Book review: Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation, written by Amy E. Wendling

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 505-519
Author(s):  
Tom Bunyard
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Human Essence ◽  
Scientific Paradigms ◽  
Interesting Contribution ◽  
The Status ◽  
Immanent Critique ◽  
Capitalist Ideology ◽  
Interest In Technology

Amy Wendling contends in this book that Marx’s concern with alienation is not restricted to his early, more explicitly Hegelian writings, and that it can be seen to evolve throughout his work in tandem with his interest in technology. This evolution, according to Wendling, is marked by his transition between two successive scientific paradigms, both of which pertain to the status of labour and machinery within society. Wendling claims that Marx uses the distinction between them as a means of conducting an immanent critique of capitalist ideology. Consequently, although it is primarily a work of intellectual history, this book offers an interesting contribution to the hermeneutics of Marx’sCapital. In addition, it also bears relation to contemporary discussions concerning real subsumption and the abolition of labour. The book’s general argument raises questions as to the degree to which a conception of alienation must rely upon notions of human essence, and upon an idea of a ‘natural’ and ‘authentic’ humanity. Wendling’s responses to those questions are described as problematic within this review, but they are also acknowledged to be both pertinent and intriguing.

scholarly journals Book Review "Friedrich Engels: Pemikiran dan Kritik" (Friedrich Engels: Thought and Criticism)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arlina Dwi Oktafiah ◽  
Moses Glorino Rumambo Pandin
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Legal Aspects ◽  
Main Question ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Friedrich Engels ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Times ◽  
Scientific Fields

Not infrequently people only know Friedrich Engels as the scribe of Karl Marx. His only job was to collect, retype Marx's papers and give them to publishers. Some books describe him as an amateur writer, limited in his abilities and unable to adapt to Marx's thinking. That is why the editor of this book, Dede Mulyanto, compiled the anthology "Behind Marx: The Characters and Thoughts of Friedrich Engels" published by Marjin Kiri a few months ago.In general, the book introduces Engels' life and thought, and explores his relationship to Marx in a way that does not simply place him within or under Marx. In this book, we will realize that Engels was not only a loyal friend but also provided the impetus and avenue for Marx to write and publish his work. Not only was he the saddest person at the time of Marx's death, but he also didn't even have time to finish the Das Kapital masterpiece. In addition, we also see Engels' persistence in compiling Marx's research notes and compiling them to produce a series of publications, including Das Kapital and Das Kapital.We also gain a deeper understanding of Engels, as explained in the brief description by Sylvia Tiwon in the introduction to the book, as a theorist who developed the theory of historical materialism into scientific fields outside of economics and struggled with the latest scientific discoveries of his time.This book exists to restore Engels' figures and thoughts and to place them accordingly. It is a challenge to reintroduce the image and ideas of Engels to Indonesian readers today, not only in formal legal aspects, such as prohibiting the spread of Marxist ideas through TAP MPR/Ketetapan Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat (Resolution People's Consultative Assembly) No. 25 of 1966 but also in the theoretical aspects of Marxism itself. As we know MPR/Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat (People's Consultative Assembly) decree 25 of 1966 is a product of the highest law of the times and has acted as an integrating mechanism and effective conflict resolution to address the nation's breakdown after the G30S / PKI 1965, which devastated national unity. With the MPRS decree, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was dissolved and declared a prohibited organization throughout the territory of the Republic of Indonesia and a ban was imposed on any activities to spread or develop the understanding or teachings of Communism/Marxism-Leninism. When studying the thinking of this German man, the main question that often arises is: Why does Engels need to be studied? Why didn't Engels study Marx's thinking right away? The ideological leanings of neo-Marxist scientists further exacerbated this situation. They hoped that by identifying Engels as the culprit of the extreme and rigid interpretation, Marx's theory was freed from the bad thoughts of Soviet determination.

Groove Theory

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Bolden
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Black Musicians ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
Social Perspectives ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Intellectual History

Tony Bolden presents an innovative history of funk music focused on the performers, regarding them as intellectuals who fashioned a new aesthetic. Utilizing musicology, literary studies, performance studies, and African American intellectual history, Bolden explores what it means for music, or any cultural artifact, to be funky. Multitudes of African American musicians and dancers created aesthetic frameworks with artistic principles and cultural politics that proved transformative. Bolden approaches the study of funk and black musicians by examining aesthetics, poetics, cultural history, and intellectual history. The study traces the concept of funk from early blues culture to a metamorphosis into a full-fledged artistic framework and a named musical genre in the 1970s, and thereby Bolden presents an alternative reading of the blues tradition. Funk artists, like their blues relatives, tended to contest and contextualize racialized notions of blackness, sexualized notions of gender, and bourgeois notions of artistic value. Funk artists displayed contempt for the status quo and conveyed alternative stylistic concepts and social perspectives through multimedia expression. Bolden argues that on this road to cultural recognition, funk accentuated many of the qualities of black expression that had been stigmatized throughout much of American history.

