the german ideology, part I (1845-1846), karl marx (in Tucker)

(147): an industrial analogy--fitting

(149): KEY PASSAGE: the young hegelians, Marx is arguing, content themselves with a battle waged on the terrain of ideas. implicit in this argument, of course, is Marx's materialism--"this demand to change consciousness amounts [only] to a demand to interpret reality in another way... The Young Hegelians, in spite of their allegedly 'world-shattering' statements, are the staunchest conservatives... They forget, however, that to these phrases they are opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world."

(150): first appearence of "mode of production"--"The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production."

(151-154): tracing their understanding of the evolution of human history (very rough and unapologetically stagist)

(154): KEY: "Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people's imagination, but as they really are; i.e., as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will."

(154): "In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceived, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process, we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable, and bound to material premises."

(155): "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life."

(155): philosophy, they're stressing, must always situate itself in "real history." this is critical.

(156-157): an underelaborated mention of "four moments," probably not worth systematizing: the production of material life itslef, the production of new needs, the birth of the family, and the production of an indepdenent "history" (?)

(157): it is important to note this assertion that any given mode of production always involves a certain amount of co-operation (in other words, the production of life is always a "social" act)

(158): "Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product."

(159): here they introduce the division of material and mental labour, which inaugurates the 'real' division of labour, it is implied here. this gives rise, they are arguing, to the men whose business it is to help consciousness "flatter itself." (with the footnote, this represents a rudimentary formulation of the role of the ideologists in any given era)

(159): cataloging "three moments": the forces of production, the state of society (rel. of production?), and consciousness

(160): the division of labour implies, here, private property and the consequent conflict of interests (this is quite markedly in contrast to Durkheim and Smith's claims and it is here, he introduces, the famous outline of what communist society will enable, in contrast.

(160-161): birth of the State, which appeals to an "illusory communal life" (hegemony?)--struggles at the site of the State, then, are "the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out among one another."

(161): HEGEMONY--"every class which is struggling for mastery...must first conquer for itself political power in order to represent its interest as the general interest."

(161): moreover, there is some hint here of the thesis of the "relative autonomy of the State" -- that the State will act in the 'illusory' general interest, which perhaps implies that it can take a broader perspective than the immediate interests of the ruling class (though this is slightly distorting what is being argued here)

(161): for emancipation, two "practical premises" are necessary: (1) the maturation of these contradictions--the great mass must be 'propertyless'; (2) the development of the productive forces--otherwise "want" will merely be made general. there's a hint, here, also that the agitation can only be 'world-historical,' but this pales in comparison with post-Marx reflections on the subject, so we leave it (it is sufficient to state that Marxism is clearly a universal project)

(164): ABSOLUTELY KEY: "It has not, like the idealistic view of history, in every period to look for a category, but remains constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice; and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into 'self-consciousness' or transformation into 'apparitions,'... but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which give rise to this idealistic humbug; that not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other types of theory."

(164-165): the central dialectic, here: "a sum of productive forcs..., which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men as much as men make circumstances."

(165): and yes, committed here to the "formation of a revolutionary mass"--but there is a question, here, about the place of theory in this struggle. until this mass is formed, they are arguing, "it is absolutely immaterial whether the idea of this revolution has been expressed a hundred times already, as the history of communism proves."

(165): memebers of any given epoch share in the ideology of that epoch (the second of the features of ideology pinpointed by Castells (via Althusser))

(166): oh no you didn't! they make Hegelian philosophy contingent.

(166-167): as we see in Theses on Feuerbach, they are reacting also to the elitism of the theoretical enterprise (and particularly against Saint Bruno)

(167-168): this critique extends to Feuerbach, who is content to show, theoretically, fact of man's sovereignty, but has not moved to a commitment to "overthrow the existing state of things... Feuerbach... is going as far as a theorist possibly can without ceasing to be a theorist and a philosopher."

(169): a re-assertion of these initial premises--"The 'liberation' of man is not advanced a single step by [theoretical interventions]... Nor will we explain to them that it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine... 'Liberation' is a historical and not a mental act."

