marxism Flashcards
Historical dialectic
Humans are historical beings and simultaneously the producers and products of historical processes.
Humanity does not have the freedom liberalism assumes. Humans have structural roles in society.
Schmitt - ‘Interplay between individual actions and the institutions that form the framework for individual action is what Marx means by dialectic’
Marxist critiques of capitalism
Obscures the real historical possibilities for self determination. People under capitalism cannot reach their full potential.
Social practices seen with self interested behavior as Adam Smith had observed were a product of the capitalist environment.
Thatcher’s famous claim there is no alternative to the free market - under the extent at which we understand ourselves as isolated and alienated individuals under the system of historical dialectic.
Marxism also believes capitalism is exploitative - the owner controls the production process and exploits the worker.
Capitalism also creates private social powers located in a separate ‘economic’ sphere of social life, effectively off limits from the explicitly ‘political’ public deliberation and norms of democratic accountability.
Globalizing marxism
Marx never uses the term imperialism. Brewer has interpreted that this is why colonialism is not fundamental to marxism.
Capitalism for Marx was not purely a ‘domestic’ phenomenon. Capitalism Transends borders.
Split of western and eastern marxism - Bolshevik and Gramsci
Gramsci
Marxism is a way of telling history from a capitalist social context.
Theory of hegemony as a suitable form of political power that relied more on consent than coercion.
He hoped an atomized and depoliticized capitalist culture might be challenged by an alternative political culture, people might be led to think of their economic lives as having political significance, and they might begin to question capitalism’s structured separation of the economic from the political aspects of social life.
