or knowing that things are thus and so over what I think he would kind of characterize as a kind of practical consciousness or kind of knowing how or making or doing. So in other words, for Marx, there's a consciousness which is, you know, human beings are conscious in the sense that everything human beings, all the activities that human beings engage in are conscious activities. And they are conscious activities because they are social activities, which means that they are not instinctual. I think this is absolutely fundamental for Marx, isn't it? He thinks that social activities involve producing useful things, making and doing things that
are not simply determined by biological needs. So consciousness is involved in practical social activity because it involves selecting and engineering. Selecting goals and engineering means to satisfy those goals which are not simply mechanically determined by human biology or physiology so I think that's the consciousness in this sense just means you know consciousness is you know always necessarily accompanies practical social activity there is another sense
of consciousness which is consciousness consciousness is ideological which is merely he thinks in a way which is kind of blind to its own social practical preconditions and in a way understands itself and its world or represents its world in a way which you know occludes the practical productive aspect of its own practical productive preconditions so I think you know I mean
It's not, that's one way in which I think Marx would, I guess, ratify this distinction or in a way that kind of, you know, the positive and the negative sense of consciousness. So free conscious activity, free conscious activity is characteristic of human species being because human beings what human beings do the activities that human beings do they have are self-generated they are the human beings are engaged in executing tasks that they have fixed for themselves socially by this he means he simply means that they are not simply that these ends are not biologically determined.
But he means that the freedom, but in a sense, this freedom has never been properly realized. So in a way, the point about communism is that only communism can realize free conscious activity because every social formation hitherto has in a way it kind of you know it presupposes you know it decouples you know um instinct from um you know from voluntary you know or intentional activity, but there's always a residual automatism or, you know, there's a kind of a social,
you know, reinstatement of the mechanical or the automatic because of the ways in which human beings, because human productive activity itself is strange and generates social arrangements which inhibits the uh the definitive realization of this um of this free conscious activity um does this i mean thanks yeah yeah that helps one quick follow-up so so this the version of consciousness free autonomous activity of productive force is a pretty it's a pretty like
robust thing um and he i'm interested in how he feels justified and kind of positing it um as opposed to something like the way hegel attempts to derive it you know from a sort of presuppositionless beginning i mean i get he sort of associates that kind of hegelian move with the other kind of consciousness um sort of ideological but but like there's still something fuzzy to me about his sense of how I guess what right you know quit jurists or whatever what he has to take define conscious you know correct that can be in this way yes okay that's very good okay so now we're getting I mean this is
I think at the base really this is why in a way those you know no kind of Marxists who want to say, for instance, you know, Althussians, but not only Althussians will want to say that there's, in a way that this young Marx is still too philosophical, in a way the way in which he, you know, if he's simply positing this kind of free conscious activity as coextensive with social production and as the kind of, you know, the sine qua non for all other kind of cognition, then this seems to be, it still seems to be like a metaphysical move or a dogmatic move.
And the danger here, and it's true that there is, it does this, you know, in a way the kind of you know it's this young Marx here in a way he he almost invites a metaphysical temptation to say that the essence that man is basically a producer you know that you simply say that the essence of of being human is to produce but to produce you know freely and consciously as opposed to produce in accordance with physical or biological kind of mechanisms. But this would still be a completely metaphysical characterization of species being or human
essence which is why when it comes by, by the time it comes to capital I think Marx in a way the kind of the activity that I mentioned of the distinction between use creating labor and value creating labor is itself only kind of you know can only be elaborated from the vantage point of analysis of capital and of in fact that you know labor is itself value generating labor is already kind of subsumed by the value
form is already kind of you know commodified and use creating labor you which is labor that is no longer subordinated to the wage relation and no longer subordinates to the production of commodities, it's impossible to give a positive characterization of it because there are no uses in themselves. If all the uses created by human labor are socially immediate, depend on historically variable conditions, then it's impossible to specify a domain of use in itself, which
means that Marx can't specify the distinction between use-creating labour and value-creating labor in terms of he can't give a positive characterization of what you labor is or what or or the uses that can be confidently distinguished from mere commodified values okay and this is where you know and I think that you know in capital this is why Marx doesn't believe in you know there are it's not as if he's saying that there is a kind of you can read off you know the the purposes you know the functions and the uses which are proper to human labor
okay there's no if you did that if you naturalize use or function you're making a metaphysical move and I think that's and I think this is a danger that Marx has to kind of stave off and I think in a way he's bringing in species being here when he talks about man produces universally what he means is that human productive capacity is not biologically or even kind of it's not economically constrained he's saying that this is the characteristic of human productive capacity is that there's nothing that human beings can't
engineer or generate because they have the you know they can you know we mime all the kind of the forms of expertise exhibited by other species. Now, but at this stage, he still has to, as you just pointed out, that claim sounds very metaphysical. It just sounds as if this is just a stipulation. The claim that man produces universally seems to be just like a kind of a metaphysical stipulation. And I think what Marx has to say in order to make this not be a metaphysical claim is that with capitalism, human productive capacity has reached a stage where human beings can
transform nature and can transform themselves. In other words, it's the, in a way it's kind of, it dissolves all hitherto established horizons of possibility of productive functioning. So in other words, what human beings, human productive capacity comes into its own and is because it's socialized, it's socialized under the conditions of capital and private property but nevertheless it's socialized in a way which opens up which you know you know and we can have implies in negative this universal productive capacity this is why I
think that's you know this is a sense in which I think capitalism and the capitalist mode of production is the precondition for the communist mode of production. And this is also why the communist mode of production can't be positively characterized because it can only be negatively anticipated because we can't yet imagine what productive will be realized once we abolish the capital relation, the commodity form and wages, etc. So I think you put your finger on a crucial issue here so that what is still at this third
stage in Marx, in a way he has to kind of use a quasi-metaphysical vocabulary, but I I think he knows, I mean, I think it's a mistake to think that he is committing himself metaphysically. I think he hasn't yet kind of worked out all the kind of the analytical resources he needs to be able to kind of to make the point he wants to make without this kind of metaphysical rhetoric. So I think that's what, well, that's my kind of interpretation. Thank you very much, that's very helpful. Okay, so now, okay, so just, yes, so eight and nine are basically reiterating this point
about, you know, man producing universally. So this alienation of, you know, the alienation of the individual from the species, or in In a way, it's also the kind of the alienation of particular purposes, particular functions and purposes from species functions and purposes. So number four is the final, so we've had the alienation of the product, alienation of production, alienation of the individual and the species, and finally, number four, the alienation of worker and employer, alienation of man from man.
