scott's notes

Notes on the Communist Manifesto

Engel's summary from the preface:
- the economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch
- consequently, all of history (since the primeval communal ownership of land) has been a history of class struggle
- this struggle is now at a stage where the oppressed class cannot emancipate itself from the oppressing class without also forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression, and class struggles

our epoch has condensed class from a set into a duality

history of history:
expansion of civilization (to America, four corners, etc) opened up trade, commodities, navigation, industry. feudal society couldn't cope and was replaced by manufacturing. guild masters were displaced by the manufacturing middle class. the division of labor btwn corporate guilds was replaced by the division of labor within each workshop. the explosion of the market allowed the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production) to rise and displace the outmoded classes.

hence the bourgeoisie is the result of a long historical development. and with each historical advance of the bourg, a political advance, too.

"The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."

Nothing is left between people but naked self-interest, "egotistical calculation". Free Trade replaces freedom.

"veiled by religious and political illusions, [the bourgeoisie] has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation"

physician, lawyer, priest, poet, and scientist are no longer revered (in a mystical kind of way); they are all now paid wage-laborers

even the family relation is now a mere money relation (SL: huh?)

the bourg cannot exist w/o constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, hence all of society remains agitated, uncertain. the market must constantly expand. all is constant manipulation.

proles are simply yet another commodity, exposed to all the fluctuations of the market. they live only so long as they find work and they find work only so long as their labor increases capital.

the bourg includes industrial owners plus landlords, shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, etc

the lower strata of the middle class -- smaller tradespeople and shopkeepers, peasants, etc -- become part of the proletariat, too, bc their capital is so marginal, and bc their skills become worthless in the face of new production methods.

before they self-organize, proles are somewhat organized by the bourg, to simplify mgmt. so in a sense, the bourg facilitate the revolution. (they do so in a number of ways, according to marx/engels, tho I'm unclear how)

p. 484: Comm party helps national proles see common interests with other nations' proles.
But p. 476-7 complains that the bourg globalize the market, and the complaints are just about the market qua market but about it becoming transnational.

Comm party is the elite braintrust of the proles.

property in its present form is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labor. (SL: huh?)

capital is a social power, not personal

"In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer."

private property already doesn't really exist for most people, so the bourg should stop complaining about Comm's intention to abolish it completely.

"Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation."

bourg lament the disappearance of capital AND CULTURE. but the culture they mourn is, for the majority, a mere training to act as a machine.

the CM has a focus on history as the progression of social/class configurations.

SL Questions/Comments
the bourg are uniform, like communists, but expansive, like capitalists
but can you rule and be a prole at the same time?
can the comms really think that the emancipation of the proles is the End?
class struggle passages (section I) are cool but the communism passages (section II) are polemic and old school.
do sociologists that identity as marxists focus on class struggle bc it's the only aspect that remains valid? or is it to be PC? or what?
what do the proles become after the singularity? they can't just remain raw labor machines.

Themes
History. Bourg/Prole as final class division. Emancipation of proles as singularity.
Modern state as agent of bourg.
Proles as mere commodity, machinery.
Communist Party as braintrust of proles.
Capital as social power, not personal.
Bourg as deluded by own self-interest, blind to history's lessons of revolution.
Law as ossified class will, not justice.

Notes from Communist Manifesto

Scott's Notes for Class

Notes on the Communist Manifesto

Engel's summary from the preface:
- the economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch
- consequently, all of history (since the primeval communal ownership of land) has been a history of class struggle
- this struggle is now at a stage where the oppressed class cannot emancipate itself from the oppressing class without also forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression, and class struggles

our epoch has condensed class from a set into a duality

history of history:
expansion of civilization (to America, four corners, etc) opened up trade, commodities, navigation, industry. feudal society couldn't cope and was replaced by manufacturing. guild masters were displaced by the manufacturing middle class. the division of labor btwn corporate guilds was replaced by the division of labor within each workshop. the explosion of the market allowed the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production) to rise and displace the outmoded classes.

hence the bourgeoisie is the result of a long historical development. and with each historical advance of the bourg, a political advance, too.

"The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."

Nothing is left between people but naked self-interest, "egotistical calculation". Free Trade replaces freedom.