(169-171): Feuerbach as a-historical (example of the cherry tree, or earlier, the fish in now-polluted freshwater), and an idealist in the last instance (i.e., the path to liberation is through theory, for him).

(173-174): HEGEMONY, the famous formulation--"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas..." And we are "generally-speaking" subject to them. Much hinges on the exposition of this qualifier...

(174): a (strategic) division of 'manual' and mental labour, within the ruling class--we see some assume the position of its "active ideologists" (and we know enough of those), and others its "active members"

(174): HEGEMONY, once more: "Each new class... has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones."

(175): a simpler formulation of the critique of Hegel (and the whole idealist tradition)

(177-178): actually fairly important pages, insofar as they present the reasons for the non-revolutionary character (in the full, final sense) of pre-proletarian classes in town and country (though we can also extrapolate, negatively, from what Marx and Engels believe to be the proletariat's potential)--but, basically, they're more diffuse and, partly as a result, more interested in their own work and own lives.

(181): the phenomenon of vagabondage (Henry VIII of England hanged 72,000!)--in general though, this whole account of the transition (pg 176-186) is of course far inferior to the account Marx gives in Vol. 1

(183): Ha-Joon Chang, enter stage right

(185-186): the formation of the world proletariat: "a class... which in all nations has the same interest and with which nationality is already dead; a class which is really rid of all the old world and at the same time stands pitted against it."

(187): what we have here is a theory of the State that is more than the caricatured "executive committee of the bourgeoisie" (mechanisms are delineated--"taxation", the "national debt", "commercial credit", the "stock exchange"), but less than the model that gives the State apparatus "relative autonomy" (even though it does have to endeavor to represent the 'average' interest)

(189-190): big industry produces the contradiction between "the instrument of production" and "private property"

(190-191): the "productive forces appear as a world for themselves"

(191): an interesting aside--those "who have been robbed thus of all life-content... have been put into a position to enter into relation with one another as individuals" (on the one hand, this is the orthodox narrative of w-class' formation as subject--but it also can be interpreted to imply, a la Fanon, that the oppressed find their humanity not just in victory, but also in struggle).

(191-192): why the proletariat's expropriation will be unlike any other in history--"in all expropriations up to now, a mass of individuals remained subservient to a single instrument of production; in the appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments of production must be made subject to each individual, and property to all. Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when controlled by all." With this upheaval, "labour" will become "self-activity" (an end to 'estrangement').

(192): history, then, is not "Man", as abstract subject, estranging himself

(193): ridding itself of "the muck of ages"

(194): dialectics--"one-sidedness" of a particular ideology/era becomes apparent only "when the contradiction enters on the scene and thus exists for the later individuals..."

(196): "Thus all collisions in history have their origin, according to our view, in the contradiction between the productive forces and the forms of intercourse."

(197): communism denotes the first time that--really rather than supposedly--the community will be identical with the state.

(198): again, the uniqueness of the working-class consists in their non-separation as individuals, their combination through the division of labour

(199-200): curious passage on the division between "the personal and the class individual," need to re-read--but basically they are grounding their assertion of the proletariat's uniqueness... "The proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individual, will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto... namely, labour. Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State."

notes on capital
chapter 15: machinery and large-scale industry
sections 1-5

(492): quoting john stuart mill on the dubious utility of technological innovation for "any human being," marx seems to approve of a thoroughgoing skepticism. this, it has to be stressed, is in direct contrast to left, center, right interpretations of marxist developmentalism which ally a misguided appraisal of marx's technological determinism to an alleged 'linear' view of history. against these understandings, both this introduction and the rest of the chapter make clear marx's dialectical ambiguity with respect to the introduction of technology: at once a source of unprecedented revolutions in productivity, but also simultaneously the means for the brutalization of the handicrafts, the exploitative employment of women and children in their place, etc. aside from asserting the generally contradictory nature of "progress," then, the specific morphology of capitalist deployment of technological innovation is critical: the profit-seeking that underlies prodigious advances in technology renders them useless from the point of view of human development. this disjuncture between technological development and human development, one thus understands, is left to be implicitly resolved in socialist society, where collective ownership of the means of technological discovery would orient advances in science towards the liberation of humanity. democratic control, in other words, is critical.