In other words, the fundamental class stratification. So in number 10, Marx writes, so alienated labor makes a species being of man, both nature and the intellectual faculties of his species into a being that is alien to him, into a means for his individual existence. It alienates from man his own body, nature exterior to him and his intellectual being, his human essence. Four, an immediate consequence of man's alienation from the product of his work, his vital activity and his species being is the alienation of man from man. When man is opposed to himself, it is another man that is opposed to him. What is valid for the relationship of a man to his work of the product of his work and himself is also valid for the
relationship of man to other men and of their labor and the objects of their labor so he continues number 11 so the alien being to whom the labor and the product of the labor belongs whom the labor serves and who enjoys its product can only be man himself it's a product of labor does not belong to the worker but stands over against him as an alien power, this is only possible in that it belongs to another man apart from the worker. And if his activity torments him, it must be a joy and a pleasure to someone else. This alien power above man can be neither the gods nor nature, only man himself. Consider further the above sentence that the relationship of man to himself
first becomes objective and real to him through his relationship to other men. So if he relates to the product of his labor, his objectified labor, as to an object that is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of him, this relationship implies that another man is the alien, hostile, powerful, and independent master of this object. If he relates to his own activity as to something unfree, it is a relationship to an activity that is under the domination, oppression, and yoke of another man. So what Marx is trying to do is deducing the four kind of facets of a capitalist commodity
producing society. alienation of the product, alienation of the activity, alienation of, in a way, alienation of means and ends, that's what the alienation of species being implies, and finally the alienation of, in a way, the social relation itself, because human beings, because now you know that the labor is producing something that belongs to someone else because both the labor is productive activity and the product of that activity are owned by someone who isn't you know who isn't engaged in that in
in producing anything. And so Marx's claim now is that private property is a product of alienated labor. So that it's only through this estrangement of labor from itself that private property is generated. So he writes in 12, through alienated labor man creates not only his relationship to the object in active production as to alien and hostile men he creates to the relationship in which other men stand to his production and his product and the relationship in which he stands to these other men and again he writes the relationship of the worker to his labor creates the relationship to it of the capitalist or whatever else one wishes to call the master
of the labor private property is thus the product result a necessary consequence of externalized labor of the exterior relationship of the worker to nature and to himself now this is now there's a couple of things this is a puzzling passage actually and if one thinks about the logic of Marx's account it becomes a little bit kind of baffling what because of what we're saying here is that alienated labor creates private property but then at the same time it seems that private property is a
precondition for the alienation of labor in other words because the condition under which the laborer sells his labor to another human in order to produce a commodity, from whose sale the capitalist will derive a profit, well it seems that this already presupposes the institution of private property. In a sense, the question is how is it that the capitalist is able to own both the product
and the productive activity of the laborer? How is the capitalist able to kind of, you know, to buy this activity and its products? And this is something that is, I think this is something that will, I think, only becomes really kind of explicit in capital. The point is that the labor that is being sold to the capitalist is already a property,
it's already an item of property. And in fact, as Marx will put it, what the worker is selling to the capitalist is her labor power. And her labor power therefore becomes commodified in the wage relation. It seems that the condition, so the question is do the conditions, don't the conditions of commodification already presuppose the institution of private property? And if so, how can labor be the precondition for private property? And I think what's going on here, in order to kind of, I think the distinction between
externalization and estrangement can be useful here. Because I think the claim is that, you know, so labor, all labor, all productive activity is an externalization. But this, under certain kind of social conditions, this externalization gives rise to a social relation in which what is produced or generated by this activity is estranged from it. And the estrangement, you know, must, the question is how does externalization generate
its own estrangement or its own self-estrangement? And this is the question about the genesis of the capital relation. The capital relation being the relationship between the capitalist and the worker. capitalist who owns the means of production and the worker who only owns her labor power as the only commodity she has to sell. And therefore it's under these conditions that in a way the labor is obliged to sell her labor power in order to live because you have to work, you have to sell your labor power in order to be able to live and in order to be able to do anything else.
So, I think that Marx is saying that this, in a way that the logic of Marx's accounts implies understanding how externalization creates an object or a set of objects which then prevents this productive activity, this externalizing activity from being autonomous. It becomes heteronormous, it becomes subordinated to extrinsic or alien purposes.
But what's unclear here is how, or at least in quotation number 12, it's how, yeah, in a way the kind of the wage relation must already be in place in order for this, you know, the self-estrangement of productive activity to occur and what we need so the question is is it actually possible in other words if you a metaphysical reading of Marx I think would understand this
we're trying to kind of understand this relationship causally okay in terms of externalization causing its own estrangement but I think there is no causal relationship here I think the the conditions under which externalization it becomes self-estranging, presuppose an entire system of social relations of which labor is only a component.
So in other words, I think that if you try to make labor the ultimate generating force, the ultimate determinant for all the other kind of, for the nature of productive forces, also for social relations and things like property and money etc you run into well the risk is that you know you can't but turn it into a metaphysical power and I think that's part of what the know but when Marx comes to write capital he
He understands that labor cannot be abstracted entirely from the capital relation and that the unestrange labor or labor that are autotelic labor, which sets its own ends, is something that can only be negatively characterized. It's merely a shadow cast by the wage relation, which is subsumed, which is a function of the value form at this stage. So I think, in other words, I think that the great, the metaphysical temptation is to think
that labor generates its own self-estrangement in and by itself. But if you did that, I think you'd end up with a completely idealist account, kind of a mess of physical account. And I think in order to understand the relationship between use creating, let's say, free productive activity and alienated labor you need to understand how the relationship is mediated by value where value is something that isn't in a way that is
that is generated by a system of activities which can't be classified as labor. So what I'm saying in a very roundabout sense is that I think that Marx will continue to say that kind of productive activity generates capital, the capital relation, value, money, commodities, class, etc. But the way in which it generates them can be understood if you
abstract labor from its relation to value. In other words, it's a mistake to turn labor into a kind of self-generating or self-moving principle or to absolutize labor basically. So in other words, I think that essence is not, sorry, that labor is not the essence of human existence for Marx. And I think that the productive capacities that he thinks or distinctive of human beings, in a way can't even be adequately characterized in terms of labor, because labor itself is an abstraction.
