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.