While we have all been watching the Mar-A Lago search unfold (and I am still convinced that there is some major portion of this story that we do not yet know), I have been making final preparations for tomorrow's lecture in my course.
This will be the start of a series of eight long two-hour lectures in which I lay out my complex reading of Marx's thought. In those lectures, I shall be talking about economic history, philosophy, mathematical economics, sociology, and literary criticism. I am quite convinced that there is nobody who brings to Marx's thought the complexity and diversity of materials and theoretical viewpoints that I do. This may well be the last course I teach and I want to make it a good one.
The first text that I have the students read is the famous portion of the Economic–Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 devoted to "alienated labor." I shall begin, therefore, by reading to them from the Book of Genesis, chapter 3 verses 16–19. That will permit me both to set the stage for Marx's revolutionary view of labor and also to strike the appropriately devout tone for the beginning of so important to journey.
I shall let you know how it goes.
7 comments:
Suffering from a snake phobia, I'm kind of miffed that you won't start quoting a few verses earlier, especially the one condemning us humans to be bitten in the heel. Maybe snake deaths and injuries have to be seen as agricultural-industrial "accidents" given the nature of the work and the conditions imposed on agricultural laborers?
https://www.dw.com/en/snakebites-kill-at-least-80000-people-per-year-and-probably-more/a-48836235
Remember Marxism?
Over 16 hours of Marx lectures and interpretation is quite a challenge for graduate students or senior undergraduates, a marathon of Marxism which will be sure to darken their mood as a class.
In Jerrold Seigel's book Marx's fate: The Shape of a Life, Seigel reveals the strange nickname that was attached to Marx by his intimate circle during his years as a student, "the Moor" (Marx's Fate, p 78-83 section explains this fully).
Seigel elaborates why Marx's friends would slap this nickname on him: "The reason given for it by Engels and by others who have offered explanations was that it reflected Marx's dark complexion, but that cannot have been the whole story. Anyone who knew Marx at all knew that he was no Moor, and that his swarthy cast had a different non-European source: his Jewishness. Throughout his life Marx was identified as a Jew.... To call Marx Moor was, to begin with, a veiled reminder of his Jewish origins. ... If the nickname did in fact arise in a circle of students, however, there is a good likelihood that the reference was meant to be literary. In literature there were a number of notable Moors.... The most obvious one to English readers, Shakespeare's Othello, would have been well known to Marx's friends in Berlin....Marx himself was steeped in Shakespeare and passionately devoted to him. ...
There were models closer to home, however, in the plays of Schiller. ...[One Moor] was one of Schiller's best-known characters. ... [His name in Schiller's play The Robbers was] Karl Moor (or Karl von Moor, to be precise).... Several features of Schiller's Karl Moor matched ones Marx's friends of the time saw in him. His qualities of leadership...the robber captain....a wild ringleader of wild young fellows....Schiller's Karl Moor had another trait in common with Marx: he was inwardly angry, and disdainful of the world around him. His first words in the drama were: 'I am disgusted with this age of puny scribblers.' ...
Throughout his life Marx would make his indignation felt by means of denunciations directed against those who failed to display his own clarity and commitment. ... To denounce or repudiate others was his way of setting forth and establishing his own views. This personal style reflected the revolutionary passion of Marx's revolt against existing society, but it was characteristic of Marx well before his discovery of the proletariat."
What Seigel is suggesting through out his book is that Marx was a very complex character with many phases of development, and we should be careful to not automatically judge Marx's moral character and temperament as a self-styled robber captain using his impurity of heart methods to do his best to guide what he thought was a natural revolution of human resistance to the inhumanity of capitalism. If Marx were styled as an atheistic prophet of economic doom and resurrection, along with being a scientific socialist and unrecognized literary genius, then his complexity as a philosopher cannot be reduced to one flawed strawman or another (one bad day or problematic moment in his long development does not define the meaning of this philosopher). He was a 19th century Hells Angels without a Harley Davidson, also a gonzo journalist like Hunter S. Thompson in ways.