And the temptation is to reify it and to turn it into this force, into this kind of force or agency which is invariant through human history. And I think that this is what Marx wants to avoid doing. Anyway, so this is a... I apologize, I mean this is not as clear as it could have been. I think that... So Marx wants to put labor at the center of the analysis. and he wants to show how property and class are consequences of productive activity or labour but at this stage I think he doesn't have all the kind of the conceptual resources
he needs to be able to do that properly and the danger is that you end up absolutizing labour as this kind of force, as this metaphysical force which in a way which becomes a strange from itself and then returns into itself and achieves its full potency in communism. I think if you read Marx in that way, then this is the classical, kind of metaphysical reading of Marx, which I think lots of critics, lots of Marxists have criticized. In a way, it's how not to understand the logic of externalization and strangeness. Because all you're doing then is you're simply replacing a metaphysically conceived consciousness
with a metaphysically conceived labor, which I think is not the good way to understand Marx. Okay, now I'm just going to go on to, yes, wage labour is alienated labour. The contradiction, so in number 13, monetised policy economy starts from labour as a veritable soul of production and yet it attributes nothing to labour and everything to private property. Trudeau has drawn a conclusion from this contradiction that is favorable to labor and against private property. But we can see that this apparent contradiction is the contradiction of alienated labor with itself and that political economy has only expressed the laws of alienated labor.
We can therefore also see that wages and private property are identical. For wages in which the product, the object of the labor, remunerates the labor itself are just a necessary consequence of the alienation of labor. Wages are an immediate consequence of alienated labor and alienated labor is the immediate cause of private property. Now, it's this, I think that the term immediate cause is problematic here and I think it's not clear that, you know, it's the appropriate expression to use at this stage. But the simple point is simply that the wage relation itself is coextensive with alienated
labour. So the idea of simply having equal wages, Proudhon's proposal, the idea that the emancipation of labor is merely the kind of the equalization of wages, you know, a fair wage for everyone, is completely inadequate and unsatisfactory because it perpetuates this kind of the structural alienation which is constitutive of the wage relation. And finally, this is why Marx writes in 14, the general human emancipation is contained
in the emancipation of laborers. It's contained within it because the whole of human slavery is involved in the relationship of the worker to its product. And all slave relationships are only modifications and consequences of this relationship. So this is why communism can only be understood as the abolition of wage labor as a form of slavery. Then the question is, is it also the abolition of labor as such? I think that Marx's answer will be yes,
because it's the abolition of labor, of all value creating labor. But all the uses that labor has generated in societies dominated by commodity production are indissociable from relations of commodification. So in other words, so again, it's not possible to give a positive characterization of what's purely useful labor would be if wholly dissociated from valuable labor or wage labor. Okay, so now we'll return to the German ideology.
So, in the German ideology, Marx has a very interesting, it's one of the few places where he gives a kind of characterization of communism in terms of the overcoming of these estrangements or the set of estrangements that are coextensive with wage labor. So he writes, for instance, the estrangement of general interest and individual interest is the condition for the generation of the state. So he writes, just because individuals seek only their particular interest, which for them does not coincide with their common interest, the latter, i.e. the common interest is asserted
as an interest alien to them and one independent of them, as in its turn a particular and distinctive general interest, or they themselves must remain within this discourse, within this discord as in democracy so what he's saying is that the distinction between the individual interest and the the general interest which is a precondition for the the institution of the state the state is there to reconcile the individual interest and the general interest but this is itself you know a a symptom of alienation, it's more of alienated, self-alienated labor.
And in 16 he writes, the division of labor offers us the first example of the fact that as long as man remains in naturally evolved society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long therefore his activity is not voluntarily but naturally divided, man's own deeds becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the division of labor comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, a critical critic, and must remain so
if he doesn't want to lose his means of livelihood. Whereas in a communist society where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow. To hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner just as I have a mind without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. So again this is what's significant here is the claim that you know what's the problem with the division of labor is that it allocates you know specific tasks or in a way it kind of typifies
productive activity according to social goals which are not you know which in a way are stipulated by a ruling class either by the state or the ruling class so that once again so that you know productive activity becomes it becomes stereotyped and reified in a way which inhibits its full realization. And this is, in a way, this is what it is, it estranges the collective power of human
producer, our collective social capacity from our individual capacities. So he writes in 17, this fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into a material power above us, growing out of our control, sorting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up until now. The social power, the multiplied productive force, which arises through the cooperation of different individuals, as it is caused by the division of labor, appears to these individuals, since their cooperation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not
as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside of them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant and which they thus are no longer able to control which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independence of the will and the action of man they even the even being the prime governor of these so once again yes this is the social social power you know what he calls this multiplied productive force presupposes cooperation but in a way
the estranged labor because it generates private property and therefore the division between the owner, the capitalist and the worker, and the ensuing class stratification, it's in a way it mechanizes the structure of social cooperation and it subordinates this cooperation to private interests or to the interests of a particular or privileged class. So this is simply yet another kind of manifestation of this estrangement, another consequence
of the self-estrangement of productive activity. So therefore, the human productive activity generates a social structure to which it then becomes subordinated and which prevents it from being self-governing or autonomous. Okay, and now finally… Yes. Shall we make a pause? Sorry. Yes, would you like to have a pause? And then I just want, there's just a couple more things on the handout I just want to go through, but we can pause now.
No, if you want to go on. Would people like to have a pause now or to get to the end of the handout and then have a pause before the discussion? Okay. Anyone else? let me see there's only I think okay yeah I think it's only one more page well actually
three pages but I'll move quick quickly so as you know we should be done in like you know less than 10 minutes okay so this is number eight sorry 18 proletarization is world historical this is true so this is marks this estrangement can of course only be abolished given two practical premises in order to become an unendurable power a power against which men make a revolution it must necessarily have
rendered the great mass of humanity property lists and moreover in contradiction to an existing world of wealth and culture and both these premises presuppose a great increase in productive power a high degree of its development and on the other hand this development of productive forces which at the same time implies the actual empirical existence of men in their work historical instead of local being is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it privation or want is merely made general and with want the struggle for necessities would begin again and all the old filthy business would necessarily be restored and furthermore because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established
which on the one side produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the propertyless mass or universal competition making each nation dependent on the revolutions of the other and finally puts world historical empirically universal individuals in place of local ones now okay this is it's important because i think this is um to connect up to kind of a point i was was trying to make previously is that I think that Marx's suggestion here is that the, in a way, it's the capitalist mode of production is what realizes the socialization of labor.
