Marx

1. The role of Marx in the history of twentieth century intellectual thought.
The following passage from:

•  Edward Said, The Word, the Text and the Critic, London: Faber & Faber, 1984, p. 84.

Said describes the intellectual genealogy of the twentieth century as progressing from Marx, through Foucault. Said himself was a massively influential writer in the humanities during the 1990s.

 2. Why is Marx influential?
Marx's analysis of the commodity continus to play a very significant role in the way we understand contemporary consumer culture. Recent examples of the use of Marx include:

• Janet Farrell Brodie and Marc Redfield (eds), High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

In their introduction they write:

• Mary Louise Roberts, "Gender, Consumption, and Commodity Culture", The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 3 (Jun., 1998), pp. 817-844.

Mary Louise Roberts highlights Marx's argument "that commodities are able to assume an independent life, that relations between things . . . accompany, conceal, or displace the actual state of relations between people." Scholars such as Burke have developed this idea using Igor Kopytoff's notion of a "cultural biography" or "social history" of commodities. Burke argues that things have their own biographies, including "prior meanings" that give them "their rich individuality within a specific place and time."

Notes:

Arjun Appadurai, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value," in Appadurai, ed.  The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, (Cambridge, 1986), p. 22.

Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women. Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, N.C., 1996).

Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process," in Appadurai, ed.  The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, (Cambridge, 1986), p. 22.

• Anne Cronin, "The substance of consumption: Alchemy, addiction and the commodity", International Journal of Cultural Studies 2002 5: 316-335.

As the transformation of base metals into gold, or the transformation of a banal substance into a substance of value, alchemy represented for Marx the essence of consumer culture. Using a metaphor that was to inspire later writers such as Raymond Williams (1980), Marx explored what he saw as the ‘magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour’ (1990: 169). He saw the capitalist production, circulation and exchange of commodities as a form of ‘social metabolism’ in which ‘nothing is immune from this alchemy’ (Marx, 1990: 198, 229). This is an emphasis on the transformational power of commodity relations, which revolves around ‘the conversion of things into persons and persons into things’ (Marx, 1990: 209). Congealed labour power is transformed into the material substance of the commodity, and the visual aspect of the commodity functions to conceal its social history of previous transformations.

3. Marx's analysis of the social life of commodities is also used in the analysis of more complex social and cultural forms, including "such rarefied things as ideas, consciousness and metaphysics" (Said, p. 81)

•  Edward Said, The Word, the Text and the Critic, London: Faber & Faber, 1984, p. 81.

• This argument is iterated in the Manifesto of the Communist Party- the course reading set for this week.

Mark and Engels write (p. 9).

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?

4. Finally, The video from David Harvey:

This can be found at http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/.

We watched:

29.00min - 31.00min

50.15min - 54.00min.