"veiled by religious and political illusions, [the bourgeoisie] has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation"

physician, lawyer, priest, poet, and scientist are no longer revered (in a mystical kind of way); they are all now paid wage-laborers

even the family relation is now a mere money relation (SL: huh?)

the bourg cannot exist w/o constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, hence all of society remains agitated, uncertain. the market must constantly expand. all is constant manipulation.

proles are simply yet another commodity, exposed to all the fluctuations of the market. they live only so long as they find work and they find work only so long as their labor increases capital.

the bourg includes industrial owners plus landlords, shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, etc

the lower strata of the middle class -- smaller tradespeople and shopkeepers, peasants, etc -- become part of the proletariat, too, bc their capital is so marginal, and bc their skills become worthless in the face of new production methods.

before they self-organize, proles are somewhat organized by the bourg, to simplify mgmt. so in a sense, the bourg facilitate the revolution. (they do so in a number of ways, according to marx/engels, tho I'm unclear how)

p. 484: Comm party helps national proles see common interests with other nations' proles.
But p. 476-7 complains that the bourg globalize the market, and the complaints are just about the market qua market but about it becoming transnational.

Comm party is the elite braintrust of the proles.

property in its present form is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labor. (SL: huh?)

capital is a social power, not personal

"In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer."

private property already doesn't really exist for most people, so the bourg should stop complaining about Comm's intention to abolish it completely.

"Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation."

bourg lament the disappearance of capital AND CULTURE. but the culture they mourn is, for the majority, a mere training to act as a machine.

the CM has a focus on history as the progression of social/class configurations.

SL Questions/Comments
the bourg are uniform, like communists, but expansive, like capitalists
but can you rule and be a prole at the same time?
can the comms really think that the emancipation of the proles is the End?
class struggle passages (section I) are cool but the communism passages (section II) are polemic and old school.
do sociologists that identity as marxists focus on class struggle bc it's the only aspect that remains valid? or is it to be PC? or what?
what do the proles become after the singularity? they can't just remain raw labor machines.

Themes
History. Bourg/Prole as final class division. Emancipation of proles as singularity.
Modern state as agent of bourg.
Proles as mere commodity, machinery.
Communist Party as braintrust of proles.
Capital as social power, not personal.
Bourg as deluded by own self-interest, blind to history's lessons of revolution.
Law as ossified class will, not justice.

class notes on Marx

Gramsci - actually handles class.. should be treated as the 5th book of Das Kapital

In sociology... Das Kapital is taught.

New left vs. old left - battle over old Marx vs. new Marx. A lot of Marx' transcripts weren't found until 60s. Very bitter battle - traditional Marxists saw class struggle as the key, saw the proletariat as the only character... thus, young Berkeley students couldn't be revolutionaries. Old left politicos just saw the counter culture as self-indulgent. Frankfurt school - Markusa. Loose Marx. Other theorists doing race, gender... was new left really situated in Marx?

Markuso, Adorno, Benjamin... a particular take on Marx. Gramsci notion of hegemony.

Feyerbach & Hegel really influenced early Marx... not grounded enough in historical knowledge.

In Manifesto - thought that it was a science of history, had to be grounded in history. By Vol. 1 of Capital, he was talking about the phenomenology of capital.

60s was when psychological Marx appeared.

Marx seemed to be calling the communist party the brain trust of the proletariat. Yugoslav theorists said that the dictatorship of the Communist party was contradictory.

Lenin was taking his example of a managed economy from Germany in WW1. That was his example of a managed society from an economy. Weber's ideas came from the same place.

French Revolution. Paris Commune -> could be an urban proletarian revolution. WW1 really shaped Soviet state mobilization.

They cannot represent themselves - they must be represented (from Brumier). Proletariat themselves doesn't have the intellectual capacities to consceptionalize or regulate a communal scoiety. It must be managed.

Metaphor: pototoes in a sack... peasants have so much that they don't know what they have. Development of class consciousness. Very important in Chinese revolution - speaking bitterness and trying to speak class consciousness. Was borrowed by feminists for class awareness in women's liberalization.

E.P. Thomspon - how the English working class creating a class consciousness.

