The end of history and alienation both Hegel’s ideas. Hegel saw consciousness, like history, an evolving phenomena that’s still evolving. Marx takes Hegel’s stage of this evolution called the self-consciousness stage where one being identifies himself in another and vice versa. Ultimately one, in lieu of being killed by the other agrees to submit to the dominant other. Lord and bondsman relationship. Marx took this idea and made it concrete or material by applying the concept of Hegel’s and making the bourgeoisie the lord and the proletariat the bondsmen. Hegel, through a series of evolutions of stages of consciousness ultimately ends at a point where all consciousnesses are aware of all others and vice versa and an end of consciousness evolving occurs in a state Hegel calls absolute spirit. Almost a secular version of a religious idea. Hegel, unlike Marx religious himself.
They took place at UNC Chapel Hill in Caldwell Hall (the philosophy department) roughly 2-3 days before the day that they were posted. If you need to know the exact date, RPW probably says what day of the week the lectures took place in the first lecture, and you can use that information to correlate the month and weekdays with the precise date using a calendar.
12:20, Mr. Wolff unfortunately misrepresents Marx' views on the qualitative differences between humans and animals. Marx did not say that humans were the "only" creatures that transform the nature. In fact, as early as 1844, he says: "Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty." It seems that Wolff knows about this passage as he repeats its last sentence at 14:30. Maybe Marx did not find an opportunity to observe some chimps collecting termites with twigs, yet he was perfectly aware of the productive capacity of animals. Surprisingly, Wolff does not pay attention to the earlier sentences of the very same paragraph.
@Jack Bicknell, I don't know what you are talking about: This guy clearly says "Marx was wrong by saying that the humans were the only creatures". But Marx didn't say that. So why is this guy accusing him with something that Marx did not say? And as I proved from the extracted passage, he knows that Marx did not say that. So a question of credibility here. You might think "at the end they both agree on human differences". I have doubts about that: This guy talks about his safari adventures to prove that chimpanzees use stick. What is he going to explain with this knowledge? Capitalist system? I think this guy wants to talk about his own anecdotes and ideas, but no one would listen to him, so he uses Marx' name as his background. How about that?
@@trashygit I have no idea what you're talking about pal. All i know is that i've read Marx and this guy brilliantly explains him. You might be right about that specific point, all i'm saying is that, ultimately, it's a trivial point. And by the way, this guy is a self proclaimed marxist...so whether or not he disagrees with or misrepresents marx on a specific point, he ultimately agrees with him.
If you are familiar with Marx, you should be familiar that Marx was not "Marxist": en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Guesde So coming back to your point; as Marx himself clearly pointed out, "self-proclaimed Marxists" are the ones that we should pay more attention. Plus, if you really read Marx, you should know that he was spotting a detail and digging it until finding out some dynamics behind it. Sometimes a word and some other time a calculation. I found a sort of inconsistency and shared it with everyone; you trivialised it on the basis that "you read Marx", and "this guy is Marxist". As far as I understand, you and I are not talking about same Marx and not sharing same values on certain areas.
@@trashygit 😀 Marx meant that he did not subsribe to what marxism has become. But of-course he stands by his writings; true marxism. And it is his writings that these lectures handle. You're right, one should be weary of contemporary marxists, that doesn't mean we should write all self-proclaimed marxists off as misunderstanding marxism. Obviously!
Cooperation is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for man's productivity. Individuality is, on the other hand, both necessary and sufficient for his or her productivity, for a person can, albeit does not have to, include themselves in a cooperative productive effort, but he or she no choice in being an individual in the act of productivity. Thus, a fortiori, isn't the individual to be valued as the primary producer? It seems to me that this, in addition to the abstract nature of a cooperative effort, justifies the proposition that all productivity is grounded in the individual, rendering the cooperative effort superfluous for analytical purposes. No? And, as an actual carpenter rather than just an intellectual, I can tell you that when I am working in a person's home, building a work of art for that client, one that I will eventually walk away from and leave to that client's use or abuse, I can't tell you the level of satisfaction I get. It's one that no money can buy. And this is the case whether I am working for myself or a company. Of course, there comes some amount of resentment from the fact that someone who doesn't actually do the work, i.e., the boss, takes most of the money. Also, I am mindful of the differences between my type of work as a skilled laborer and a simple laborer in a factory.
