Topic 10

Marx
Objectives of this lecture:

To read a section of Das Kapital in depth

To acquire some of Marx’s basic working

concepts

Note: this material was originally posted on www.jameselkins.com, under “Syllabi.” Send all comments to jelkins@artic.edu
 Concepts, names, and works

These are among the concepts, names, and works that you should
memorize:

Marxist: said of people and texts that follow Marx directly

Marxian: said of people and texts that follow Marx indirectly, through
popularizations or secondary sources

Natural society: for Marx, every society presents itself as natural: i.e., its
system (for us, capitalism and democracy) is presented as the optimal
system, or the one toward which all societies have been tending (this is
said in the U.S., about democracy)

Unhappy consciousness. Marx’s term, taken from Hegel, for the

consciousness divided against itself. In Marxian writing, it describes the
state of beourgeois consciousness: a typical person is not aware of how
the society in which he or she lives is not natural.
Use value: the degree to which a commodity is useful in society; it reflects
the actual labor of its making, and the kind of life that is lived in relation
to the object

Exchange value: the price.

Commodification: objects are reduced when they are assigned exchange

values; their organic relation to people’s lives is lost, and they are
reconceived as objects equivalent to specific values.

Phantasmagoria: Marx’s term for the unrealistic frame of mind that

commodification engenders: we think of everything as an object whose
value, and whose desirability, is proportionate only to its exchange value.
At the same time, we invest the exchange value with the same
importance that was once—eg, in medieval societies—given to the use
value. The world becomes a universe of ghosts and fetishes.
Fetishes: Marx’s term for the intense attachment that we feel for objects that
have, paradoxically, been stripped of their natural value. The inversion produces a
fetishization. (Note: this is different from fetishization in Freud or in
anthropology.)

Opium of the people. Marx’s famous definition of religion, coined in 1844. The
same text also calls religion the “illusion of happiness,” the “heart of a heartless
world,” the “soul of a soulless condition,” the halo in a “vale of tears,” and “the
sigh of the oppressed creature.” It is a form of unhappy consciousness. “ (This is
not in our reading.)