What do the oppressed have in common other than their oppressor. First instinct is negation of their oppressor. How do they evolve from that to some vision of self? Niche: the proletariat will do nothing but seek revenge. Proletariat: class out to negate their oppressors. Communist party - trying to educate. Role of the Manifesto - try to elucidate the responsibilities that people have.

What is the "value" of class? What actually comes out of class?

Gramsci... Most intellectuals work for the bourgeoisie. Weber: politics is a vocation... journalists/professors can be neutral. Organic intellectuals.

Eric Hoffer - long shore-man who wrote a lot of philosophy - 60s in SF. Organic intellectual. Actually published (rare).

Dictatorship of the proletariat - big phrase in Germany.

Law encodes will of bourgeoisie instead of encoding justice.

Community of women. In Russia, after communist revolution, women movement that was suppressed. Engels - wrote a theory of women's subordination, private property of her husband. Believed that once class was ended, women would be emancipated. Saw the working class family as degrading the family.

Gramsci/Weblan: women become luxury mammals.

In primitive society... they had access to Morgan.... idea that in primitive societies, the sharing of women... free love situation.

Where did they get access to women? Women writing back to 1700s in France. Mary Wellstone Craft - part of the British tradition.

Did believed that under capitalism, women was suppressed. Gender-specific subordination. Inspired feminism.

Marx: children are educated by society, not families. In Germany, kindergarten at 6 months old. This was a way to crush the bourgeoisie tendencies of the family. Everyone's child was guaranteed space in those institutions. Job was also guaranteed until she got back to work after child birth.

Concealing power in technology.

Proletariat gets its consciousness of its collective spirit by experience of being disciplined by industrial system. Bourgeoisie needs to keep proletariat organized (so that they're not managing chaos)?

K-12 education: learning how to show up on time, do meaningless assignments, don't make connections between classes.. fragmentation of self useful for work.

In Germany - never said we are communists, we are socialists... the stage before communism... the stage before fishing. [Emulating Russia.]

Collapse of socialist states - in concert with capitalism's advance... led to decline of Marxism as a popular ideology in the academy.

New left: Yugoslavian syndicalists... decentralization.
Old left: Russian structure

Marxism more relevant than ever - globalization and commodity fetishization.

Castells, Wallerstein.

Before your European hegemony. Europe developed - applies world systems. Marx's stages still frame discourse. Feudal, pre-industrial, industrial, technological, etc. Progression.

Marx: roots of capitalism are not capitalism, but primitive accumulation. Force. Illegitimate in its own terms.

Weakening of the nation-state. Post-Marx folks seem to think that Marx was wrong because he had a conception of the State.. but he didn't. State: preserves the interest of bourgeoisie.

Shift in capital towards intellect. In Marxism - tiers... two: power was binary and increasingly binary. Nature of capital has evolved in directions that couldn't have been imagined.

Pretty hard to argue that working class people are oppressed when they own SUVs.... false needs manipulated through advertising and various forms of insecurities.

3rd world is no longer located geographically... it's not just Bangladesh, but it's also East LA. No longer separated by geography.

Marx really struggled against nationalism. In Marxist theory, it's doctrine.. the way Marxists handle economic collapses is to declare war. Hmmm.......


Bill Donhmoff - studies the rich. Studies bohemian grove and rich. The ruling class. Bush & Kerry are part of the intermarriage - cousins 9th removed or something.

Different forms of capital lead to different politics. Owners of land have different class interests.

Petty bourgeoisie most threatened by the Jew in France... define: property owner, small business owner. Volatile, threatened to lose their class status. When they feel threatened, they attack others... support fascist approaches. Support Republicans.

Our property: technological expertise... technocrat.

[Brumier - way that french renamed the calendar. Banned all Christian names. Huh?]

Bourgeoisie can only survive as long as they can always redo the means of production.

Intellectual wage laborers.

How fast your intellectual property burns out. Career trajectory of engineers - 25 years. Career crash in mid-life for engineers

General intellect. Information and knowledge will be freed from the means of production. Instead, knowledge has been commodified. Weber: professional classes who own expertise are a separate class. Ministers of society. Artisan class as the drivers of history.

