Marx Final

Base

The economic structure that affects politics and ideology, (Althusser)

Ideological State Apparatus

State that functions by ideology. A certain number of realities present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions. Religious, educational, family, legal, political, trade union, communications, and cultural. (Althusser)

The Repressive State Apparatus

Functions primarily through violence. Consists of the army, the police, the judiciary, and the prison system. (Althusser)

Capital

Marx says it can only increase by exchanging itself for labour power by calling wage labour to life. Money or means of production. The social form of the means of reproduction assumed based on wage-labor (Wage Labour and Capital, and Capital).

Capitalist Production

The alienated labour Marx talks about, (Communist Manifesto)

Civic/Civil Religion

Implicit religious values of a civilization. The state intertwined with religion, the opposite of the separation of church and state. This is something to be overcome. (On the Jewish Question)

Class Consciousness

Realizing you are within a class that has the numeric majority (The Communist Manifesto)

Commodity

A social thing whose qualities are both perceptible/imperceptible to sense, use-value made for exchange value. It must have social value (Capital)

Communism

The real movement that abolishes the present state of things. The positive expression of annulled private property. Public control of the means of production. (Communist Manifesto)

Corvée

A day’s unpaid labor owed by a vassal to his feudal lord, compulsory, unpaid, intermittent, seasonal work, compulsory work. Create a village common as a group insurance policy. (Capital)

Ideological Criticism

Attacks the present society in the name of a society to come (Aron)

Moral Criticism

Rises against things as they are the notion, vague but imperative of things as they ought to be. No solution, pointing out the wrong things. (Aron)

Technical Criticism

One puts oneself in the place of those who govern or administer, one suggests measures that might attenuate the evils one deplores, one accepts the inevitable constraints of political action (Aron)

Cultural Hegemony

The worldview of the ruling class becomes the cultural norm. (Aron, Gramsci)

Descriptive Theory

Necessary beginning before one enters into theory → a thing that doesn’t make sense and doesn’t have to make sense. (Althusser)

Dialectical Materialism

Emphasizes the real world, and contradictions within it (opposition/class differences). Dialectical means engaging with the material world, material is what we can experience. (German Ideology, influenced by Hegel and Feuerbach)

Reason

Men, through this, can engage in dialogue with the material world around him and come to know things about it. Nothing is permanent, we can only know the truth through our experience of it. (The German Ideology)

Dictatorship

Imposition of rule on others who do not consent to it

Dictatorship of the Party

The organizers (Bolsheviks). But this is all in the proletariat’s interest. this isn’t just another bourgeoise. (Trotsky, Critique)

Dictatorship of the Proletariat

The workers are the minority. Problems of organization. Consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the bourgeoisie. (Critique of the Gotha Program). Trotsky says that the dictatorship of the Proletariat can’t happen unless they take over the state apparatus. (Trotsky)

Existentialism

Existence precedes essence, with emphasis on the material world. We see a lot of the influences of dialectical materialism in this. (Sartre)

Fetishism

Something that “attaches itself to the products of labor” → like a good luck charm. We attach more importance to commodities than we should, something only has value insofar as we perceive it has value. (Capital)

History

Four stages of history: tribal, communal, feudal, capitalism, our conception of it depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, must be written according to an extraneous standard, nothing by the succession of the separate generations, each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations. (The German Ideology)

Humanism

A worldview that attaches importance to the human, often at the exclusion of the divine or eternal. Marxism is a kind of transhuman in that he seeks to overcome human nature. (Rousseau, all of Marx)

Ideology for Althusser

Ideology has no history. “a system of ideas of representations which dominate the mind of man or a social group.” (Althusser)

Ideology for Aron

“Marxist ideology discerns a fixed order of development under the blind, anarchic muddle of human interests.” “Ideology turns into a dogma.” (Aron)

Intelligentsia

Broadly, all non-manual workers. More narrowly, experts and men of letters. “Not content merely to live, they want to think about their existence.” (Aron)

Iron Law

Real wages tend towards the minimum wage necessary to sustain the life of the worker, over the long run. (Capital, Inaugural Address)

