Marxism

Marixism
Mark Rupert
* Marxism “practical-critical activity was founded by Karl Marx
* Is possible to understand this constellation of intellectual abs political positions as constituting variants of historical materialism insofar as they are animated by a critique of capitalism, as a particular historical form of organization of human social life, rather than a natural or necessaryexpression of some innate and invariant human nature
* Historical materialism has focused its attention upon capitalism as a material way of lif an ensemble of social relation which has never been coterminous with the economy
* Historical materialism suggests that states an systems of interstate and transnational power relations are embedded in a organization of production
* Historicalmaterialism begins from the premise that humans become what they are in large part because of the social forms through which they organize their material reproduction, a process that is at once both natural and social
* Human social beings continually produce the conditions of their existence through socially organized productive activity, trough this process, the material world socialrelations and ideas, and human beings themselves are continuously reproduced or transformed.
* The kind of society we will live in and the kinds of people e will become is for marx an index of our freedom
* THE CRITIQUE OF CAPITALIST SOCIAL LIFE
* Capitalism, as Marx represents it is not a seamless web oppression, but rather a contradictory life of dual freedom
* CAPITALISM AND CLASS POWER* Capitalism social relations generate the possibility of asymmetrical social powers distributed according to class. Socially necessary means of productions are constituted as a private property, exclusively owned by one class of people.
* Capitalism exercise two kinds of power
* As employers capitalist and their managerial agents attempt to assert control over the transformation oflabor power. Driven de imperatives of competitive accumulation, they seek to maximize the output of workers in relation to wages paid for labor power, and may lengthen the workday or transform the labor process itself in order to do so.
* The second social identity is investors. Deciding when, where and how to invest is a prerogative attendant on ownership of private property in the means ofproduction. As owner investors, capitalists routinely make decisions which directly determine the social allocation of labor resources-the pace of aggregate economic activity and the shape of the social division labor
* Class powers must be actualized in various concrete sites of social production where class is articulated with other socially meaningful identities resident and effective inthose historical circumstances.capitalis powers over waged labor has been historically articulated with gendered and raced forms of power.
* Class cannot be effectively determining without itself being determined.
* GRAMSCI:CAPITALISM, IDEOLOGY, HEGEMONY
* Gramsci contributed with the historical materialist tradition with a conceptual vocabulary which enable the processes oftransformative politics
* Marx suggested that socialist transformation might emerge out of confluence of capitalism’s endemic crisis tendencies, the polarization of its class structure, the intensified exploitation of the proletarian , the emerge of the latter as a collective agent through the realization of its socially productive power.
* Gramsci accepted the marx analysis but was unwilling toembrace the more mechanical and economistic interpretations of marx circulating in the international socialism movement
* For Gramsci popular “common sense” becomes a critical terrain of political struggle
* Popular common sense could become a ground of struggle because it Is an amalgam of historically effective ideologies, scientific doctrines and social mythologies. Gransci
* Understood...