via Lenin’s Tomb
Category Archives: Marx
Hunger and Historicity
There’s an excellent post up at Roughtheory on the historical dimension of Marx’s materialism. Here’s a snippet:
Firstly, the object is not an object in general, but a specific object which must be consumed in a specific manner, to be mediated in turn by production itself. Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down meat raw with the aid of hand, nail and tooth. Production thus produces not only the object but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively but also subjectively.
The interweaving Marx attempts here is one of the most characteristic dimensions of his work. Hunger is something natural – something physical – but something no less historical for all that. Its historical manifestations – each of its historical manifestations – are no less natural for not being timeless invariants. Something can be an historical product – and yet deeply, profoundly, and inextricably embodied. Our activities – what we do, what we make – inform us, developing us, expressing us, creating us – and linking this self-creation intrinsically with the creation of what might superficially be taken as things wholly external to ourselves, but which Marx rather conceptualises as nonhuman objects participating in interactions with us.
Check out the whole thing here.
Kliman – ‘A Marxist Analysis of the Economic Crisis’
An excellent talk on the current economic crisis, given by Andrew Kliman, can be found here. A text-version is here.
Update: There’s also an interview with Kliman.
Alienation and Freedom in Marx and McDowell
One way of taking Kant’s legacy in practical philosophy, and one which I favour, is as motivating the thought that responsiveness to reasons is a good gloss on the greater part of what freedom consists in. Part of what I find atractive about McDowell’s position is that it manages to bring this idea together with a story about experience as the locus of many such reasons, yet without falling into a dead-end version of empiricism. As it stands though, it can seem like a rather thin characterisation of freedom which is divorced from our embodied existence. After all, we are not just reasoners who passively observe the world, deciding what would be best to believe or do: we act in the world. So too, the material conditions we find ourselves in can prove to be a check on our freedom. One of the advantages of McDowell’s conception of experience is that its trajectory points in the direction of these issues. It does not simply relegate them to disparate senses of ‘freedom’ confined to the theory of action, morality or political philosophy. Rather, it provides a promising basis for a schematic integration of freedom across these domains and which explains their relation to the freedom allowed by our relation to experience.
We can see how the freedom secured by a rational responsiveness to experience opens out into a more robust sense of freedom by considering McDowell’s discussion of Marx:
Marx sums up his vision of what a properly human life would be in a striking image: without alienation, ‘the whole of nature’ is ‘the inorganic body of man.’ (MW p.117)
McDowell takes this to express the idea that when she is permitted to perform her human functions—something wage slavery prevents—then a person can be said to be at home in the world. This is a possibility that is closed off for animals, who remain alienated from their environments in virtue of their inability to resist the biological imperatives to which they are subject and to achieve what Gadamer calls a ‘free, distanced orientation’ towards their surroundings. Human experience is characterised by its ability to exert rational constraint, whereas animal perceptual responsiveness remains at the level of a causal response that, while purposive, does not allow the animal to respond to reasons that could be taken as such or become reflectively available to it. So, experience can be a condition of freedom since “experience enables the layout of reality itself to exert a rational influence on what a subject thinks.” In the same way, we can indict politico-economic conditions that force people to give up a free, distanced relation to the environment and respond to it as animals do in virtue of biological necessity. As Marx describes such a condition:
Man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions of eating, drinking, and procreating, at most also in his dwelling and dress, and feels himself an animal in his human functions.
Thus, it appears that a unified account of freedom can be given that connects the sort of freedom derivable from experience enabling a rational response to reality with the sort of freedom that consists in the material ability to engage in rationally directed activities rather than ones which biological necessity forces us into in light of social conditions.
Kapital und Schwärmerei
1. David Harvey is giving a course that undertakes a close reading of the first volume of Capital, which you can watch over at davidharvey.org (via NP).
2. Here is a collection of talks given at a workshop with Brandom in 2005. Immersed in Fred Beiser’s The Fate of Reason, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism and Schiller as Philosopher as I have been over the last few weeks, I found the anaemic post-analytic approach of them somewhat grating. Nevertheless, there’s still some good stuff to be found in there.
Hegel and the Law of Non-Contradiction
Paul Redding
abstract :: sound recording (including discussion)
What are the Categories in Being and Time? Brandom’s Account of Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit
Bruin Christensen
abstract :: sound recording (including discussion)
Pragmatism, Expressivism and the Global Challenge
Huw Price & David Macarthur
abstract :: sound recording (including discussion) :: slides
The Significance of Embodiment – the Dangers of Leaving Nature Behind
Nick Smith
abstract :: sound recording (including discussion)
Kantian Lessons about Mind, Meaning, and Rationality
Bob Brandom
abstract :: sound recording (including comments by David Macarthur, and discussion)
The Communist Manifesto
Natural’s Not In It
This is just a quick pointer to N.Pepperell’s fantastic series of posts on the first chapter of Capital. In them, she explores Marx’s use of a broadly Hegelian methodology that insists on an immanent exploration of bourgeois economics. This is an approach to Marx that I wholeheartedly commend, and to see why one has only to begin to work through the exciting and rewarding reading that emerges in these posts.
Here are the links, in order of appearance so far:
Fragment on Textual Strategy in Capital
Reflections on the “Greatest Difficulty”
Value and Abstract Labour as Real Abstractions
An Aside on the Category of Capital
Grundlegung 