¡Descarga Karl Marx(1818–1883 - First writings- Historical materialism- Capitalist socie y más Apuntes en PDF de Administración de Empresas solo en Docsity! Karl Marx (1818– 1883) - First writings - Historical materialism - Capitalist society Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts • First drafts of Capital. Marx already has the project of elaborating a critique of capitalist society – economic relations at the centre. A critique of political economy. • Intrinsic interest of topics eg. religion, alienation. Alienation • Starting point: ‘The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more goods he creates. The devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things.’ • Objectification takes the form of ‘a loss and servitude to the object’; the worker ‘becomes a slave to the object’. The product of the worker is ‘alien to him, and…stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force’. Main dimensions of alienation: 1. Alienation of the object. Workers lack control over the disposal of their products; what they produce is appropriated by others. 2. Alienation in the work task itself. The work task does not offer intrinsic satisfactions; it is labour imposed by force of external circumstances alone. 3. Alienation in social relationships. Human relations are reduced to operations on the market. 4. Alienation from human nature itself (species- being). Adaptation, rather than active mastery, of nature. Estrangement from our social ties. Historical materialism • The organisation of production (‘economic laws of motion’) is at the centre of society and a key motor of social change. • Production is not just economic activity, but a form of social organisation: ‘In production, men not only act on nature but also on one another. They produce only by cooperating in a certain way and mutually exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and relations with one another and only within these social connections and relations does their action on nature, does production, take place.’ • Mode of production: ancient, Asiatic, feudal and capitalist modes of production. Primitive accumulation • Process through which a minority of the population gains control of the means of production. It involves the expropriation of the peasants from their means of production, a set of events which ‘is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire’. • The case of England: Mass of ‘free’ proletarians formed by (i) disbanding of servants by impoverished aristocracy end 15th cent. (ii) Enclosure movement (iii) Reformation and the sale of church lands in 16th cent. • ‘Free’ wage-labour: people have no other means of subsistence than selling their labour-power. The liberation of people from feudal ties entails ‘the most shameless violation of the “sacred rights of property” and the grossest acts of violence to persons’. Theory of surplus value • Capital starts with the analysis of the commodity as capitalism’s elementary form. Use value and exchange value. • Labour theory of value: the value of commodities is related to the labour-power that has been applied to produce them. • The capitalist appropriates surplus value, because he or she pays the worker the value of labour-power as a commodity but not the value of what the worker is really producing. The profits of capital consist in this surplus value, representing the worker’s unpaid surplus labour. • Profits as the visible, ‘surface’ manifestation of surplus value, in which their real origins and ‘the secret of its existence’ are hidden. Commodity fetishism • Commodities, as things which are exchanged in the market, appear as things which have value in themselves. Mysterious character of commodities: they hide their social origins, the fact that they were made by human beings: ‘The mysterious character of the commodity form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of the labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things.’ • ‘the definite social relation between men themselves... assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.’
