ADVANCED MARXISM

Speaker: Antonucci

• Basic Principles
o Capitalism – private ownership of means of production
o Social system in which there’s an accumulation of value
o Surplus value of labor
 Gap between production and payment; Amount produced > amount earned
 Allows for the accumulation of capital
 Capital accumulation expansion
• Requires surplus labor, laborers can never be paid fair amount
• Populations have to be poor – reserved pool of labor to sustain the gap
 Gives rise to technological innovation, which increases productivity
 More productivity decreases work force, creating more of a surplus
 Continued drive imperative to grow or die
 Use and exchange value – maintain system f economics with gap between use value and
exchange value
 Exploits labor for creation of excess value
o Capitalism began with rise of machinery in which gap could be created and sustained
o Cap organizes everything in society
 Organizes ideology
 Grand, unified theory of social relations
o Capitalism is constantly expanding
 Seeks new markets, new supplies of labor, raw materials
 Raw materials of goods taken
 Colonialism drives expansion
 Forcefully maintain pattern of colonial relations – dominate the periphery
o Empirical presence of capitalism
 Cap bad DAs before Ks existed
• Debate Application
o Can explain every instance of Foreign Policy as an instance of capitalist drive
o Cap explains racism, issue over whether it proceeds or succeeds the creation of cap (create v. condition)
o Mode of conflict not involve the same explanation
o Gap between labor and profit
o Impossible to go backwards Marxism
o Evolution of Marxism – not advocating a move to feudal society
o Marxist explanations of feminism
 Female labor exploitation – females easy target for exploitation
 Core engine of capitalism is exploitation – housewife doesn’t get paid
• Child-rearing, child care, etc.
o “Capital” by Marx is mainly descriptive, “A Communist Manifesto” is prescriptive
o Cap can explain nearly all impacts – even kritikal ones
o Historical precedence doesn’t mean the thing that came first has precedence
o Post-alt: patriarchy could technically exist
o Not solve root cause
o Argue that transformation is inevitable , can happen under system of collapse, the longer we ignore the
presence of capitalism, the magnitude of the impacts increase
o Alt: do something as a form of resistance
o Carie Engleton
o Win unq. That cap is unsustainable, heading towards collapse
o Failure of Marx’s original predictons
 o Vulgur Marxism
 Super-structure: obvious and transparent relationship to the base
 Makes arguments that if something happens to base, it affects the superstructure
 Base should be focused
 Demystification
 Superstructure only there to cover up the base
 Opiate of the masses
 Antonio Gransci – questioned why resolutions don’t happen if labor exploitation occurs
• Superstructure silences the base
• Distorted perception of what occurs at the base
o Superstructure gives perception of hegemony
 Reification – explain social, cultural things as “natural occurrences”
 Convince that is it inherent, unavoidable
 Personifying commodities
 Darwinism, system of social organization is a function of someone
actually being better
 Sociobiological explanations – creates organization
o Engine of production
 Althusser- ideology of hegemony codes us from early on
• Psychoanalysis and lacone – capitalism constitute who we are
• Cap determines a lot of what goes on
o Very few phenomena have a single explanation – larger social field
(overdetermination)
o Gibson-Graham card – still relatively under the ideology of Marxism, g-g is
another K, not your aff
o Every movement of the base does not immediately affect the base
 Base & superstructure influence eachother
o Volosinov lit- language is the locus of class structure & terry eagleton
o Words like cites – language battle action
• Find post-althusser cards (social Marxists)
 Emphasize that soviet union was still embedded in cap
o Cultural Marxist
 Material base
o Human society organized into a base (consumer nature) and a super-structure
o Cap not root cause, amplifies/ conditions, how should we approach the impact level
• Impacts from vulgar Marxists, links from cultural Marxists (Fredrick Jameson)
• Alt-