Self-valorize ???????

mode of production 18:20

Story 19:00
Social antagonism 23:47
Mode of production is the idea of history (27:30)  explains any social formation
Idea: system of elements in relation that can explain all the fields it relates to
Marx can reduce all history to one formula
Elements: laborer and non-laborer
Two relations: Proprietor (own what you produce) or an appropriator
In medieval times, you own your tools and your knowledge, the only thing they
didn’t own is the land. Now, you don’t own your tools and you buy your
knowledge.
Back then, we needed force to get surplus (workers can get powerful)
Today, everyone is nice to you. If you don’t own anything, do you need your job to
live? You are so dispossessed. It’s a legal juridical relation since you legally give
them the right to take the product and accept in return a section of this production.
They know you will accept because you have no other option. So, you transform
power relation into legal relation. They exploit you and use authorities as
repressive force.
Today, you can’t work on the side. Whenever you work, someone is making
surplus: Production and production of surplus are now identified. In medieval
times, we had a division of space and time between them.
Ideology:
8:40 Capitalist and prolityle ???
Obedience is valuable in the medieval times but not valuable today. You can’t
promote obedience and loyalty. If it helps the dominant class to extract surplus,
this is when it becomes a value.
Medieval times: loyalty, obedience, respect…
Now: Freedom of the way you dress, sexuality…
Even if your hair is red and you listen to heavy music, you are not free since you
still work and are being exploited
Freedom is not subjective
Values are strategic tools to make the machine run, more or less smoothly
(facilitate domination)
Value is any human trait or quality that is raised to the status of a value in order to
facilitate the dominant class
Freedom:
For liberals: do what you want
Medieval times: obedience
Marx: freedom in reality: live without the need of anyone (independent)
Equality:
You respect the law, but you go to sue someone, you can’t sue the governing class.
Also, Can’t afford a lawyer. Not rich and powerful enough.  Not really equal

Society is made of two layers:

Infrastructure: where you produce goods (ex factory)/ reproduce means of
production
How can Capitalism endure over 300 years? Repression (police) and ideology
(brainwashing)
Superstructure: what produces subjects/ reproduce the workers (through education)
Ideology helps workers obey
Relations need to be reproduced
You are an individual but can have many subjectivities (student, father,
worshipper…)
Moral dilemma  Values in one institution clash with values of another (clubs Vs
Muslims, drinking vs not drinking)
The role of institutions is to produce a subject out of you. This is ideology.
They create divisions so you start arguing over values and forget the most
important thing: you are being exploited. Your reality is that you’re either a worker
or a capitalist. You can’t unite because you think your reality is your appearance.
Ethics begins when you have to make alliances with people you don’t like in order
to change and stop being exploited.
Propaganda results from ideology. The feelings and affections you have towards
friends and families from same community is ideology itself and prevents you
from making alliances with other people.
A class is what you are as a condition, not what you belong to or feel like
1st function of ideology is to divide the mass (by formation of closed groups)
In universities, we get bored and daydream
2nd function is dividing ourselves by ourselves, you detach yourself from yourself
Even though you get bored, you study mathematics knowing that you won’t use it,
but because apparently this is how the world is. You sit in schools in a disciplined
way.
Marx says a knowledge that doesn’t immediately yield a desire to act is not a
knowledge
01:10:00 conclusion
Apathia (state of being indifferent) is produced in these institutions
Ideology functions on void knowledge (impairs your reasoning) and religion
Two types of knowledge: fiction and formal
If your mode of thinking is simply to listen to stories and accept them without
thinking, you are ready for exploitation

Subjectivation:
For Kant, friendship is wonderful
For Marx, friendship could be pernicious since it could be the expression of the
division of the mass
If you feel you are under surveillance all the time for 10 years, you start watching
yourself by yourself (internally)  1st effect of institutional organization into
panopticon
2nd effect of institutions is that you become lobotomized (brain cut in half)
The ideology dogma
Dogma is things that we can’t really prove rationally with the rationality we have
today
What constitutes an ideology?
Ideology
Ideological apparatus: the institution that instills this dogma ex Church
Rituals ex Sunday Mass, Christmas …
Actions ex pray, stand up…
Belief: recognize yourself as Christian
Big subject: locus of value, the person we have to imitate
We are small subjects
When we identify others and start policing them,
Identification, recognition lead to rejection (if he’s part of the group or not)
Grades are how much we resemble the model
Marx says the more your ideology or dogma is incomprehensible, the better it
works
You can’t prove it is wrong or right
It is the most powerful ideology
Instead of having debates, reorient your attention towards your life and try to build
a community on the ground of interests and rationality and not on the ground of
emotions and beliefs.
For you to be a believer, you need an institutional framework (set of rules)
Liberal theory of action: If you have a belief, you should do it
If you want to make money, you should make money
What is important is doing your belief (practicing it)
For Marx, it is not good since I’m perpetuating the division of the mass
It’s not enough to believe and do.
Religion shouldn’t be the social order
Before “just doing it”, we should check consequences in terms of reality
We have to build the apparatus/machine that allows us to act
Ideology is the imaginary representation of our imaginary relation to our real
conditions of existence

If the social order is corrupted, whatever you do in it, you’re contributing to the
rottenness of the social order. You should change the social order aka revolution
We should go against the privatization of means of production, not what we
consume.
We can’t have 3 families controlling petroleum

Is Marx himself an ideology?

According to liberals, if we really believe in a revolution, we should do it.

Marx knows very well that if we believe in something doesn’t mean that we should
do it because to do it we need an institution, an organization, rituals…
In reality, it’s not about belief, there are constraints and you have to prepare
everyone and yourselves to be able to do it. You can’t do it on your own

What should I do?

You prepare theoretically for a revolution
1. You really need to understand what is going on
2. Assess it in a Marxist real way
3. Start organizing  counter attack…
4. Read Marx and understand it
5. Prepare for revolution and start building groups based on intellect not on
emotions

Ideology of ethics:
What is evil today, if you’re not a Marxist?
1. Notion of suffering: what is really evil today? Suffering is the ultimate evil
Do you need to think in order to detect evil? No, you can see children hungry, you
only have to have empathy and feel with others
Can public opinion decide what is evil? Yes
Liberals think evil = suffering
If you’re a Marxist, you need to think to detect evil
Can we agree that something is good or bad?
1. Definitions:
Historical Materialism: a discipline that relates history to economics and
economics to history (mode of production 13:20)
Dialectical Materialism: an ontological position claiming that the real is what we
know (accessed via knowledge/thought). Ex: combustion in phlogistic chemistry
vs modern chemistry (oxidation)
Real: object of universal judgements/reflects the idea
Materialism: the power to become
Labor Power: capacity to do work
Labor: value of the products produced by the laborer
Mode of production: idea of history
Idea: system of elements in relation that can explain all the fields it relates to
Value: any human trait or quality that is raised to the status of a value in order to
facilitate the domination
Ideology: the imaginary representation of our imaginary relation to our real
conditions of existence

2. Explain how labor power is produced

Explain how values function
How ideology functions, division of the class division of the subject
4. Concrete examples of the way we interpret events and situations which are
practical in the opposition between liberalism and Marxism