Bourgeois and Proletarians

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. A. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Human Essence ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
German Ideology ◽  
At Home

This chapter explores the question of the nature of the alienation of the bourgeoisie under capitalism. In particular, it considers the distinction made by Karl Marx in The Holy Family between the alienation endured by the worker and the alienation endured by the capitalist in bourgeois society. According to Marx: “The possessing classes and the class of the proletariat present pictures of the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at home in and confirmed by this self-estrangement.” The chapter analyzes the meaning of this passage by focusing on a characterization of the human essence in The German Ideology and on the doctrine of alienation articulated in the Paris Manuscripts. It also discusses the worker's alienation in his relation to the machine, and the capitalist's alienation in his relation to money, as well as the latter's relation to his capital. Finally, it restates the contrast between bourgeois and proletarian.

Memorial Museum: Existential Optics of Space

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3-2) ◽  
pp. 389-409
Author(s):  
Lev Letyagin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Self Disclosure ◽  
Memorial Museum ◽  
The Status ◽  
Historical Authenticity ◽  
Key Aspects

The modern museum is not only in the sphere of mass interests, but also serves as a reflection and expression of certain mass trends. While maintaining the status of a classical cultural institution, it was to a large extent precisely the museum that has become an arena of public discord on determining the strategies of cultural reproduction. This issue gains a pronouncedly contentious character due to the rapid development of information formats of traditional leisure now including interactive technologies, arbitrary historical reconstructions, elements of theatricalization. In “Escape from Amnesia” (A. Huyssen) the ‘society of total spectacle’ demands searching for new means, which often contribute to loss and substitution of values. The visitor’s interest towards the history of the quotidian greatly influences the dynamics of changing the creative potential of a museum, predominantly a memorial museum. Long-term practices of modeling the historical space reveal the internal form of the concept of ‘ex-position’. This is the natural cause of an internal conflict, when being ‘arranged in a straight line’ replaces the principles of accurate and documentally verified positioning of memorial objects. ‘Museumness’ should not supplant ‘the quotidian’, ‘the existential’; however, the functional principle of arranging the objects, their ‘pattern’ is often replaced by the composite approach, in which ‘decorative’ or ‘design’ solutions become dominant. This trend actively competes with the key theoretical foundations of museum source studies, and the traditional museum is increasingly transforming into a kind of parallel model of culture. The memorial object, as a fact of intellectual history, is significant within the material culture and spiritual heritage. At the same time, the alleged meanings and false semiotization often substitute the biographical realities, when ‘fit for exposition’ is everything that the mass museum visitor connects in his mind with his arbitrary understanding of the past. These are key aspects of the subject of modern museum criticism. This article discloses our understanding of the memorial exposition as a self-organizing system with a certain aesthetic code. Methodologically significant is the existential turn towards ‘evidence paradigm’ – giving up the impersonal demonstration of old things. This is a turn towards the model ‘things-speak’ (self-awareness, self-disclosure of things) – towards the structure that communicates ideas and life meanings. It is where the memorial object, understood as ‘message’, ‘material communication’, can disclose the fullness of its historical authenticity.

Tolling academics: Rent-seeking and gatekeeping in the university space

2020 ◽  
pp. 030981681990013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Welsh
Keyword(s):  
World System ◽  
Rent Seeking ◽  
Academic Life ◽  
Critical Geography ◽  
Journal Publication ◽  
Neoliberal Reform ◽  
System A ◽  
Immanent Critique ◽  
The University ◽  
Capitalist Ideology

Assuming the ‘neoliberalisation’ of academic life to be axiomatic, this article delves into the operations of its political economy with the aim of expanding critical vocabularies, analytical categories and research trajectories. In particular, it indicates where an immanent critique of neoliberal academia can be begun. While the capitalist transformations of academic life are justified by ideological claims eulogising ‘production’, ‘competition’ and ‘marketisation’, the neoliberal regime has proven decidedly ineffective at fulfilling these claims. An effective critique of neoliberal reform must, therefore, explore and interrogate the degree to which the practical effects of neoliberal reform diverge from its underpinning theoretical claims, and why this might be so. The principal question here pertains to rent and rent-seeking behaviour in the academic space, as a mode of activity inconsistent with the legitimating tenets of capitalist ideology. To the extent that rent-seeking activities can be identified in neoliberal academia – in distinction to ‘value-producing’ labour or ‘profit-making’ entrepreneurialism – a more potent critique of neoliberal reform will be forthcoming and an immanent critique of the neoliberal regime of capitalist accumulation in the academic space put into motion. By positioning the neoliberal regime within a broader shift towards accumulation by ‘appropriation’ in the world-system, a strategic reason can be identified for the proliferation of rent-seeking behaviours in academic life and beyond. The article argues that these rent-seeking behaviours have materialised in a range of gatekeeping techniques across the academic space, with which many inhabitants of that space have become complicit, resulting in the increasing dispossession of surplus through the practice of tolling realised in those techniques. The article develops a Marxian critique with additional insights from world-system theory, critical social theory and critical geography. Examples of gatekeeping technique considered throughout the article include master degree programmes, journal publication structures, conference fees and Graduate Record Examinations.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document