Karl Marx Response 1

Tanay doctor

The philosophy on which Marx bases his theory (communism) is really important because Communism springs up organically from the theory itself. To say that the laborer is estranged and dehumanized to me seems like a very reasonable thing to say but it does not stem from the materialism and historicality that Marx suggests. De-humization would imply the idea of a human outside a social sense and even estrangement and lack of virtue and animalism would be based on some aesthetic or moral criteria that is above just the means of production and intercourse. I wonder if this is just me reading him very superficially but if one is to just accept what is as a product of a history of progressive change and the organization of the means of production. I think the resolution to this has to do with the unpacking of means of intercourse as this is what is in contradiction to the means of production and gives rise to both the alienation of the laborer and his dehumanization. It is obvious that intercourse has to do with the social relations of people within a community. But I dont know whether Marx means that this contradiction of intercourse and production is a contradiction where the sum of social interactions and relations that started off at the beginning of history and evolved on a certain trajectory is just different from the trajectory that the means of production evolved in and that they needed to be reconciled. (By this I mean is that Capitalism undermines the many many years of definite human relations for this new era of the individual competing man). Or whether inherent in the idea of Capitalism itself the contradiction between this very efficient and productive means of production and the intercourse of human nature it creates (that of the class structure and the inequality incumbent to it) is the problem. Thus I wonder whether he argues from a contradiction not unlike a Kantian contradiction that is inherent to the assumptions and proposition itself (but this time in the sense of the thesis of the material world and not the ideological) or whether this contradiction of how mans nature (that has evolved over time and come to mean something concrete, manifested in his identity) does not correlate to the means of production that undermines this identity. I also find a similarity with Plato here (if youve noticed a pattern, I find everything similar to Plato in some way) in that Marx too tries to centralize the means of Production to let the true human identity sort of meet its potential and be free to do what it wants physically and intellectually and Plato wants to centralize everything to the Philosopher Kings so individuals can attain their true potential. I wonder how much Hume Marx read Interesting to see how this would problematize Descartes who derives his existence purely from his thought but from a Marxist point of view would fail to realize that this thought could never exist without the physical world at all and that Descartes sense of identity, even the one that questioned its own identity was actually a product of his environment and his history and that those automatons wandering around had a much bigger effect on his identity than he imagined.

Its also funny to see that Marx, very contradictory to Smith criticize capitalism because the worker receives none of the benefit and Smith praises capitalism because it is a form of production that percolates down to the laborer and raises his welfare.