Posted: May 22nd, 2015

Karl Marx

The task at hand is to choose ONE or TWO of the provided tutorial questions from a week before the due date of the exercise and answer it by using lecture material and the tutorial reading. The objective is to encourage you to learn how to engage in a deep reading of theoretical texts. You will need to demonstrate a clear and deep appreciation of the text as a whole by placing your answer to the chosen question in the context of an interpretation of the author’s central purposes and themes. This understanding will be aided by further reading beyond the required readings and lecture. Your essays must be properly referenced throughout, and you must provide a bibliography at the end of the essay. Do not use lecture slides/notes as references! 550 words are not much. You will need to be concise and get straight to the point. We are not asking for a summary of a theorist’s work: we are asking you to engage with a particular issue or claim raised by the text and work out a specific idea about modern societies as developed by a theorist and to reflect on it.

Required Reading: Marx, Karl (1972), ‘Estranged Labour’, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in R.C. Tucker (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader, New York and London, W.W. Norton and Company Inc.

Note: Marx opens with a critique of political economy that you need not dwell upon. He argues that political economy views bourgeois society from the point of view of private property. It considers only the outward symptoms (acquisitiveness and greed) not the structuring productive relations (alienation) of bourgeois society. Hence, Marx proceeds to a critique of bourgeois society from the point of view of alienation. He intends to show that private property is tied to the alienated character of social relations in bourgeois society.

Tutorial Questions:

1. Interpret ‘the worker is related to the product of his labour as an alien object’
2. Interpret the passage beginning ‘Till now we have been considering…’
3. What does Marx mean when he says ‘What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal’? Also what does he mean when he says that ‘the eye has become a human eye’ ?
4. Explain Marx’s account of the difference between animal and human labour .
5. Why does Marx say ‘From this relationship (between men and women) one can judge the whole level of development’ ?
6. What does Marx see as the connection between alienation and the money economy?

Lecture References:
Markus, Gyorgy (1983), ‘Concepts of Ideology in Marx,’ Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 7(1-2): 84-103.
Avineri, Shlomo (1971), The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. London, Cambridge University Press.
Kellner, Douglas (1989), Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.