Marx & Modernity:Marx & Modernity:Mind, Culture & ActivityMind, Culture & Activity

(1818-1883)

A talk by Andy Blunden, 16 February 2011

“History does Nothing!... It is people who do all

that”

Social Formation

1. Theses on Feuerbach

2. The German Ideology

3. Grundrisse: The Method of Political Economy4. Capital: Preface & 5. Chapter 1: The Commodity

6. 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

7. The Communist Manifesto

Theses on FeuerbachTheses on Feuerbach

Herder – Fichte - Hess

“Practical-critical Activity”Theses on Feuerbach

8.“All social life is essentially

practical.All mysteries which lead

theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human

practice and in the comprehension of this

practice.”Theses on Feuerbach

The point of philosophy

Theses on Feuerbach

The German Ideology

• The Real Individuals

• Their Activity, and

• the Material Conditions

The premises of the materialist method

Thought and LanguageThought and Language

The German Ideology

“Language is the immediate actuality of thought”

“Just as philosophers have given thought an

independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an

independent realm.”

The Method of Political Economy

“The concrete is the concentration of many determinations ...It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality.”

Preface to Capital

“In bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour — or value-form of the commodity — is the economic cell-form.”

The Commodity

Capital

“The secret of the expression of value, namely that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities.”

Capital

Alienation andFetishism

The Commodity

1818thth Brumaire of Louis Brumaire of Louis BonaparteBonaparte

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living.”

1818thth Brumaire of Louis Brumaire of Louis BonaparteBonaparte

“And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.”

The Manifesto of The Manifesto of the Communist the Communist

PartyParty

“the free development of each is the condition for the free

development of all”

In Conclusion

http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/Genealogy-CHAT.htm

Available for consultation:

2:30pm – 5pm Tuesday 15th February1:30pm – 4pm Wednesday 16th February2:30pm – 5pm Friday 18th February1:30pm – 4pm Monday 21st February2:30pm – 5pm Tuesday 22nd February2:30pm – 5pm Wednesday 23rd February12:30pm – 5pm Friday 25th February Please book a time with Carol on 082 562 1050

Program of TalksTuesday 15th Staff Lounge 12:30pm The Mind from Descartes to HegelW’sday 16th Senate Room 4:30pm Marx & Modernity: Mind, Culture & ActivityFriday 18th Staff Lounge 12:30pm Vygotsky & Concept of ConsciousnessMonday 21st Senate Room 4:30pm Is Science a Humanity?Tuesday 22nd Staff Lounge 12:30pm Units & Motives in Activity TheoryW’nsday 23rd Staff Lounge 12:30pm Projects & the Problem of ContextMonday 28th Staff Lounge 12:30pm Vygotsky’s Theory of Child Development

Genealogy of CHAT:http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/Genealogy-CHAT.htm

Andy Blunden’s Home Pagehttp://home.mira.net/~andy

History of Philosophy on M.I.A.:http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/