In a way, it's the mass production and the creation of the world markets and the kind of the co-option of the entirety of humanity into the wage relation is precisely what the precondition for communism. Because it's under capitalism that the productive forces reach a kind of a pitch of development, which is historically unprecedented, which obviously kind of brings about the systematic
disempowerment of an entire class, of the working class, who basically are obliged to work in order to live. As the globalization draws the whole of humanity into the wage relation and brings about universal proletarization. So the distinction there, so therefore the whole of humanity becomes structured in terms of the distinction between capitalists and proletarians or capitalists and workers between those who own the means of production and
those who can only buy and sell things if they sell their labour. You have to sell their labour power to the capitalists in order to be able to buy what they need in order to exist. So the claim here is that this kind of estrangement has to kind of in a way be radicalized or has to kind of reach this kind of extremity. This proletariat has to kind of be reduced to having nothing but their labor power to sell in order for communism to be possible and so as in number 19 this is
why he suggests that the world market is the world historical condition for the existence of communism communism understood as a real movement and not an ideal condition so now just in that he writes the proletariat can thus only exist world historically just as communism and sectivity can only have a a world historical existence. The world historical existence of individuals, i.e. the existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history. Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the now existing premise.
So the now existing premise is capitalism and the kind of the capitalist world market, which ushers in the proletarianization of the entire human population. And it's important, this is why it's a real movement. Communism is a real movement because the movement of estrangement, or the dynamic of externalization and estrangement, reaches an extremity which for Marx will necessarily precipitate a transformation,
a revolutionary transformation. So, and this is really, the quote number 20 is really just kind of, you know, reiterating this claim. I just want to draw your attention to the kind of, towards the bottom of this passage where Marx writes, The communist revolution is directed against the hitherto existing mode of activity, does away with labor and abolishes the rule of all classes along with the classes themselves because it's carried through by the class which no longer counts as a class in society,
which is not recognized as a class and is in itself the expression of the dissolution of all classes, classes nationalities within present society it's precisely because proletariatization is the dissolution of every other positive determinized positive determinized determination is uh you know creates the class which has um you know which will expropriate the expropriators as Marx puts it and abolish labor as such, which I think is very important, will do away with labor and therefore the, by which I think he means
and because as I've suggested, use creating labor can be positively characterized in complete abstraction from value-creating labor under capitalist conditions, the communism is the abolition of labor, the abolition of labor and in a way the kind of inauguration of a kind of activity which can't be understood in terms of as labor has been understood up until now. he distinguishes also between three forms of communism. Crude communism is still governed by private property.
This is number 21. So this is Marx's critique of Crude On, where he says that communism isn't just the generalization of the category of the worker. Communism is not making everyone work and equalizing wages. he says, as Marx puts it, this communism is merely the consistent expression of private property which is just this negation, negating the personality which is to say the kind of the unique productive capacity of each individual insofar as it's commensurate with human species being. Crude communism is universal envy setting itself up as a power and it's the concealed
form of greed which merely asserts itself and satisfies itself in another way. The second form of communism is still political in nature whether democratic or despotic and be with the abolition of the state, abolishes the state but is still incomplete and still under the influence of private property. Now, he doesn't elaborate on the contrast between the first and the second form of communism. But he says, it is still imprisoned and contaminated by private property. It has understood its concept, but not yet its essence,
By which I think he means its essence as created by self-estranged labor. And finally, communism, you know, in the proper and kind of the authentic sense, is the abolition of private property and of human self-alienation, but I think also the abolition of labor. the abolition of, in a way, the distinction between valuable labor and useful labor as we currently understand it. And then this is another very famous passage, but I just want to point, you know, I'll just read the section in bold.
It's a genuine solution of the antagonism between man and nature, between man and man, the true solution of the struggle between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution to the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution. The whole movement of history, therefore, both as regards the real engendering of communism, birth of its empirical existence and also as regards its consciousness and thought is the consciously comprehended process of its becoming. This is why the movement of history is the consciously comprehended process of the becoming of communism.
okay I'll stop here why don't we stop now have a you know a five minute break and then maybe if we come back I guess let's see at 10 to 7 shall we start back at 10 to 7 OK, yep, let's start back at 10 to 7. Hello? Hello? Sorry, he was out. He was out. I was washing my hands. I was washing my hands.
Are we on pause? Are we on pause? Yes, yes, we're having a break. We'll start back in the afternoon. We'll start back in the afternoon. We'll start back in the afternoon. We'll start back in the afternoon. We'll start back in the afternoon. We'll start back in the afternoon. We'll start back in the afternoon. We'll start back in the afternoon. We'll start back in the afternoon. We'll start back in the afternoon. We'll start back in the afternoon. We'll start back in the afternoon. We'll start back in the afternoon. We'll start back in the afternoon. We'll start back in the afternoon. We'll start back in the afternoon. at 10 to 7. Okay. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Thank you.
Hello? Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? Hello? Yes, we hear you. Yes, we hear you. Yes, we hear you. Yes? Still on a break. Still on a break. Okay. Okay. Shall we start again? Shall we start again? I think we're still... ... we're still... ... we're still... ... we're still... ... we're still... ... we're still... ... we're still... ... we're still... ... we're still... ... we're still... ... we're still... There's still, I said until 10.02, so I think there's a couple more minutes to go. Yeah. I mean, whatever, you know, I think some people might still be kind of taking a break.
um a bit overwhelmed by what's happening in italy right now right now oh what's uh i haven't seen what is happening the fascist started shooting in a city in the market For racial motives. Oh wow. No, I haven't seen the news. It's on the Guardian. Oh yes, I see, yes.
Yes. in that passage of the German ideology where you said all the old filthy businesses hello? can you hear me? I can hear you where you said all the old filthy businesses I think in the original version it said all the old shit which is I mean it's significant of the way Marx wrote his books because he used a very colorful language and it's also symptomatic
of the way he treated capitalist society because he treated it like the same old shit it's something that is decomposing and that has to be overcome in order not to get decomposed the human being this is something that I wanted to say just as a little particular about marks. That's all. I have a question, but I think I can't see your mouth, Dr. Brassier, but if you're talking,
you can't hear me. No, it's okay. Go ahead. All right, so – go ahead and mute you guys, but I'm not echoing. Okay. My question is – I'm wondering, from what I understand, Marx and Engels were rather hostile against socialist, communitarian, sort of communal living movements. and did not think that worker-placed democracy would be good enough of an alternative to fix or ameliorate capitalism.