(499): the centrality of the story of the steam-engine to the modern geography of rural-urban relations is critical, both in the historical sense that it explains specifically a momentous revolution in human life, and in the theoretical sense that it affirms a historical materialism that identifies the importance of shifting structures of production in shaping the contours of social life. though, in a basic sense, cities remain parasitic on the agricultural economy (in the sense that their metabolic reproduction is rooted in rural areas), the urban economy, now, for the first time, stands to become a concentrated area of real productive activity. in this sense, cities in industrial england in the 19th century are clearly entirely different from urban formations in earlier centuries.

(508): marx here makes a critical point about the changing basis for the "organization of the social labor process." in pre-machine manufacture, he argues, the organization of labor "is purely subjective." as i understand it, this means that it depends not on the nature of the implements being used, but takes the form of progressive innovations, on the part of the merchants/small capitalists in charge, in the form of organizing the process of production. with the advent of the machine era, however (and particularly, it would seem, with the point at which machines begin making machines (504)), the progressively more alienating organization of the labor process becomes an objective necessity, grounded in the technical requirements of production by machinery. in other words, as man, in general, cedes his sovereignty to machines, in general, specific man, in the form of the labor, loses all possibilities of control over his specific workplace. the machine takes the reigns. (see also page 547.) this attempt to understand the morphology of the factory in terms of prevailing technologies is crucial: perhaps raymond williams et. al. would insist that this not become reified as one of many "moments" (such as the ill-considered argument that 'mental' and 'material' labor become irrevocably split at one point in history)--in other words, that this dynamic, the relation of the division of labor to extant technology, needs to be constantly assessed and re-assessed. yet it does seem indisputable, this notion that the machine era inaugurates something totally unprecedented, in requiring a particular form of bondage in the factory. (i suppose, though, that it's only the williams argument that would make room for emancipation, even if it's hard to anticipate.)

(524-525): much of das kapital is littered with examples of the fallacies of liberal narratives of the industrial revolution (i.e., the ways in which they (a) less sophisticatedly, discount the suffering of the subalterns in favor of extolling the gains; (b) more sophisticatedly, recognize the suffering of the subalterns, but subjugate it, as benjamin insisted, in a narrative of future progress. in other words, the past becomes irrelevant because we live in the future). against all this, marx recovers the timelessness of domination. it is with the persistence of this morphology in mind that one ought to engage capitalist anthropology, the struggles of the working-day, etc. not as moments when capitalism had yet to be civilized, but as examples of the emphatically present requirements of capital accumulation. moments that form as inextricable a part of our present experience as anything that happens today, precisely because they explain, both historically and theoretically, today.

(530): remember--the distinction between the individual pursuit of relative surplus-value, and the way in which it is acquired by capitalism in toto. namely, the distinction between the honeymoon period (which is all the neo-classicals see), which results from the successful implementation of a new technology by one capitalist, and the general cheapening of consumer goods, which benefits all capitalists by cheapening the price of labor-power (and thereby reducing the the amount of necessary labor in a day).

(531): the classic immanent contradiction, which leads to the formulation of the declining organic composition of capital.

(542): 1780s, beginnings of unrest; 1833, 12 hr day; 1847, 10 hr day. needless to say, the presentation of these pieces of legislation as amenable to bourgeois aspirations is a revision, in a sense, of the polanyi picture of a capitalism being tamed (if i remember that right). in other words, these are not quite the fetters on bourgeois rapacity that orthodox explanations of them might attest. while of course it's true that these were welcome gains for workers, it is important not to forget that they were co-opted, in one way another, to fit the enormously plastic tactics of capitalism. to give marx's example, the shift to the 10-hr day, he argues, led to an "intensification" of the working day, which concentrated more labor-time in it than had previously been expended in 12 hours.

