explring marxist and anti-capitalist points of views in literary criticism. Looking at politics and history and its relationship with class, ideology and devisional relationships of labour
Lecture 3
Key words and their meanings:
Epoch - a particular period of history, especially one considered remarkable or
noteworthy. A notable event which marks the begining of such a period.
Interpellation - the act of questioning the period in which government officials are
questioned about and explain an act, a policy or a point raised during a debate. The
act of identification. The act of interpretation.
10 October 2022
13:34
Slides Notes
1 How to relate a text to it's context
Class & Eagleton's critique of cr is from a marxist povs
Ideology The truth of politics or history. Is what Marx is after - to do
with class, ideology and devisional relationships of labour.
2
Historians ‘up to the present [...] have only been able to see in history
Karl Marx
the political actions of princes and States, religious and all sorts of
1818-1883
theoretical struggles, and in particular in each historical epoch have had
to share the illusion of that epoch. For instance, if an epoch imagines
itself to be actuated by purely ‘political’ or ‘religious’ motives, although
‘religion’ and ‘politics’ are only forms of its true motive, the historian
accepts this opinion’. Karl Marx The German Ideology excerpted in ed.
David McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford 1977.
What is meant by context? How do we identify it? What if we are
also shaped by our context? Marx says previous historians relied
on the dominant conscious narrative about what was going on at
a particular moment (rather than focusing on the deeper or
hidden causes). Marx believes these causes to be those in social
power ?
Its not obvious by what we mean by history and society - in this
text he argues that what really history is about has been
concidered irrelevant.
How the historical moment has been shaped and what goes into
it, has largely been ignored - statues remembered but no the
workers that brought it together. Same goes with people - we
aren't able to see our own moment truely
3 The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life
'as they really process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear
are' in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they really are; i.e. as
they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under specific
material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.
( ‘The German Ideology’, p. 655)
, The world around us is a product of how individuals live in it - by
this Marx specifically means the material conditions - not how we
imagine us to be live but how we actually are.
History doesn't make the process of things through how the
individuals have influenced that thing clear.
The physical matterial rescources of the world: material and
labour resources not acknowledged.
Material conditions = the ways in which people work in and on the
world. The next text really explains this:
4
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that
Ideology
are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production
which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material
productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production
constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on
which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond
definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of
material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in
general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being,
but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their
consciousness. Karl Marx, Preface to A Critique of Political Economy,
reprinted in ed. David McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford
1977.
What really counts in a society is
a. Who owns stuff and
b. Who does stuff
The relationship between these are 'relations of production'. E.g
In a cottage economy, lots of individuals own sugar, and
saucepans, and make their own sweets, in their own time, which
they sell at market. In an industrial economy one individual buys
the sugar and owns the sweet making machinery, and buys the
time of an individual who works the machinery, and then owns
the sweets too.
The relations of products (the relationship between who own's
what and who does what) has changed between these two
models.
The second point - relations of production shape how we think
and act in the world without our knowing it. >> alienating us from
our enviroment socially.
Material production forces: the raw material available and the
means of production (means of production)
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