JM1
6th August 2008, 03:17
Ruthless Criticism Presents:
Discussion in Oakland, California, August 9, 2008
What Can Be Learned From Karl Marx:
Everything About Work and Wealth in Capitalism
When: August 9, 2008, Saturday, 1:00 pm
Where: Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library 6501 Telegraph Ave, Oakland, CA 94609-1113 Ph: (510) 595-7417
Speaker: Frank Winter, co-editor of GegenStandpunkt (Germany)
Leftist groups include the 19th century theorist whose ideas once shook the world in their inventory of traditions, but they are no longer acquainted with his writings. Marx is now a dead dog. All the more as in the universities, inasmuch as he is remembered, he is politely included in the intellectual historical western heritage -- and as a Great: he is to have been a great philosopher, the last after Hegel to have succeeded in dialectical thinking; a great sociologist who created a system in which society is brought by a single principle from the material base up to the superstructure of ideas; a great prophet who early predicted globalization; a great utopian who thought up a nice better world.
That the Old Man himself wanted to accomplish none of these greatnesses and, if he were asked, would have refused to tolerate this praise, cannot deter his intellectual-historical friends. They even forgive him that he was a communist. He himself saw his achievement solely in what the subtitle of his theoretical major work announces: the “criticism of the political economy” of capitalism. Marx was, if anything, an economist. However, economics does not have a good recollection of this classic; actually none at all. No wonder. In the end, he attacked not only the misanthropic and absurd logic of the economic system that they find so reasonable, he also dismantled their theoretical understanding of it.
Capitalism, which Marx analyzed and criticized in the phase of its emergence, has changed since his day in this way and that, but in nothing really essential. The accumulation of money is still the dominant purpose of work. Working people are still a cost factor, thus the negative variable of the company’s goal: profit. The development of the productive power of labor, the greatest source of material wealth, still takes place exclusively to save money on wages and lay off employees -- thus making workers poorer. Because of this reality, and only because of this, the long forgotten thinker deserves to be remembered. His books help to explain economic reality today.
This talk will demonstrate this by quotations from the first chapter of Das Kapital Volume 1, “The Commodity.” It offers thoughts about use value and exchange value, concrete and abstract labor, money and benefit, work and wealth – paired together, terms that our modern world can no longer distinguish, when they really contain the hardest opposites.
Discussion in Oakland, California, August 9, 2008
What Can Be Learned From Karl Marx:
Everything About Work and Wealth in Capitalism
When: August 9, 2008, Saturday, 1:00 pm
Where: Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library 6501 Telegraph Ave, Oakland, CA 94609-1113 Ph: (510) 595-7417
Speaker: Frank Winter, co-editor of GegenStandpunkt (Germany)
Leftist groups include the 19th century theorist whose ideas once shook the world in their inventory of traditions, but they are no longer acquainted with his writings. Marx is now a dead dog. All the more as in the universities, inasmuch as he is remembered, he is politely included in the intellectual historical western heritage -- and as a Great: he is to have been a great philosopher, the last after Hegel to have succeeded in dialectical thinking; a great sociologist who created a system in which society is brought by a single principle from the material base up to the superstructure of ideas; a great prophet who early predicted globalization; a great utopian who thought up a nice better world.
That the Old Man himself wanted to accomplish none of these greatnesses and, if he were asked, would have refused to tolerate this praise, cannot deter his intellectual-historical friends. They even forgive him that he was a communist. He himself saw his achievement solely in what the subtitle of his theoretical major work announces: the “criticism of the political economy” of capitalism. Marx was, if anything, an economist. However, economics does not have a good recollection of this classic; actually none at all. No wonder. In the end, he attacked not only the misanthropic and absurd logic of the economic system that they find so reasonable, he also dismantled their theoretical understanding of it.
Capitalism, which Marx analyzed and criticized in the phase of its emergence, has changed since his day in this way and that, but in nothing really essential. The accumulation of money is still the dominant purpose of work. Working people are still a cost factor, thus the negative variable of the company’s goal: profit. The development of the productive power of labor, the greatest source of material wealth, still takes place exclusively to save money on wages and lay off employees -- thus making workers poorer. Because of this reality, and only because of this, the long forgotten thinker deserves to be remembered. His books help to explain economic reality today.
This talk will demonstrate this by quotations from the first chapter of Das Kapital Volume 1, “The Commodity.” It offers thoughts about use value and exchange value, concrete and abstract labor, money and benefit, work and wealth – paired together, terms that our modern world can no longer distinguish, when they really contain the hardest opposites.