A person can feel pride and a sense of accomplishment in conquering something through their labor. However, I think this doesn't necessarily equate to fulfillment or happiness. Of course, that's subjective too.. which has been mystified too, in a sense, by capitalism. And if I'm getting it right, that kind of labor is more of the peasantry in the 21st century than with proletarianism. Correct me if I'm wrong
14:00 he describes the lions cooperating but says “they weren’t operating instinctively”. Why? Why is communicating not instinctive? Is the formation of a pride a learned behaviour? Cooperation can obviously be instinctive. The simplest example are ants and bees. Even more so the only reason we can learn languages so efficiently is because we have an instinctive capacity to do so.
In regards to :the greatest sentence in all of political philosophy" (sic), to wit: "The Worker, therefore, only feels himself outside his work, and, in his work, feels himself outside himself" is a constant theme of English Romanticism emerging out of Rousseau and continuing Wordsworth, Blake and Robert Burns, with echoes in American literature in Uncle Tom's Cabin and "Leaves of Grass". .I mean, if you are going to understand Marx in his milieu, it is impossible to avoid the alienation of the Natural Man from the Industrial Revolution. Goethe, Shiller and other German Romantics were working witht the same theme, so the proposition that the genius of Marx first isolated industrial alienation in the factories he never visited is a bit of a stretch.. Marx is a Romantic poet. the Lord Byron of industrial sociology. And, as Vladimir Putin points out, it's all a fairy tale. Unlike the Harvard MBA program's business model, a very intellectually rigorous fairy tale, but a fairy tale, indeed. By 1970, as a result of the Pentagon's strategy in Vietnam, both Brezhnev and Mao recognized that Marxism is untenable and were agreeable to adopting Nixon's aspiration to reconfigure the global Military Industrial Complex to the Aerospace-Entrepreneurial Matrix made possible by Apollo 11 and described by Werner von Braun as the Starship Capitalism necessary to sustain a NASA-Soyuz lunar colony for the next 100 years, if not an epoch, just as depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The up-hill battle Wolff has been contending with is that Analytic Marxism is the dialectical Marxism of post-modern historical deconstruction that is employed universally since the take over of Columbia University by the Students for a Democratic Society in 1968. Even the Christian apologetics of the Solo Scriptura interpretation of the Pro[Life Evangelical Prosperity and Salvation Gospels, and the Critical Historical interpretation of the Gospels by Dale Martin at Yale, is the dialectical Marxism/Materialism of what Wolff calls Analytic Marxism (which is one reason why evangelical apologetics have so much trouble with Mulsim critics). Marxism, as an economics, is ultimately a static system that embraces the steam engine as the essential metaphor for the prime mover of economic progress and the means of production. Jefferson Davis's State's Rights theory of property, labor and the means of production essentially embrace Marx's characterization of Capitalism as an economic theology. Marx may have coined the term "Capitalism", but capitalism as a human activity came into existence when a society became sufficiently organized to introduce a stylized, and portable, for of barter with the creation of currency and the minting of coins. Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" explicates the economics of the Bible as a moral science and Jesus' parable of the Talents is a commentary on the dynamics of what we call Keynesian policies and the dynamical modeling in Paul Krugman's "Peddling Prosperity" Jesus didn't have any problem with Capitalism, which is all processes and structures. Jesus had the same attitude towards money that we have towards electricity: it's a handy thing to have in a healthy society. Unlike Marx, Jesus didn't hold that money was evil, but that the love of money is the root of all evil, Mammon being a false god and the image of Caesar on a denarius a graven image. I mean, it is useful to remember that the whole time Marx is complaining about the evils of Capitalism in the British Museum, America is in the process of creating the Worker Paradise that the January 6 conspiracy wants to blow up. Frederick Winslow Taylor's Scientific Management is the core, and founding, technology of the Harvard MBA program business model and it is a response to