But I'm wondering, when we talk about alienated labor, how to put this? There's unpaid labor. That's the surplus labor. That creates a surplus value. The surplus value, it always has to be unpaid because some of that has to go into the research and development of the means of production, and obviously some of that goes into the capitalist's pockets as well. um but what would would it be true that um if if the worker was getting uh was gaining ownership of the means of production um somehow yeah i don't know there's probably
different ways that this could be done but they're slowly gaining ownership the longer there in the company um what could it be done in proportion to the um wages they're not or to the the labor they're not being paid and in that case would it still be alienated and i can rephrase that question if that doesn't make sense but um hopefully that's clear enough and you're muted No, I was just saying no, the question makes sense. I think I understand the question. About surplus labour and surplus value, okay, so it's important that this is absolutely
kind of central to Marx's entire account. In fact, it's what, you know, exploitation is the extraction of surplus value from the wage relation. So the point is that the worker necessarily creates more value than they are remunerated for when they enter into the wage relation. So this surplus labor, unremumerated labor is a source of surplus value which is the source of profit which is absolutely kind of, in a way, which is the motor of the core
of what Marx calls the valorization process. Capital is kind of self-valorization. However, this unpaid labor, it's unpaid wage labor and it's unpaid commodified labor. And in that sense, remember the labor that enters, the labor from which surplus value is extracted is abstract labor, which is labour which is simply kind of measured in terms of socially necessary abstract labour term.
abstract meaning that you abstract from all the specific characteristics or qualities or skills that distinguish individual instances of concrete labor in reality. So in other words, So the labor that produces value, that generates value is abstract and is necessarily abstract. So that means, so the second part of your question was, well you said well if the workers owned, let's say, the factory, would they no longer be exploited?
But in a sense, they would be exploiting themselves. The exploitation relation would no longer have, in other words, they would be performing in two different roles. They would themselves be both capitalists and laborers. And in fact, that's a general condition now in kind of contemporary capitalist society in that lots of people exploit their own labor. So they both act as laborers, as proletarians, and as capitalists. but they're still perpetuating the social arrangements and the social structures which, you know, for which exploitation is general. So in other words, I don't think the solution for Marx wouldn't be to get – it's not – the point is not – first of all, you can't –
the socialization of the means of production means that you can't have any private ownership. So whether it's a single capitalist or a hundred workers, you still have private ownership of the means of production. And even if the entire proletariat takes hold, appropriates the means of production, expropriates the capitalist class, this is still not the end of exploitation because this is still property. In a way, it's just generalized private property.
So I think, in the passage we just discussed, this is exactly what Marx thinks is wrong with what he calls crude communism. It wants to kind of, it doesn't understand the relationship between alienated labor and property and the wage form. And the abolishment of one entails the abolition of the others. So this is why the socialization of labor and the collective ownership of the means of production is only the first step.
The second step is the abolition of wage labor and therefore of private property. So I think, yes, so in a way I think that Marx thinks that these are, look, it's not, okay I don't know, I'm not an expert on Marx's relationship to other socialists and anarchists etc. and labour struggles. I think that Marx's points and, you know, I think Marx thinks that kind of labor struggles are important, but he thinks that merely, you know, obviously kind of the shortening of the working day,
the institution of like, you know, the five-day working week, you know, the kind of the raising of salaries, you know, these are, you're merely palliating the symptoms, but you're not really treating, you know, the cause, the root source of exploitation. So for him, of course he's saying, you know, in a way you have to kind of, you shouldn't stop doing these things because, you know, so long as capitalism exists, there's a very real difference between, you know, mere exploitation and actual kind of, you know, miserable degradation.
But the horizon, you can't simply operate on this level. Otherwise, you can't give up on the revolutionary transformation, he thinks. So I think, as I understand it, I might be wrong about this, as I understand it, socialism is a phase that will eventually usher in communism, or is supposed to, but it's clearly not quite, it's not communism. So however desirable socialism might be in the short term, it can't be kind of an end in itself because in a way it merely palliates this kind of general,
you know, what Marx here calls this kind of the self-estrangement of labor, but also exploitation. And one thing, exploitation for Marx is not oppression. Exploitation is a structural determination you can be exploited uh no matter how much you get paid or you know how few hours you work it's just a characteristic it's a structural characteristic of capitalist existence and in this regard you know it's got nothing to do with alienation for Marx is not a kind of a psychological state. An exploitation can
simply be measured in terms of things like domination or repression, which is not to say that Marx doesn't want to abolish domination or repression, but he thinks that abstract domination under capitalism is sometimes imperceptible, only works through exploitation, which, you know, exploitation can feel very nice, you know, you can be very happy and still be exploited and alienated in Marx's sense. And I think he thinks so long as you're, if you're only considering improving the lot of segments of the population, then you're not engaged in communism understood as the
project of human emancipation, too cool, without phase or qualification. I don't know if this answers your question. So I think these kinds of ventures, I mean it would be I think silly and kind of counterproductive to kind of object to them, but they have to be part of a strategy it seems to me. These kinds of, so you know, workers taking control of their conditions of production, is fine, very good, but it's only a kind of, surely it's only a kind of, can't be the
ultimate goal. So that all makes a lot of sense. Would you just say that the part of the reason it doesn't go far enough though is just because no business that operates in a capitalist system can be isolationist? right you live in a world a fully globalized world where you are necessarily going to have to compete with other people who don't have to play nice oh you're muted um yes i think um you know marx once insisting he's he thinks that capitalist is a totality
so it can only be understood as a kind of as a social totality and he thinks that's no i mean it's no it was it was beginning to be true when he was writing you know the world market was emerging but now you effectively have a fully integrated world market where um no aspect no kind of fragments of the market can be kind of segregated or artificially segregated or kind of you know abstracted from any other so that all they're all interdependent and all these these circuits of commodity production and exchange and distribution they're all interconnected and
interdependent. So, you know, apart from the obvious things that, you know, kind of, you know, the amounts of kind of mass produced, you know, kind of goods are manufactured in China now, or in Southeast Asia, so that any commodity that you own depends on the wage labor of proletarians in other parts of the world, you know, with whom you may never have come into contact. In a way, but the point is that you are connected to them because you're just, as soon as you buy and sell commodities, whether you engage in the kind of commodity production or commodity exchange, in a way, you are embedded in these kind of relations of exploitation.
