I am now ready for my third class, which will be devoted to a quick survey of classical political economy: the Physiocrats, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo. Then we take a 50 year break for Labor Day, and when we return it will no longer be 1817, the year in which Ricardo published his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, but it will be 1867, the year in which Karl Marx published volume 1 of Capital. Thanks to the indispensable help of Alex Campbell, now Dr. Alexander Campbell, my lecture will be supported by a series of slides projected on the drop down screen at the front of the classroom. God, I love to teach!
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8 comments:
Professor,
Is Alex Campbell also working on getting your lectures for this semester onto YouTube?
Professor, I was wondering if you could expand on Marx's idea that regular "men and women engage in activity of creative self externalization not as isolated individuals but collectively, through the division of labor and its reintegration into the productive process".
Good luck with your next class, Professor! I just taught again last week, for the first time since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. It felt so good to be in front of a class again.
I am afraid I will not be posting YouTube videos of my lectures, for two reasons: first, it is I believe illegal according to UNC rules, but second, even if it were legal I would not do it because it would compromise the freedom of my students to speak up in class. But I have already posted videos that cover much of what I will be talking about in the course.
2022 students of Marx might like the free 2011 film Marx Reloaded by Jason Barker which tries to make Marx's ideas relevant by comparing his methods of ideology critique to the red pill in The Matrix and can be found on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm7ZK-E3yew&ab_channel=SpeculativeRealism
There are many interviews with philosophers pretending to be neo-Marxists such as Slavoj Zizek and others in the context of the 2008 financial crisis. Zizek could possibly be the worst popular Marxist writer in terms of clarity and reason of all time, but he has made philosophy popular again by being an embodiment of the lost cause and his incapacity to edit himself and argue professionally. Zizek does not follow Marx's methods of composing philosophical arguments with great craft, but maybe I miss his irony or did not try hard enough to read him. There are other useful background documentaries on YouTube about Marx's life also.
"God, I love to teach!"
This is what I meant while back when I said that as far as teaching is concerned RPW is just hitting his stride.
Robert Henri, the artist/teacher hand picked by Emma Goldman to head up her art department (Modern School) in NYC at the turn of the last century, remarked that as strange as it may seem, the point of making a picture is not to make a picture but to obtain a state of being. Of course he was suggesting that the picture is a by-product of that state of interactive fascination and that the virtue of the activity of making marks on a canvas is the intrinsic value experienced by the maker of those marks. An unfolding occurs as the artist is riveted under the influence of the moment. The painting just happens along the way. So we find Schubert saying to his students who secretly rounded up his scattered writings, sat him down, and performed his music back to him, "My that's lovely. Who wrote it?"
Life is an activity of expression said Herder in the face of an epistemology that turned on science - observation, the correlation of measurements, the separation from and the objectification of nature. And so began the "expressive turn" which would eventually find Marx writing the manuscripts where work, at its most fundamental level ought to be a process of becoming.
So we find our fearless leader back in the saddle, exclaiming "God, I love to teach." Come, come! Has RPW ever been more prepared, expressively in the moment that is, than he is now?
Sounds to me that Fast Eddy is back!!
Jerry,
I never thought I would see Golman, Shubert, and Herder in the same post as Fast Eddy!
Professor Wolff,
Though I know you to be a 'demented Marxist' I am very much enjoying the lectures on Kant that are streaming on Youtube.
I, too, loved to teach. Thinking out loud is a wonderful way to spend the day - and get paid.
Wish you and those you hold dear the very best.
As they say to the troops: thank you for your service.
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