Marxism, generally, and the American Molly McGuires,, in particular. Both Marx and Taylor assumed that Capital and Labor are antagonistic agendas and both seek to suppress and/or subvert the Esprit de Corps of Workers. This is why Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk continue to battle the unionization of their organizations. But what the experience of the American labor movement has established is that the industrial organization, such as the Teamsters and AFL/CIO, allow workers to capitalize their Esprit de Corps and to recapture synergies otherwise lost to the industrial process. Because Marx misunderstood Hegel, his economic model has no component for the synergies that all human activity creates that can result in material gain and represent the value added of the worker as the means of production. Synergies are something that Alexander Hamilton seemed to understand intuitively in his advocacy for a central bank that is totally lost on Jefferson. To be honest, I don't begin to understand the quibble Wolff has with Analytic Marxism. By 1975, most Marxists, including Christopher Hitches (who claimed to be a disciple of Trotsky) were as despairing of the fraud of Marxism as an unrequited lover. I played rugby with a Marxist taxicab driver and the mother of one of my daughter's middle school classmates was a lapsed Marxist. There were a lot of them in the District in the 70s and they all sort of blew away after the Nixon-Brezhnev Detent like the last of the autumn's leaf fall. Wolff is typical of Marxist: they truly loved Marx, intellectually, in contrast to the crypto-Nazi Fascism of William F. Buckley and the motional investment of the 1960 agenda of the John Birch Society in white supremacy and anti-democratic authoritarianism that animates the psyche of the MAGA nation participants in the January 6 riot and election denialism of the Trump voters. If the Communist Manifesto was made into a movie, John Lennon's "Imagine" would be the theme music.
The behavioral conflict between cooperation and confiscation existed long before industrial production. It began as soon as groups of people settled in one location. Rules had to be established for control over locations, for access to whatever natural resources existed. While such tribal societies might have started out with communitarian arrangements, eventually hierarchy developed (as described in Gerhard Lenski's book "Power and Privilege"), and with hierarchy the redistribution of wealth from producers to non-producers. Henry George offered a maxim to describe this part of our nature. He wrote that we seek to satisfy our desires with the least exertion; and, therefore, have a tendency to try to monopolize natural opportunities.
If, in fact, capitalism destroys religion, as Marx foresaw, then either Marx accepted this outcome as a rather long-term process, or one must conclude that religion has accommodated itself to the capitalist system of production. Is "the Protestant work ethic" an accommodation to capitalism, or a fundamental ethic associated with one's religious duty in order to live up to the moral standards of the deity?
Marx says in Communist Manifesto: "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes." Mr. Wolff did not take this aspect of capitalism in his list of 4 important ideas of the Communist Manifesto. If he thought it was not that crucial to mention the above extract, he missed the entire point. If he thought that his list already covers the above extract he was simply wrong. I hope he comes back to this issue in later lectures. The "change" or revolutionising the instruments, relations, and the culture of production is not a side effect or an unexpected consequence brought by the capitalism. This is not only "the" existential necessity which is rooted at the centre of the capitalist economy politics, but also, arguably, the single most important intellectual achievement in Marx' interpretation. Without comprehending this core historical dynamics of the capitalist mode of production, every Marx reading will be superficial. I cannot express enough how deep and essential this idea is, so I'll do my best: The "dependency on constant revolutionising" is not "just a useful explanatory tool" that allows to see through the capitalism, neither "a good perspective" that opens up the possibilities of multi-level analysis. It is the very eyes one must have to perceive colours in the first place...
@@trashygit 😀 just making the point that you're implying that this guy doesn't understand Marx as well as you, or whatever, but you make no good points.