Class notes on Smith, Marx Engels

Smith: Wealth of Nations - Division of Labor.
- allow for greater production (increase in quantity of work)
- cause of technological innovation
- measure wealth based on capital; thus, capitalism
- need for human community, so as to share the burden of production
- origin of where an individual will do what's in her best interest and if everyone else will do the same, resulting in the good for all

Marx & Engels
- focus on labor, not capital
- Smith is naive in self-interest argument, revealed how this has not been the case in England. (Engel's ethnographic piece on the state of the poor in England)
- the richest get richer with capitalism
- Marxism: stemming from utopian socialism to scientific socialism (historical materialism - moving towards a worldwide anti-capitalist revolution); directly connected with Hegel
- capitalism is a required first step to communism


Division of labor - 2 senses
- social division of labor (Hegel/Smith)
-- people in society of two different roles (in Smith - descriptive - philosophers, farmers)

Marx: division of labor (antagonistic against classes) - tendency to go towards two. class antagonism / struggle is at the core.
- middle class is a doomed class that sells mental labor instead of physical labor; working class sells physical labor as a commodity; middle class has illusion that they're rising to be a part of bourgeoisie
- they are doomed because their mental labor is just another commodity (if you annoy me, i fire you)
- Weber buys this argument (professionals have a classless status - they're not neutral). autonomy of that class is a huge contested state

Hegel - description of different estates

Technical division of labor - industrial production (pins)

Master/Slave - phenomenology of the mind - Hegel (psychology of power - subordination)
- master is appropriating the will of the subordinate
- basically, you follow orders
- powerful appropriating the will of the powerless
- powerless become powerful because they develop a more egalitarian view of the world (dialectic of master/slave - the ability of the master to impose the world view on everyone else).
- thesis (master to appropriate mind of the powerless), antithesis (stripping of will or independence form the powerless), synthesis (ability of the powerless to see in the interest of everyone long term - universal subjective of objective history)
- powerless has a consciousness that rises above
- France Phanom - analysis of psychology of the oppressed
- Marx imprints on top of class struggle; bourgeoisie places it on top of people... his goal is to get the proletariat to see. marx wants to see it overthrow the technical division of labors - philosophers in the morning, farmers in the afternoon

Hegel intended it as a psychology of power, but Marx saw it as an opportunity

Marxism in sociology
Class struggle is the center of everything. Everything is about domination.

Academics? Weber takes the middle class as an independent. Huge debate within Marxist folks. All of us intellectuals are employed by the bourgeoisie.

Press cannot report on anything that inverts the power struggle. In university, people who threaten class are fired. We have the illusion of being free of class, but ultimately we only make a living from the bourgeoisie.

Organic intellectuals - people who rise out of people. Malcolm X. Rise from the underclass and never work for big institutions. Live a life like the class they came out of. They are the only people who are actually make a history.

Is there mobility from working to middle.

Edwards. Technical domination - in technical division of labor, power relations used to be in the form of a boss. Huge wars between unions and auto companies on the streets of Detroit. Discipline of workforce is executed by technology. No longer personal me telling you what to do. Personal domination disappears.

Software - disciplining workforce.

False consciousness. Hegel in Marx (early writings). Most of these weren't published until recently. Theory of alienation. Feeling estranged (from german), feeling that your work is defeating you, feeling that your work is being used against you ---> all get translated to alienation.

Very few people feel enriched by their work. You work to be a consumer in your private life. Marx' conception of work is about losing creativity. Psychology of work.

Smith: worries entirely about technical. He worries about the moral impoverishment by sheer repetition. Marx doesn't offer a suggestion for the improvement.

Praxis - usually translated as action. Praxis synonym is labor - creative force of humans. From Marx, activity is purely in labor.

Yuri: Does he believe that a society can exist without power? In a primitive society, you don't need to have domination. Peter: it's primary. In every stage of history, all the way back to beginning. He expects to overturn it. It's the end of history and when the proletariat overturns power. Back to wealth of nations. It's possible to produce enough to free everyone.

Yuri: if he believes he can do away with domination, doesn't that mean that it's artificially created? Peter: cause of domination (German ideology, manifesto) -> scarcity is the source of domination. Once you overcome scarcity. That's the great contradiction of capitalism - it does overcome scarcity but the system distribution is the most unequal.

If the proletariat overthrew bourgeoisie, would they overcome scarcity or would they abuse that power? No Marxist revolution overthrew domination, it just was used in new ways to create new ways of using power.

