So, that's by way of the big background,

now we'll come to the somewhat smaller background and

link Marx to the central enlightenment themes that I've been talking about.

And here, in some respects, you're getting an idiosyncratic view of Marx from me,

I should say.

You can find go, go off, for example, and find a book by the title, Marx and

Mill, by a man called Duncan, Graeme Duncan.

And that book argues that Marx and Mill come from fundamentally different

paradigms, fundamentally different frameworks of thinking.

that, that speak past one another.

I think that's wrong.

I think that Marx was an enlightenment thinker,

as I've said, committed to the twin goals of science and individual freedom.

And I'm going to say a little bit about that going in before we really dig in.

So the first sense in

which Marx is committed to science is what's sometimes called materialism.

The materialist conception of history and this is the notion that

the material conditions that shape our lives, determine everything else.

And so, the most important thing for Marx about human beings that

differentiates them from animals, is that they produce their means of subsistence.

They work, they create things.

And, so he thinks that's where you have to start.

Unlike Mill and Bentham and

the others we've been talking about so far, he doesn't start with ideas.

He starts with how do humans organize the means of

producing what it is that they need to survive?

Then secondly, though, as I said, that's a materialist conception of history.

He has a, he has a conception of history which I'm afraid is

dressed up in a lot of jargon and

and mumbo jumbo, what will seem like mumbo jumbo to many people.

He has a so-called dialectical method,

which revolves around the ideas of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

Now, you,

you've I think done a little European philosophy, what would that call to mind?

>> Hegel.

That's exactly right.

So, Hegel was the 19th Century

idealist German philosopher that Marx was reacting against.

Hegel thought that there are ideas that work their way through history.

And usually, they work.

By the, the mechanism of so called contradictions.

So the idea of a thesis was there would be some idea propounded such as

the freedom of the individual.

And then there would be some

contrarian idea that would be pushed up against that idea.

Maybe the demands of production and that then,

that out of that clash would come some new synthesis.

It's, it's going to take us too far afield to dig into Hegel's ideas, but

what Marx did was to adapt that idealist conception of the dialectical method.

The dialectical meaning this going from thesis to antithesis to

synthesis which becomes then a new thesis,

which produces a new antithesis on through until we get to some end point.

Marx wants to say, that general way of thinking makes sense but

it's all driven by the materialist conception of history.

So his notion is that as a, a mode of production.

A syst, a system of organizing production gets created.

It works for a while, but then it starts to generate internal tensions.

There is no equilibrium in, in, to use the terminology that we've,

we've talked about with respect to the system, there's no equilibrium.

And eventually, the contradictions in the system become so pronounced that it falls

apart, and then you get a new system, and the new system works for a while.

It has, brings certain benefits.

But again then it has contradictions within it which start to

come to the surface.

And as they become sufficiently Pronounced eventually the system collapsed.

And that's why it's very important to see most people think

that Marx was against capitalism.

Right? That's fairly standard reaction.

But it's not really what his view was.

He thought capitalism had a very important role to play for a while.

It was going to generate enormous new amount of

wealth that would make communism and socialism possible.

So it's, it's too simple minded to say it was just against capitalism.

What he thought was it,

it, for a while, it would be the most productive economic system ever deviced.

But eventually, it would, it,

it's internal contradictions would surface and it would tear itself to pieces.

okay, a third, idea that's associated with Marx's view

of science is generally captured with the phrase base and superstructure.

What comes to mind when I say that?

>> It's the economy stupid.

>> It's the economy stupid as Bill Clinton famously said.

In his 1992 election campaign, that's exactly right.

It's the economy that, instead of focusing on,

political freedoms and, political arrangements, institutional arrangements,

whether we should have parliamentary systems or, separation of power systems.

Forget about it, what's really important is the economy.

Every thing else is the super structure, so

this is the idea of base and super structure.

You need to understand what goes on in a base if you're

going to figure out what goes on in your super structure.

The super structure at some points her refers to he say's they're

effing phenomenal.

They're unimportant, they're all derivative.

Everything that happens in politics is really going to

be determined by what goes on in the economy.

So you have to start there.

So Marx has a view of science that's an adaptation of

Hegel's dialectical idealism.

And it's really a dialectical materialism.

And it all comes down to saying that we really need to understand

the imperatives, that are going to get generated in the economy.

Okay, let's talk about Marx and individual rights.

This is even more jarring for

many people than thinking of him as a scientific thinker.

Freedom versus equality.

You mentioned that already, and I'm going to, I'm going to suggest to you that

freedom is indeed the highest good for Marx, although he's going to

say something about the distribution of freedom, that's very important.

Which we haven't thought about before.

But it's going to be vital to him.