(548): a specific use of sisyphus to explain the laborer in machine-production. marx and engels as apologists for liberal modernity? please!

(548): here a reflection on the separation of intellectual labor from manual labor (i.e., the former becomes the duty of capital, and latter the bitter fate of labor). in other words, we see, with machines, the consolidation of alienation. yet, as williams would suggest, perhaps we need to remember that more is going on here? yet is that truly the case? i find it hard to see ways in which mental labor is not being detached from the lives of laborers everywhere. we, of course, need ranciere's reminders here, always. but this should not obscure, i don't think, the emphatically true suggestions that alienation intensifies with the ascent of the machine over handicraft/manufacture.

(549): a reminder, again, of foucault's debt to marx. aside from the talk about disciplining an entire population to accept the dictates and routines of industrial production and urban life (teaching workers to consume, for example), here marx writes of the implementation of specific intra-factory codes. the formation of an autocratically-administered army at the site of production, in the name of discipline and diligence (and, of course, as marx makes explicit at the top of 550, in defiance of the representative 'democratic' tradition laid claim to at the time).

(557-559): marx formulates briefly an argument about how the implementation of machinery creates (and re-creates, as time progresses), an reserve army of labor. specifically, he writes of english hand-loom weavers, and--critically to the caricatures of marx as colonial apologist--of the weavers in india who were devastated by english innovation. these examples, and this general history, is his explanation for luddite rejoinders to machinery. yet, of course, it's not that these open up revolutionary possibilities; in that sense, they are, however regrettably, only birth-pangs of the new order.

interview with chomsky and zinn (part 2):
[chomsky] Raul Hilberg is the founder of Holocaust studies, you know, the most distinguished figure in the field. In fact, he says Norman didn't go far enough. And it's the same -- Avi Shlaim is one of the -- maybe the leading Israeli historian, has strongly supported him, and the same with others. I can't refer to the private correspondence, but it's very strong letters from leading figures in these fields.
(...) [zinn] , universities, colleges are not democratic institutions. Really, they’re like corporations. The people who have the most power are the people who have the least to do with education. That is, they're not the faculty, they're not the students, they're not even the people who keep the university going -- the buildings and grounds people and the technical people and the secretaries -- no. They're the trustees, the businesspeople, the people with connections, and they're the ones who have the most power, they're the ones who make the decisions. And so, that's why I was fired from there, and that's why I was almost fired by John Silber at Boston University
(...) [zinn] One of Eugene V. Debs: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” And Henry David Thoreau: “When the subject has refused allegiance and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.”
(...) [zinn] I mean, the Mexican War had some of the same characteristics as the war in Iraq today, and that is that the American people were lied to about the reasons for going into Mexico, and they weren't told that the real reason for going into Mexico was that we wanted Mexican land, which we took at the end of the Mexican War, just as today we're not being told that the real reason for being in Iraq has to do with oil and profits and money.
(...) [chomsky] It's true that the country, that in terms of the institutional structure -- government for the wealthy and so on -- there hasn’t been much change in 200 years. But there's been enormous progress, I mean, even in the last forty years, since the ’60s. Many rights have been won: rights for minorities, rights for women, rights of future generations, which is what the environmental movement is about. Opposition to aggression has increased. The first solidarity movements in history began in the 1980s, after centuries of European imperialism, and no one ever thought of going to live in an Algerian village to protect the people from French violence, or in a Vietnamese village. Thousands of Americans were doing that in the 1980s in Reagan’s terrorist wars. It’s now extended over the whole world. There’s an international solidarity movement. I mean, after all, the Iraq war is the first war in hundreds of years of Western history, at least the first one I can think of, which was massively protested before it was officially launched. And it actually was underway, we have since learned, but it wasn’t officially underway. But it was huge, millions of people protesting it all over the world, so much so that The New York Times lamented that there's a second superpower: the population. Well, you know, that's significant and, I think, gives good reason for hope. There are periods of regression. We're now in a period of regression, but if you look at the cycle over time, it's upwards. And there's no limits that it can't reach.