In the previous lecture, I referred to Marx's historical materialism, which means rejecting the idea that history is driven by great ideas or powerful individuals alone.
Marx argued that the primary driver of historical change is the material or economic conditions of life.
And I explained how Marx used Hegel's theory of thesis - antithesis - synthesis in his own materialist way.
But there were more sources that helped Marx to develop his own view on society and the forces within.
The tumultuous history of France in the late 18th and early 19th centuries provided Marx with the raw material and concepts for understanding class struggle and political change.
The French Revolution (1789) was the quintessential example of a political revolution that transformed society.
It showed how a rising class, the bourgeoisie, could overthrow an old order, the aristocracy, and reshape society's institutions to suit its own needs, capitalism.
French Historians after the Revolution wrote histories of the Revolution that explicitly framed it as a class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy.
They used terms like "class" and "class situation" to analyze political events, a concept Marx would adopt and make central to his theory.
And then there were the utopian socialists, as Marx called them, like Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), who criticized the social inequalities of capitalism.
From them, Marx drew the vision of a future beyond capitalism and the critique of its inequalities, reinforcing the idea of class struggle as the central dynamic and the need for a radical social transformation beyond mere political revolution.
The Industrial Revolution in Britain created a new economic reality and a new science to study it: political economy. Marx spent years studying the works of its greatest thinkers to understand the inner workings of capitalism.
In previous lectures, I introduced you to Adam Smith and David Ricardo. These thinkers developed the labor theory of value, which argued that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labor required to produce it.
Ricardo, in particular, developed a model of how this value was then distributed between the three main social classes:
the capitalist, as profit, the worker, as wage, and the landlord, as rent. He even noted the inherent conflict between these classes over this distribution.
Marx saw their work as a brilliant but incomplete and ideological analysis. He accepted the labor theory of value but used it to develop his own theory of surplus value.
He asked: if labor creates all value, and workers are paid wages that cover their subsistence, where do profits come from?
His answer was that capitalists extract the "surplus value" created by workers beyond what they are paid for their labor. This, for Marx, was the secret of capitalist exploitation.
From this root, Marx took the tools to analyze the economic structure of society, consisting of class, value, capital, and profit, and used them to build his critique of the capitalist mode of production.
As you see, Marx did not write his analysis of the economic structure of society on a Sunday afternoon, but after a thorough study of philosophy, history, and economics.
Main Sources:
MacMillan The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd edition
of Economic Thought (2012)
TABLE OF CONTENT -----------------------------------------------------------------
1 - 100 Philosophers 9 May 2009 Start of
2 - 25+ Women Philosophers 10 May 2009 this blog
3 - 25 Adventures in Thinking 10 May 2009
4 - Modern Theories of Ethics 29 Oct 2009
5 - The Ideal State 24 Febr 2010 / 234
6 - The Mystery of the Brain 3 Sept 2010 / 266
7 - The Utopia of the Free Market 16 Febr 2012 / 383
8. - The Aftermath of Neo-liberalism 5 Sept 2012 / 413
9. - The Art Not to Be an Egoist 6 Nov 2012 / 426
10 - Non-Western Philosophy 29 May 2013 / 477
11 - Why Science is Right 2 Sept 2014 / 534
12 - A Philosopher looks at Atheism 1 Jan 2015 / 557
13 - EVIL, a philosophical investigation 17 Apr 2015 / 580
14 - Existentialism and Free Will 2 Sept 2015 / 586
15 - Spinoza 2 Sept 2016 / 615
16 - The Meaning of Life 13 Febr 2017 / 637
17 - In Search of my Self 6 Sept 2017 / 670
18 - The 20th Century Revisited 3 Apr 2018 / 706
19 - The Pessimist 11 Jan 2020 / 819
20 - The Optimist 9 Febr 2020 / 824
21 - Awakening from a Neoliberal Dream 8 Oct 2020 / 872
22 - A World Full of Patterns 1 Apr 2021 / 912
23 - The Concept of Freedom 8 Jan 2022 / 965
24 - Materialism 7 Sept 2022 / 1011
25 - Historical Materialism 5 Oct 2023 / 1088
26 - The Bonobo and the Atheist 9 Jan 2024 / 1102
27 - Artificial Intelligence 9 Feb 2024 / 1108
28 - Why Am I Here 6 Sept 2024 / 1139
The Discussion
[14:23] .: Beertje :. (beertje.beaumont): thank you Herman
[14:23] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): ㋡
[14:24] .: Beertje :. (beertje.beaumont): why became his vieuws so popular?
[14:24] herman Bergson: The surplus value created by the worker is an interesting observation
[14:24] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): yes
[14:25] herman Bergson: Why? Well. one reason was that workers indeed felt exploited and without any chance to improve their living conditions
[14:25] Max Chatnoir: Is the value of the factory machinery part of the capitalist contribution?
[14:25] herman Bergson: Another reason could be the horrible and unhealthy working conditions of the workers
[14:26] herman Bergson: Yes, Max, because it is the means of production possessed by the factory owner
[14:27] herman Bergson: The bad conditions of the workers caused the creation of trade unions for instance...
[14:27] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): aaa
[14:27] Max Chatnoir: What about the value of the invented object -- the value of creativity?