And Marx's point is, he says, you can't grasp this phenomenon logically. You have to kind of use the resources of abstraction to grasp the concrete social conditions, which conditions your daily activity. Everything you do on a daily basis, you're engaged in buying and selling commodities from the moment you rise to the moment you go to bed and even when you're sleeping you can be kind of engaged in a commodity exchange. And the point is that all this activity involves the realization, what he calls the exchange
abstraction, commensuration of all these different types and species of labor. And this is something that you're doing, whether you, you know, independently of your psychological awareness or the kind of information that you have access to. I think this is why, it's a point I was trying to make last week, is that we don't know what it is we're doing. In a capitalist society, we're engaged in exchanging and producing value and consuming
kind of you know use values but we don't really know what it is we're doing and so that there's a kind of this structural unconscious that conditions are our existence and it's necessarily unconscious because it's social and this involves a kind of a scale of complexity which is in a way kind of necessarily unfathomable and inaccessible at the personal or individual level. So this is why, and this is what the word revolution means, a structural transformation for Marx. It's not, you know, we'll see later on,
This is why I think that the conditions under which there would be a revolution now have changed fundamentally, and this is why it's not possible, I think, to conceive of it using the scales that were previously, in terms of previous political revolutions unfolded. you think of like a punctual event you think of 1789 or 1917 the the revolution that abolishes capitalism would i think you know take centuries not just years or decades but centuries so the question is what kinds of is how does one kind of engage in a task of that magnitude
And yeah, I mean, I think that's the fundamental problem. else want to or i don't know if that was a satisfactory response um that was great that was great thank you would anyone else um like to ask something on clarification anything um
I did want to say there's something, there's one short thing I wanted to say, as I kind of summing up in terms of like, you know, the content on today's handouts. So, you know, we started with this whole kind of alienation, you know, and then discussed kind of communism or the ushering in of communism. And in the final quote, I mean, in quote 23, the final quotation on the handout. So I think this kind of passage invites, I think, a conservative reading of Marx where communism would be,
because he says communism is the complete and conscious return of man, conserving all the riches of previous development for man himself as a social human being. or when he talks about communism as the real reappropriation of the human essence behind for man, I think the temptation here is to think of alienation in metaphysical terms as being… So you have this kind of, you know, if labor becomes alienated under capitalism, and communism is the de-alienation of labor, then, you know, communism as in this, I think this as in the
bad metaphysical readings of Hegel is this kind of return or reunification or reintegration of a sundered, you know, of an organic unity or a wholeness that has somehow been split or sundered. But I think this is exactly what Marx doesn't mean because I think, as I've said before, because labor, you know, the essence of labor understood as useful or use creating labor cannot be positively characterized in an abstraction from specific forces and relations of production,
then there's no such thing as labor in itself or an essence of labor, which is kind of estranged under capitalism and then is reunited and reunified under communism. I think this is a kind of a bad metaphysical reading of Marx, which in a way naturalizes labor as the essence of human existence. And I think Marx's point is that what he means, although he talks about reappropriation and return, what he means is that the, you know, I don't think, it's not kind of reinstate, it's not the kind of the reestablishment of, you know, a unified essence.
it's actually the kind of the initiation of the beginning of something unprecedented. It's actually the destruction of something that prevented this human species being or you know human productive capacity from actualizing itself from being actual so and I think what he's saying is that it's never really existed but capitalism you know in a way provides the conditions under which it can be brought into existence by negating the negation
So capitalism is the negation of this essence, this productive capacity, but it's a mistake to think that this productive capacity pre-exists its negation in and through capitalism. So the negation of the negation is actually what constitutes the essence understood as a positive productive capacity. um i mean what you know the point i'm making here is the kind of you know basically zizekian points okay how um the points you know for him is that there's not uh what has been negated you know
in the allegedly initial negation didn't pre-exist its negation so that the negation of the negation is not the reinstatement of an original state of affairs, this kind of prelapsarian harmony, but it's actually the negation of a constraint, a negative determination of something that can be that is only you know positively actualized through this you know this second negation or negation of the negation and this is what I think Marx means by communism communism is a determinate negation of capitalism and
capitalism is self-alienated labor but not remarks does not think that there was this originally kind of you know pre-lapsarian state where human beings existed in perfect harmony what labor was in harmony with itself and with nature I mean I think that that is you know a really bad metaphysical reading of Marx and I think that his whole point the reason why you know it's the history begins with communism is because you know we don't yet know what human beings are capable of what human beings can actually create and produce and capitalism is gives us a negative
inkling of what they can produce but what has to be done is to kind of not to to destroy capitalism in order to you know to unleash this productive capacity this unprecedented productive capacity which capitalism has in a way prepared but also prevented I think yes David has a quotation here yes Marx himself says as much I think do
not do not let us go back to fictitious primordial conditions a political economist does when he tries to explain so in other words there is no unalienated labor is not like this originary, you know, this kind of a Edenic state, like, you know, prior to the kind of, you know, the fall. And I think, but I think the problem that Marx has initially at this stage is that he can't help but kind of the very way in which he talks about labor, labor as both externalizing self-externalizing and self-estrangement almost invites this in a way
this hypostatization of labor which is which for Marx is always embedded in a social relation so kind of a set of what is labor is a set of productive practices which are always kind of socially embedded And this is why, yeah, once again, just to reiterate the same point, that there is no domain of use in itself. Because all the purposes which our practices seek to realize are always historically and socially mediated. And Marx is just saying that it's possible to...
