The orange chair was initially drawn whilst I was employed by Royal Mail from 1997 - 2002. The polo was left over...matter just like the chair. The overheard conversation of the postie's displeasure at the
quality of the meals. I would hear stories of halycon days when the mail centre used to have it's own restaurant, cheaper prices than the contracted firm now providing the catering services.I would spend hours tied to the machine, the letters would sound like rivers leaving me in a state of euphoria, somehow at one with technology, the vast collossus of the inward mail processor.
What is a commodity?
'Everything is a commodity now.'
Marx: class comes before everything.
'Every class struggle is a political struggle.'
A type of subversion...Political.
Something with a strong message.
'Mass class'- today.
Reactionary: looking back to the past (poss opposite to revolutionary).
Communism came to an end around mid 80's.
** Marx comes out of Hegel.'...tied to class.
Marxism- material
phenomenology- experienced.
Herbert Marcuse...worth looking at...
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Marx...Wikipedia brief...
Marxism is both theory and political practice. ( praxis).
Any political practice or theory that is based on an interpretation of engels and marx may be called Marxism.
Most forms of Marxism share...
> a belief that peoples' consciousnesses of the conditions of their lives reflects these material conditions and relations.
> an understanding of class in terms of differing economic relations of production, and as a particular position with such relations.
> an understanding of material conditions and social relations as historically malleable.
> an attention to the material conditions of peoples lives and social relations among people.
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle." (introduction to the communist manifesto).
1818: Marx born.
1820: Engels born...developed Communist theory alongside Marx.
1844: both met for the 1st time- had similar views on philosophy producing a number of works including 'Die Heilige familie.' (The Holy Family).
1845: Marx deported from France...
1846: Engels and Marx returned to Brussels in Jan 1846...setting up communist correspondence committee.
1847: Engels and Marx wrote pamphlet 12000 words long.
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...in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organisation necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class - the proletariat - cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class - the bourgeoisie - without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles'. The communist Manifesto, Preface to the English Edition of 1888. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. pp66.
. The great divide that exist between the two main classes referenced in the above quotation seems to imply that there will always be a great disparity between them. It is like he is suggesting that there is a stand off between the camps, and the only way to achieving a harmonious society is by the ruling class to surrender their oppression of the proletariat, or perhaps he is suggesting that a revolution of the proles is the only realistic path to freedom.
. This seems to suggest something that is palpable with the Germaine Greer passage stating that women are left with no other option but to run away. It would seem that the same can be said of the above quote where it talks about the need to reject social norms in which to attain emancipation.
.'Class struggle is the active expression of class conflict looked at from any kind of socialist perspective. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, leading ideologists of communism wrote "[The Written]history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle."
Marx's notion of class has nothing to do with social class in the sociological sense of upper, middle and lower classes (which are often defined in terms of quantitative income or wealth). Instead, in an age of capitalism, Marx describes an economic class. membership of a class is defined by one's relationship to means of production, i.e., one's position in the social structure that characterizes capitalism. Marx talks mainly about two classes that include the vast majority of the population, the proletariat and bourgeoisie. other classes such as the petty bourgeoisie share characteristics of both of these main classes...' enwikipedia.org/wiki/Class_struggle
. 'The central idea in Marx's theory of class and class struggle is exploitation. Those who by their labour who have produced the means of life-food, clothing and shelter in the first place-in every class society have been exploited. Marx uses this term not moralistically but in a technical or scientific sense. It means simply that the surplus product of their labour, over and above their own subsistence has been taken, appropriated, by a class of non-producers...' Marx and Marxism, Cliff Slaughter, Longman. PP22
. I'm from a traditionally working class background and regard much of my work as social commentaries with narrative running through them, with a significant number referencing class and materialism.
. I used to live Cambridge and feelings of the class divide were possibly more apparent in that town than anywhere else that I've lived during my life. I would work the late shift at Royal Mail and was pushed to work harder and faster in the name of productivity, targets with the poisoned carrot of bonus culture.
. Even today I find it nearly impossible to dampen and thwart a simmering aggression and feelings of irritation towards those in 'high' social places.
. My work also references a theoretical football league...the traditional working class sport.
. I witness inequality on a daily basis and find myself interacting more and more with people from all walks of life, but it is still a struggle to ignore my upbringing, the confused messages and the insecurities that I've kindly allowed to follow me into adult life.
. I remember days living in Cambridge walking in the evening into the windows of the middle classes and long for a place that I could call my own, a centre in which to think and reflect.
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Quotes From...Marx and Marxism an introduction, Cliff Slaughter, Longman.
*The following quotes cross reference with Phenomenology
'By 1841, when his thesis was accepted by the University Of Jena, he had become a prominent member of a circle of thinkers and writers known as the 'Young Hegelians'. The philosopher Hegel had elaborated a critical method of showing the necessity of change within every apparently fixed part of nature, history and thought. Even though Hegel himself had by now become accepted as a conservative thinker who justified the existing Prussian state as the culmination of all development, these young Hegelians took it upon themselves to use his method for challenging and overturning the existing order of power and ideology'. pp1
'In Paris, socialist groupings were very active, and Marx and Engels took part vigorously in their discussions. It was in the course of this work that they worked out the separation from what they called 'middle-class' or 'petty-bourgeois forms of socialism'. pp2
footnote pp1
*Idealism: the outlook which sees the ideas or spirit as the basis of reality, with forms of matter derived from these.
*Materialism: the outlook which considers matter in its infinity of forms to be the primary reality, with thoughts and ideas a reflection of matter.
'It was with Hegel's philosophical system that Marx had to come to terms. Eventually, Marx rejected Hegel's idealism, but he extracted from Hegel's work a scientific method and an understanding of the fundamental importance of mankind's practice in creating history which were entirely new, and which provide the key to understanding how he answered the unresolved problems of political economy and pre-Marxian socialist theory.' pp14
'Hegel was an objective idealist'. 'Objective' here means that he saw the original and essential reality as something which exists outside and independent of the individual: that is to say, he was not a subjective idealist...' pp14
'...Hegel was able to show that the world in which we live (including the transformation of it through human practice) is not just a mass of separate things, some similar and some dissimilar, with fixed characteristics and definitions. On the contrary, it is a vast complex of processes, changes, transitions which can only be grasped by seeing the internal, developing contradictions and interconnections of the parts and of the whole...'pp14
'Marx took this dialectical historical method and outlook from Hegel and rejected the idealism'. PP14
* Dialectics - logic.
* materialism - the only thing that can truly be proven to exist is matter.
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