[14:27] herman Bergson: Collectively, they could yield power
[14:28] herman Bergson: Depend, I guess, Max...the creative person can be an exploited worker in some laboratory
[14:28] Max Chatnoir: Or is that part of the factory value?
[14:28] .: Beertje :. (beertje.beaumont): Could these workers be creative, or had they the same work to do day in and day out?
[14:28] herman Bergson: Or it is a smart start - up person with a patetnted idea
[14:29] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): hmm
[14:29] herman Bergson: Well...it was around 1900 that the conveyor belt/lopende band was invented....
[14:30] herman Bergson: Workers didn't construct the whole product anymore...
[14:30] herman Bergson: Every one aded some part...and this is stil the case
[14:31] herman Bergson: It alienates workers from what they are creating, from the final product
[14:31] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): aaaa
[14:31] Max Chatnoir: So they are effectively robots
[14:31] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): all for creativity!
[14:31] herman Bergson: You could say that,yes
[14:31] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): but yes those were the times
[14:33] herman Bergson: Now and then I see on YouTube huge production halls....a hundred people just picking up a part from a conveyor belt...add a screw or so and put it back for the next worker
[14:33] Max Chatnoir: Yes, the conveyor model restricts the skill that the workers can use.
[14:33] .: Beertje :. (beertje.beaumont): seems horrible to me
[14:33] herman Bergson: Ye me too...I always wonder...how can you do that all day 5 days a week
[14:34] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): indeed
[14:34] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): slavery
[14:34] Max Chatnoir: It's efficient, but incredibly boring for the workers.
[14:34] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): yes :(
[14:34] herman Bergson: I think so too
[14:34] .: Beertje :. (beertje.beaumont): i wold already scream after an hour
[14:35] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): not like me, a bit on the bandsaw, a bit on the lathe, a bit on the welding machine, forklift, CAD work ect
[14:35] herman Bergson: I was lucky as an educator for 30 years...not a single day the same
[14:35] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): same all time
[14:35] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): ad also that work itself liik much more boring thn what i do on itself
[14:35] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): not giving
[14:35] herman Bergson: Yes Bejiita...I already had the impression that you have a job with a lot of variation
[14:35] Max Chatnoir: Yes, Herman.
[14:35] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): yes
[14:36] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): true
[14:36] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): i do all kin of things add im oing it from raw material to finished product oftenn
[14:36] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): doing
[14:37] herman Bergson: The tough jobs are in the mass production facilities, I guess
[14:37] Max Chatnoir: I would think so.
[14:38] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): + i feel like one in the team, not just one innsignificant ad replacable cog my 1000s of others
[14:38] herman Bergson: Good point Bejiita
[14:38] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): aa
[14:38] Max Chatnoir: Yes, that seems like a better model, Bejiita.
[14:38] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): yes
[14:38] Max Chatnoir: Can you also switch tasks?
[14:39] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): yes, i run all the different machines depending on what im manufacturing
[14:39] herman Bergson: lol
[14:39] Max Chatnoir: Oops.
[14:39] .: Beertje :. (beertje.beaumont): hahah
[14:39] bergfrau Apfelbaum: hihiii
[14:39] herman Bergson: Nice machines, Bejiita :-)
[14:39] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): like now i was thread cutting pipes in the lathe for attaching irrigation spreaders to
[14:40] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): sprinklers
[14:40] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): was looking for that name
[14:40] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): we do lots of irrigation stiff
[14:40] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): stuff
[14:40] Max Chatnoir: So you see enough of the process that you could actually improve it?
[14:41] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): yes , well it depends but
[14:41] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): we are inventors ourselves, ill show u a thing we made
[14:41] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): https://www.ksab.com/sv/Kategorier/Vara_TOPP-20/KSAB_SprinklerTrim?id=56010
[14:42] Max Chatnoir: OK
[14:42] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): the idea came from a golfer seeing the backbreaking work of greenkeepers trying to keep the grass clear around the sprinklers
[14:42] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): ive madde 100s of these and they are fun to make and a great tool
[14:42] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): ergonomics for the greenkeeper too
[14:43] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): toe most important thing + speed
[14:43] herman Bergson: nice..
[14:43] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): aah
[14:43] Max Chatnoir: clever!
[14:43] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): great idea for sure
[14:44] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): and for a fair price too, every greenkeeper shall have one of these
[14:44] herman Bergson: I guess it means that you deserve some rest now, Bejiita :-)
[14:44] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): and some beer
[14:44] Max Chatnoir: :-)
[14:44] herman Bergson: So, if there aren't any questions or remarks anymore....?
[14:45] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): can't wait to speed down that runway and into the sky toward prague
[14:45] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): ㋡
[14:45] herman Bergson: Well then...thank you all again....
[14:45] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): gnna be fun
[14:45] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): but before i lift off lets play some cards?
[14:45] herman Bergson: You leave tomorrow?
[14:45] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): ys
[14:45] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): yes
[14:45] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): over the weekend
[14:45] herman Bergson: Ok...Class dismissed ㋡
[14:46] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): back home Sunday afternoon
[14:46] bergfrau Apfelbaum: Thank you Herman and class!
[14:46] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): home
[14:46] bergfrau Apfelbaum: yay
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