Communism will usher in conditions under which practical conditions, which do away with all the impediments to the previous social impediments to the realization of our practical capacities. There's a question here. Is it possible that the initial negation has a danger of being read in a metaphysical light as well? You mean that the initial negation, you mean the, capitalism's negation of in a way of use creating labor is that what you have in
mind um yes and in a way if you think that capitalism if one thinks that capitalism is eternal or necessary or has always already existed then that's also a metaphysical kind of you know, hypostatization. And you know, here this is the problem about you know, kind of synchrony and diachrony. Marx is a historical materialist, he insists that there's a kind of you know, the capitalist mode of production is one
you know of a series, you know there's a kind of a feudal mode of production, but the point is that there isn't, you know, as we said I think last week, is that it's not simply, you can't simply string modes of production next to one another in a historical sequence. So the conditions under which capitalism emerges, you know, Marx tries to say something about this in the discussion of primitive accumulation at the end of Volume 1 of Capital. But yes, the emergence of capitalism is both a contingent historical accident, it's just
something that came about through a kind of a specific concatenation of mechanisms and processes, but there's nothing ineluctable about it on the one hand, that's what it means to be historical materials. Yet on the other hand, when you're analyzing the capitalist totality and the functioning of the capitalist totality, you can't separate any moment of the structure from any other. So like labor, so for instance, in the distinction between use value and exchange value. Well, the point is that use value is also kind of encompassed by the capitalist totality. So in other words, you can't talk about use value in complete
abstraction from exchange value and from you know the capitalism and that means so then the danger then is you know can you do this then without eternalizing you know kind of capital and I think yes you can if you're clear that you're getting a structural analysis I mean structural not in a narrowly Althusserian sense but structure in the sense that it's a kind of a synchronic, you're treating as Marx himself who puts it at the beginning of volume one, he's what he's dealing with a kind of an idealized, you know, he's
disregarding lots of kind of empirical details and specificities and he's just trying to kind of construct this the basic functioning or the you know the capitalism's general laws of motion. And I think you can do this without doing metaphysics, precisely because you understand, precisely in so far as you understand, and this is why I think you need to hold on to this idea that all of this, this vast impersonal machinery, valorization process is still conditioned by practical activity by what human beings do
and I think that this is the key to kind of in a way to to not kind of ontologizing capitalism in the way in which arguably even some value theorists do to maintain this distinction between you know I think between the reality of the act and the actuality of the form determination. So if the active exchange is at the core of capitalism, well, the reality of the active exchange, which is something done by human beings, is independent and distinct from the actuality of the exchange form,
or exchange which which mediates you know all human activity so this is something I think yeah I think this is a very important issue actually okay Meredith has a question I don't know what non-alienated labor could even look like unless all labor is performed by robots or automated is this psychological we must understand that we are alienated. Well yes in the sense that I think that when Marx talks about look and I said all labor is externalization so there is no labor that doesn't involve externalization but you know not
all externalization entails, you know, is self-estranging. So all estrangement presupposes externalization, but not all externalization leads to estrangement. So, but the point is that the externalization, you can't give, you know, what does he mean by externalization? He means the creating of something useful. Human beings do stuff, they make things that they want or need, but again his point is that what human beings want or need is
not, can't be, there's no eternal catalogue of natural human wants and needs. That's metaphysics, if you think that. He thinks that this is what political economists end up doing. So he just says that the specific, any positive characterization of the wants and needs that are kind of generated by human activity will be historically specific. And I think that's all he means, I think by, I mean, I think what he means by unalienated
labor is labor or productive activity that is autothelic, that is not subordinated to the creation of value very simply okay that's all he means so also on this all labor is performed by robots and automated well actually there's a distinction Marx as a discussion remember Marx distinguishes instruments from machines or tools from machines and in a way there's a limit to the automation of labor in a sense that you can automate parts of the labor or the
production process but you can't fully automated labor is oxymoronic for Marx because there's no wage relation because you don't pay a machine if you don't pay the machine you can't extract surplus value from it you can't exploit the machine because you don't need to pay it and if you don't need to pay it you can extract surplus value from it so this is why there's a limit to automation which is guaranteed by the capital relation I don't mean to be
silly can you can you say that again yeah yeah I'm afraid what I'm saying right but I totally mean it seriously is there no way in which we are paying machines or even speculatively that we may end up paying machines and and then I was just thinking about well look at obviously they need to be powered just as we need money to buy food we need to pay for electric production just like electric coal production in order for machines to be fed. So just wondering if that could be complicated in any way, what you stated. I think you're muted.
No, it definitely can be complicated and you're right to point out the complication. What do you have in mind when you say we pay machines, what exactly do you mean when you say that there are machines that we pay? Well I mean I am thinking more speculatively, a machine may even be considered conscious or may sound a you know you know philosophers philosophers yeah i can speculate the potential self-conscious
i i i i think you have to be careful here because look um the distinction between the human and the the machine has got nothing to do with consciousness or any qualitative characteristic. I mean, most human labor is moronic, okay? And that's the whole point about kind of abstract labor. By decomposing labor into kind of discreetly, kind of simple kind of functions.
Think of like an assembly line. The labor being produced on an assembly line by an assembly line worker is completely moronic. There's no kind of property or characteristic of the worker that distinguishes her labor from the operation of a machine. And in fact, Marx explicitly says that human beings become machine parts. They become tools. They become parts of a machine. They become components of a machine. the point is if you even someone even the these components of the machine okay
still need to be paid if you eliminate they still need to be paid because if you don't I think this is going to kind of sound a bit actually this is actually a very difficult point and I don't know if it actually makes sense. But I think that in Marx's account, I think Marx distinguishes between living labour and dead labour. And again but what he means by living labor is not some you know the distinction is not that living labor is human and dead labor is automated or machinic living
labor is can be as you know punitively kind of moronic or mindless as you want but it's just necessary in order to actualize the conversion of you know the the conversion of commodities into money okay so that it intervenes in the it's necessary in the production process because what you're doing is when you're producing commodities you're producing something that can be sold but you're producing for something that can be sold at a a profit and its production must also be profitable. So in other words, the labour that is bought
in the production process must be cheap enough to ensure the generation of surplus value. idea that you must make a profit when you sell the commodities and in a way that's I think the role of living of living labor in Marx is just to kind of to you know to convert you know and always to mediate between what he calls fixed capital and variable capital to secure surplus value and profits. Fixed capital is the capital invested in the means of production, instruments of production. Variable capital
is the wage, okay. But the whole point about paying someone to contribute to the production process is to ensure that you can make a profit and sell the commodity at a price that is greater than the cost of manufacturing it, including the cost of the wage. And so I think that if you automate the entire production process, which means to say if eliminate living labor in that sense then it's not clear where surplus value is going to come from. So I think Marx's, all of Marx's distinctions,
they're structural and formal distinctions and I think that as we'll see when we look at you know everything capitalism is just about the extraction of surplus value. The whole account is the crux of the entire account. This is The reproduction of capital is miraculously an amplification, an augmentation. Capitalism must reproduce itself in a way that ensures its augmentation or its increase. How can it do this? It can do this. This is why it needs the laborer because it needs the wage relation to be enforced so that the laborer sells her labor at less than the price for which the commodity that she's
producing will eventually be sold on the market. Now this involves some economic arguments actually which get very complicated. And it may be that there are counter arguments to be made at the economic level. But I think the critique of the theory is, in other words, this whole, it seems to me that these debates about automation, I mean, it's not really about humans versus machines, it's really about the extraction of surplus value and about the economics, the economic dynamics involved in extracting surplus value and whether it's possible to extract surplus value without the wage relation basically.
The wage relation is something where you sell, again, most you're selling something to the capitalist the campus is buying something that you can do but in a way the the qualitative features of your activity are entirely irrelevant like you know it doesn't really matter and the point is that there isn't there's you know you could everything that human beings can and will do can and will be automated the question is whether that won't just kind of terminate the valorization process. There's okay Meredith has two comments. Google extracting flu
epidemiological data from aggregating all search and geographic data related to flu queries. I think you can extract surplus value for machines due to emergent effects, emergence, maybe my understanding of surplus values lacking so from a capitalist perspective or hire workers extract surplus value from the product. Yes I mean obviously what is surplus value it's simply that the it's unpaid that the the worker must sell her labor at a price that is less than the price for which the capitalist will eventually sell the commodity.