We are also going to see that when we try to understand what freedom means for

Marx, we have to go back and

think about his term alienation, and the discussion of the division of labor,

about which I'm going to have a little more to say shortly.

And that finally, we're going to have to turn to our old friend,

the workmanship ideal that we talked about in connection with John Locke.

And that's going to provide the philosophical basis for the labor

theory of value which was expressed in a fairly rudimentary way by Locke.

But his much more systematically stated.

By the classical political economist Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and

of course, for our purposes, Karl Marx.

When we think about Marxism and

we think about Marx's ideas, we should really start at the end.

We should start at this idea of communism.

For Marx capitalism eventually collapsed and is replaced by socialism,

which is a kind of transitory state on the way to communism.

And here we see in his definition of communism, in the Communist Manifesto,

he says it's a world in which the free development of each is the condition for

the free development of all.

I think what he actually meant, I think it's not very well translated.

I think the way I would translate that passage is actually to

say it's a world in which the free development of all, is the condition for

the free development of each.

That is to say, everybody should be free but

you can't be free if others are unfree.

So he wants a world in which the free development of all, we might say,

is, is a better understanding of what he was trying to communicate here.

The free development of all is the condition for free development of each.

But the, the basic notion is if, if some, if the condition for

your freedom is my lack of freedom then we don't have a free society.

And that's why I said in the very first lecture that the central,

organizing concept of Marxism is actually the notion of exploitation.

If your freedom is parasitic on or

dependent upon exploiting me, we don't have a free society.

So, this idea of communism is a world from which

exploitation will have been banished, and therefore, we will all be free.

he, he, he describes it in a very famous passage.

I'll talk a little bit more about the division of labor in a minute.

But the, the notion here that,

of the division of labor is that different people perform different tasks.

Right so, if I'm a subsistence farmer, I graze my sheep on the common land.

I, I, I get meat from my sheep when I butcher the sheep.

I make shoes from the sheep, and so on.

That's a subsistence economy.

As soon as you start to get a division of labor,

different people perform different tasks.

One person makes shoes, one person grazes sheep,

one person makes cheese, on person makes milk, and so on.

And the, the division of labor is the beginning of capitalism's productivity.

So Marx says here, in this famous passage,

actually Marx and Engels together, people tend to forget about Engels.

He says, as soon as a division of labor comes into being,

each man as a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and

which he cannot escape.

He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd or a critical critic, and

he must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.

While in a communist society when nobody has any one exclusive sphere of activity,

but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes,

society regulates the general production and

thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow.

To hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon,

to rear cattle in the evening and to criticize after dinner.

Just as I have a mind without ever becoming a hunter,

fisherman, a Shepard or a critic.

So, Marx is here, alluding to the fact that the, the productive dynam,

dynamism of capitalism is intimately linked with the, the division of labor.

But the division of labor makes us all more and more and more and

more specialized, and we'll talk about the dynamic by which that happens later.

But just to underscore this notion that the dynamism of

capitalism is connected to the division of labor.

I want you to, to read to you one more passage.

And this is a, a famous statement by Adam Smith.

At the beginning of the wealth of nations, which when Marks wrote,

was by far the most advanced treatiies on the nature of capitalism.

And, and, in this, this paragraph, Smith describes a visit

that he makes to a pin factory and he says he's shocked by the, the incredible

productivity that results from the division of labor in the pin factory.

He says, one man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it,

a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head.

To make the head requires two or three distinct operations.

To put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another,

it is even a trade by itself, to put them into the paper.

And the important business of making a pin is, in this matter,

is actually divided into about eighteen distinct operations.

I've seen of small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed.

And where some of them consequently performed two or

three distinct operations.

They could, when they exerted themselves,

make among them about 12 pounds of pins in a day.

They're in a, they are in a pound upwards of 4,000 pins of mid-length size.

Those ten persons therefore could then make among them

upwards of 48,000 pins in a day.

But, if they had all wrought separately and independently, and

without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly

could not each of them have had made 20, perhaps even not one penny in a day.

That is certainly not the 200th and the 40th,

perhaps not the 4800th part of what they are at present capable of performing.

In consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations.

So this is just blew Smith away when he went into this pin factory and

he asked himself, if each of these people had to make pins on their own,

how productive could they be?

So the division of labor is integral to capitalism's dynamism.

And Marx agrees with that, but he thinks it's also the sense in,

the, the source of human alienation.

And until we can somehow get beyond the division of labor, where we

can live in this world where we fish in the morning, hunt in the afternoon, and

criticize after dinner, as the whim takes us, we can never be free again.

so, in that sense, it, it is a utopian ideal,

and we'll come back to the senses in which it's utopian.

But that is,

is where we're going to end up in trying to under, understand his ideas.

Marx as an Enlightenment Thinker

Moral Foundations of Politics

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