French Revolution. Liberty, equality, fraternity.

Paris Commune - in Marx's time - 1870, parisian working class took over... tried to implement these ideas. Germany, France, etc joined to crush this event. Most revolutions have been in peasant countries. Marx saw Paris Commune as possible, as verification. Scientific socialism based on a close analysis of history. He claimed that it was scientific.

Identity. Early Hegelian - Gromsci. As marxist version turned into Leninism. In hungary, it turned into a psychology theory. Emma Goldman in the US. Advanced industrial society - identity, psychology.

America could be an evolution towards socialism without a violent revolution (in 3rd version intro to Capital). because we never had a feudalist society. so bourgeoisie didn't have the same control over society.

Marx: first systematic theory of importance of history of technology. Around scarcity. Industrial system is incredibly good at production, but not distribution. Ideology of technology - it can overcome social contradictions, by teaching, by overcoming scarcity. (in Vol 1. in capital - means of production in industrial society is technology... systematic creation of tech for production is a history changing fact). Marx puts technology at center. (Franklin mentions it; Locke, Hobbes don't)

In Democratis and Epicures - nothing you can see on earth that is nature, except the discovery of a new comet. Everything has been transformed by labor. Congealed labor == tools.

Albania, North Korea - these are the places where Marx is seen as part of class struggle. Everyone else is focusing on technology.

Very few sociologists see the proletariat as the universal subject object of history. But they use these tools to understand - stratification of history. No point of view that is neutral. All positions are materialist.

Lot of groups claim to be the legitimate descendants of Marx. Castells sees himself as a child of Marx. Wallerstein - see the class struggle as a struggle between nations. US to other nations as bourgeoisie to proletariat. Rules of the world. Class struggle is read on a global basis in major schools of sociology (Castells it the biggest).

Peter's thesis: use of phenomenology to understand societies.

Back to Division of Labor. Marx critiques it on p. 392 in Capital. Humans become stupid through repetition. Hard critique of division of labor. Technology is the perpetual creation of and solution all of our problems. Hegelian dialectic.

How do you overcome scarcity? Food shelter clothing - in these Marx ideas of needs, there's enough to go around. If you define need as prestige, there's not enough to go around. Is wealth connected to some limited notion like prestige, status or a finite notion as Marx would have it.

In a consumer society, the middle class thinks it's free because it has SUVs, because it can consume. But to Marx, freedom doesn't come with consumption. Illusionary kind of wealth. And therefore an illusory kind of need. People are manipulated by their needs. Marx doesn't talk about a consumer society.

Manipulation of people now is through mass media. Marxism as cultural critique.

Apply Smith to division of intellectual capital?

Weber - a real interest in artisans. Skill is so rare that they can control their independence. Freedom from class because they can control workers. Is a programmer an artisan? They impose upon a capitalist system under what conditions that they will work. That's a moderating force on society.

Syndicalism - in Yugoslavia - team work - division of labor in factory but those factories would compete against one another. Buy-in to a sense of community. Also in Japanese auto-production. Introduction of autonomy into work and choice. This makes work a lot less alienating. Syndicalist. In software company - re-negotiation of who does what... maybe on person whose vision directs, but everyone has input. This is an unalienating scenario. Division of labor in technology is a bit alienating. Great sense of creativity because of the re-negotiation of production. How much is technology introducing flexibility because of choice.

Technology was going to change division of labor because people could better organize. Instead, you see faster and faster production lines and being evaluated based on/by machines.

Software design - becoming increasingly alienating. Now you feel like you are being depleted by writing stupid amounts of code to interface with crappy products. Never thought about coding being a production line, but it's becoming that. Writing a spec. More about increasing production (support). Now people have to write an insane amount.

Introducing Soc101 for HCI-Types

A group of us HCI-types decided that it would be wise to learn the theoretical underpinnings of sociology. The only class at Berkeley that we could get into on this topic was an undergrad one - Soc101. We decided that we didn't want to take the course as is, but focus on how this applies to the current state of technological development. Thus, we are (somewhat) attending the lectures to Soc101, reading all of the materials and running our own section where we engage with the topics in a more personally meaningful manner. These are some of the haphazard notes from that class.