So effectively, the labor is The baseline for the laborer must make enough money in order to reproduce her own labor. In other words, the laborer constantly reenters onto the market in order to reproduce itself. In other words, why do you work? You work in order to make money to feed, to find food, clothing and shelter. That would be the minimum.
But the cost of food, clothing and shelter, which is the cost, the defaults, the baseline against which you're going to measure the viability of the wage, will always be less than what the cost of the commodities produced by that labor itself. I think that's the simplest definition.
and so this is why I'm not sure so Meredith when you say you can extract surplus value from machines you Timmer you can use machines I mean I mean can you clarify exactly what you mean here you mean you can use machines to kind of this mean using machines as part of a kind of a larger process of manufacturing or designing or engineering a commodity? Okay.
okay should I just read what Meredith has written here okay yes I'll just read what Meredith has written here so say I start my own Twitter and I have an AI that goes through all the Twitter statements to create predictive information about anything aside from my initial labor going into building the original AI I am getting extra value out of that process okay but then do you mean but you'd be able to sell the information okay if you get the you know you create predictive information but the that information must be sold okay
and that then you can kind of you know if you sell the information and as Presumably so if the information then, but when you sell the information, you know, you sell it at a price higher than, the costs incurred in creating it. But that's just profit though. I'm not sure that that's surplus value. According to, okay, I mean, so Marx thinks that ultimately all profits can be rooted
back, can be traced back to surplus value. But he doesn't think that they're the same thing. So in other words, you can make a profit on a transaction. You can always buy something cheaper than the price at which you sell it and you can make a profit. That's not surplus value. Surplus value comes in the production of a commodity. So when you make the AI, if the commodity here is the AI, so you produce the AI, but then you'd have to be selling the AI not just the information in order for if we're talking about surplus value you'd have to be you know selling you know
not just the information generated by the AI but the the AI itself there's another comment here also the labors of the company Twitter have their own alienated labor managing the system on which the AI operates. Can you can you just say a little bit more just to elaborate a bit exactly what you mean? Oh sure, I just wanted to, one second, sorry I'm muting you. I just wanted to elaborate just on that statement to remember that the processes
that we currently work with. For example, the internet is built on a capitalist platform as well and there are laborers who are hidden behind these internet companies on which you can create an AI like Twitter. Just a side point that the labor goes back. It's not just one creates the AI and it works just on its own. Just a side point. You're muted too, Ray. No, no, that's a very good point. Thanks. That's a very good point. And Meredith says tech labors are alienated.
I just wanted to follow up. Sure. Yes. I'm just trying to think really concrete about what's happening, but actively in regards to automation. Right that I'm having difficulty hearing you. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, yeah All meeting unmuting thing is unfortunate, but can you hear me now? Okay, you're muted for a second. That's okay. What I was gonna say is I Think if I'm following along correctly We're still ripping on this idea of
of pretty much all of this, what you called moronic labor will be automated at some point, or all labor perhaps will be in the Marx critical sense will be automated at some point. So what will society look like at that point? And then as I think Meredith was pointing out, there's still going to be people having to manage these machines, the system, the technology. And so there's always going to be still this class structure, so long as capitalism sticks around as it is. But nonetheless, it does make me wonder and speculate a little bit as to whether when this happens, when pretty much all labor is automated. And there's been some articles, just pop articles that come out talking about what kinds of labor can't be automated, certain kinds of creative endeavors.
So in the best case scenario, let's just say everybody everything that's not automated all labor That's not automated is creative labor and even though that's still a form of exploitation It's a lot better than what we have now It's maybe not quite as moronic as a lot of things that people have to do to make money So is there any way this is a really bad question? I'm so sorry But is there any way that we'll have some kind of realization of what marks what ideally want as a substrum? within this capitalist system where the kind of in this division on the side of this of this hardcore capitalism what you have is really the people managing the machines and then underneath that you have a new kind of society which is
primarily creatively driven that's pretty much my question I realize it's a bit broad and weird. So yes you said you'd have so you'd have most you know so kind of almost maximal automation of labor and then you just have a kind of you know a class you know people kind of you know supervising, I guess, the machines or the operations of the machines. Maybe that could be collected. Everybody takes their time. Everybody takes their time. We all know how to fix machines and make art.
Okay, but is the idea that these, everything that all the kind of, all forms of manual labor or even all forms of kind of, you know, manual and intellectual labor that are um you know that are that people are forced to do now but you know don't really want to do would be automated so therefore people would be left free to kind of as you said to kind of create um or do nothing nothing yes but then the question is okay i mean the The question is who owns the machines? And does anyone, you know, I mean, do they just carry out these tasks?
You know, does no one own the machines? And what are the costs? I'm sorry. I think it's . I think it's . That's a good start. Amazon. Okay, okay. Look, these are very interesting questions. In a way I'm not, you know, I need to, you know, I confess I'm kind of, you know, I simply don't know enough about, you know, the contemporary economy to give, you know, very informative answers to them.
I think they're the right questions to ask. I think the fundamental questions to bear in mind from Marx's point of view is simply who owns what? Is something being bought and sold? And is someone making a profit? And as far as the creative as being, you know, as far as this kind of, you said, like, you know, what about, you know, if all kind of drudgery, you know, all undesirable labor is automated, so people really are left free to kind of, you know, to more or less do what they want, could they create.
But the point is that the horizons of creativity are socially constrained. So even if, you know, even machines did, you know, all the kind of the manufacturing, you know, the kind of material manufacturing, but even, I guess, even the kind of intellectual manufacturing that is, you know, the condition of contemporary society. even if all of that was automated so that people didn't have to kind of you know go out and you know get paid to do it so what would what would people do well they might create but the point is that the horizons of the creative imagination are also socially constrained for Marx and
they're going to be constrained by you know if there's if there's a distinction between you know I guess because the material structure of society reflects you know what kinds of things do water what kinds of functions and tax are executed reflects social relations which are tied to property and class. So the question I think, the question is like would property is, you know, would you still have abolished, would you have abolished property and class? Because he thinks Marx thinks that those are the
ultimate determinants of the social imagination that's an open question I think I mean I don't know and actually this is where the empirical details are very I don't think these questions can be you know speculative speculative adjudicated sorry sorry yes i think we have to start we need to finish okay um uh any any final questions okay maybe yeah it seems a good place to stop for this week okay thanks thanks and uh okay Okay, we'll carry on next week.