"which will be sure to darken their mood as a class"
Double entendre?
More on exploded philosopher Darya Dugina or Darya Platonova from the Russian tsargrad.tv web site memorial article by Alexander Stepanov:
"Daria was born on December 15, 1992 in Moscow - in the family of philosophers Alexander Dugin and Natalya Melentyeva. After graduating from school, she entered Moscow State University - in the footsteps of her parents, at the Faculty of Philosophy, becoming a specialist in the history of ancient and continental philosophy. In 2015, she completed her postgraduate studies and wrote her Ph.D. thesis on the topic "Interpretation of Plato's Political Philosophy in the Commentaries of Proclus Diadochus."
She was fluent in French - she did an internship at the University of Michel de Montaigne in Bordeaux. That's why she analyzed in such detail and subtly in her TG channel topics related to France and its relationship with Russia.
She was seriously fond of music - and she loved to listen, attentively and thoughtfully, and she herself played music on the flute and guitar.
Just the other day - last Friday, July 19, Daria, as part of the international forum "Army-2022", made a presentation on "the foundations of mental wars and cases that have been the most striking recently," as she herself said. In this speech, in particular, the speech was about the events in Bucha.
It is clear that the activities of the bright Darya Platonova (Dugina), a political observer who, like her father, spoke for the Russian world, could not pass by the Western curators of Kyiv. Just a month and a half ago, the UK imposed personal sanctions against her, believing that she provided "support and promoted policies or actions that would destabilize Ukraine."
However, there is a strong belief that the killers aimed primarily at her father, the philosopher and ideologist of the Russian world, Alexander Dugin. According to our information, he was also supposed to ride in this car and the assassination attempt was being prepared on him. But Dugin, by coincidence, which the killers could not have known about, went home from the festival, where he had given a lecture "Tradition and History" a few hours earlier, in another car.
The head of the ideological department of Tsargrad, Mikhail Tyurenkov, knew Daria as a child, "a sweet snub-nosed girl in an Old Believer headscarf in dissolution":
"Even among men in history, it is not often possible to meet warrior thinkers and thinker warriors. Dasha was both from a young age. Together with bright sincerity, childish naivety and spiritual purity, the fire of struggle always burned in her. Truly Russian passionarity, that the most evangelical "thirst for truth." (end of memorial article text)
Another wrong-headed philosopher bites the dust? The murder of a philosopher by the Ukrainian secret police death squad? I don't know what to think about this hard case.
On the other hand:
"A former member of Russia’s Duma who was expelled for anti-Kremlin activities has claimed that Russian partisans were allegedly behind a car bomb which blew up the daughter of one of Vladimir Putin’s close political allies on the outskirts of Moscow."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/21/ex-russian-mp-claims-russian-partisans-responsible-for-moscow-car-bomb?fbclid=IwAR0cLFAZCbaYQcVLwCnztfgQbWjwPujyeIvRfiL1dzR_iPi94COtA_EO7gY
"I don't know what to think about this hard case."
What's "hard." While I tilt to the above as an explanation, both were outspoken, very public advocates of fascism everywhere, totalitarianism in Russia, and genocide in Ukraine. There have been many unexplained fires and explosions in Russia recently. Something beyond Ukrainian SOF has been at work.
I love the approach. The specific journey you are bringing the students on, the turns in the rode, the stops, the destination - reflect years of thought and consideration. Perhaps when this course ends you can do the course lectures for youtube - but the problem of not actually speaking to a class when lecturing remains.
The choice for the beginning, the Manuscripts/Alienation, is so right on. So many people will draw the distinction between the "early" Marx and "later" Marx as though the Manuscripts were some tangential musing. I think it is the heart and soul of Marx, the seed or single cell, as it were. In them is the birth of the "siren call of liberation," (a phrase you used once in one of your tutorials).
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