Kautskyism

Not as extreme as Trotsky says he should have been, institutes Marxism through democratic reform, not as committed as he should be. Kautsky’s fundamental argument against the Bolsheviks was the they weren’t doing things as legally as possible. The time is not right, be patient (Trotsky)

Collective Labour

If laborers participate in the production of a useful effect, that is, function as parts of the collective laborer working for capital, the laborers work productively, even if their labor contributes only indirectly to the production of use-value. (Capital)

Division of Labor

The economic expression of the social character of labour within the estrangement. Division of labour (specialization) creates less-skilled workers, according to Marx. (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844)

Reserve Army of Labour

Refers to unemployed or underemployed. Backup labor (Capital)

Labour Theory of Value

The economic value of a thing is determined by the labor that was put into the creation of it. (Capital, Ricardo)

Man

For Marx, man is an economic animal. He is defined by his circumstances and his economic role in society. Yet, he is also capable of breaking beyond these things, even transcending the limits of human nature itself. They are the producers of their own conceptions and ideas. (The German Ideology)

Marxism

An economic theory. A vision or worldview. (Aron)

Volunteerism

Voluntarily giving your time and resources to a greater cause. Marxism relies a lot on this idea. (Althusser? Trotsky disagrees with this)

Money

Supply commodities with material for the expression of their values. The Google Translate of the material world. Reduces cost of exchange. (Capital)

Paris Commune

Trotsky → “the Russians did it better, the French kind of did a terrible job…they all died because they didn’t have the stomach for terror.” (Trotsky)

Personality Cult

The ideology and the person become one entity, an object of worship. Ironically, Marx writes against this in “Against Personality Cults” but he became a cultish personality.

Political Economy

Relationship of laws and economy. (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

Pre-History (as opposed to History)

Communist Manifesto

Price

The price of labor is how you assign value to things. (Capital)

Productivity of Labour

Productive labour is therefore labour which for the worker only reproduces the previously posited value of his labour capacity; but as value-creating activity it valorises capital, and counterposes the values created by labour to the worker himself as capital. (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844)

Prophetism

Aron highlights the presence of prophetism in Marxism which predicts through economic theory what the future will look like. Marxist prophetism “conforms to the typical pattern of the Judeo-Christian prophetism.” (Aron)

Radical Freedom

Man is in anguish because he has to bear the burden of his own existence, he can define himself. Man is so radically free and remains so even with a gun to his head. The only reason there is morality is that there is a god that we posit. (Sartre)

Red Terror

In the East, primarily the Soviet Union, targeted anti-Bolshevik groups (such as the clergy), the name kind of gives it away. (Trotsky)

Revolution

The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class. (The German Ideology)

Scarcity

The idea that there are a limited amount of resources to go around, these are the source of conflict. Thomas Malthus. (Probably from Capital)

Secular Religion

Aron calls Marxism this. The secular religion is a deistic (minus deity), cosmic, imminent, rational, totalizing, values/norms, materialist, ordered cosmos (Aron)

Solipsism

The idea that we can only truly know that the self exists (Althusser)

State Power

The State is explicitly conceived as a repressive apparatus. A ‘machine’ of repression, which enables the ruling classes to ensure their domination over the working class, thus enabling the former to subject the latter to the process of surplus-value extortion (Althusser)

Structuralism

Determinism, how you’re trapped. You are a victim. What is around us determines us, free will is an illusion. Check ur privilege. Discourse grammar. (Althusser, Sartre)

Superstructure

Political and ideological (as opposed to base) (Althusser)

Absolute Surplus Value

Getting more out of workers, just making them work more. Surplus labor (time) as a commodity (Capital)

Relative Surplus Value

Finding some way to “push a little further” Surplus labor (quantity) as a commodity. (Capital)

Use Value

Connected to the ability to use the thing, tied to a physical object, part of the object (Capital)

Exchange Value

Connected to what you can get by trading the thing, social utility, depends on the perception of the object (Capital)

Value

Inherent to the thing, part of the thing itself (Capital)

Wages

Minimum wage is enough to exist on, wages create capital (The Communist Manifesto)