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To be a Communist in philosophy is to become a partisan and artisan of Marxist-Leninist philosophy: of dialectical materialism.
It is not easy to become a Marxist-Leninist philosopher. Like every ‘intellectual’, a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite.
You know what Lenin says about ‘intellectuals’. Individually certain of them may (politically) be declared revolutionaries, and courageous ones. But as a mass, they remain ‘incorrigibly’ petty-bourgeois in ideology. Gorky himself was, for Lenin, who admired his talents, a petty-bourgeois revolutionary. To become ‘ideologists of the working class’ (Lenin), ‘organic intellectuals’ of the proletariat (Gramsci), intellectuals have to carry out a radical revolution in their ideas: a long, painful and difficult re-education. An endless external and internal struggle.
Proletarians have a ‘class instinct’ which helps them on the way to proletarian ‘class positions’. Intellectuals, on the contrary, have a petty-bourgeois class instinct which fiercely resists this transition.
A proletarian class position is more than a mere proletarian ‘class instinct’. It is the consciousness and practice which conform with the objective reality of the proletarian class struggle. Class instinct is subjective and spontaneous. Class position is objective and rational. To arrive at proletarian class positions, the class instinct of proletarians only needs to be educated ; the class instinct of the petty bourgeoisie, and hence of intellectuals, has, on the contrary, to be revolutionized. This education and this revolution are, in the last analysis, determined by proletarian class struggle conducted on the basis of the principles of Marxist-Leninist theory.
"Louis Althusser, Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon (1968) -
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(via SCOTT KING)
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"We are born female and male *, biological sexes, but we are created woman and man, socially recognized genders. How we are so created is that second aspect of the mode of production of which Engels spoke, “the production of human beings themselves, the propogation of the species”.
How people propagate the species is socially determined."Heidi L. Hartmann, The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, p.12 Capital & Class Summer 1979 vol. 3 no. 2 1-33 (via fuckyeahdialectics)
* and of-course intersex, apologies.
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Ultimate ‘Reading Capital’ Post
Reading Capital by Louis Althusser:
Reading Capital Politically by Harry Cleaver:
Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One by Fredric Jameson:
Companion to Marx’s Capital by David Harvey:
Marx’s Capital, Philosophy and Political Economy by Geoff Pilling:
“To understand Capital, and therefore its first volume, it is necessary to take up ‘proletarian class positions’, i.e. to adopt the only viewpoint which makes visible the reality of the exploitation of wage labour power, which constitutes the whole of capitalism.
This is, proportionately speaking, on condition that they struggle against the influence of the burden of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology that they carry, relatively easy for workers. As ‘by nature’ they have a ‘class instinct’ formed by the harsh school of daily exploitation, all they need is a supplementary political and theoretical education in order to understand objectively what they feel subjectively, instinctively. Capital gives them this supplementary theoretical education in the form of objective explanations and proofs, which helps them to move from a proletarian class instinct to an (objective) proletarian class position.” (L. A.) (x)
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"His labour is not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another."
Karl Marx, ”Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” (via asthepoemsgo)
“mortification” - crucial here.
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“A leather-bound edition of Das Kapital! Long live the proletariat!”
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Much ink has been spilled in controversies over anti-Hegelianism in Italian operaismo. Hegelianism was to be found, first and foremost, in that ideology of the workers as a ‘universal class’, saturated with Kantian ethics in the era of the Second International, and with dialectical materialism in that of the Third. That image of the proletariat, which ‘by freeing itself frees all of humanity’, present in the nineteenth-century Marx, was shattered by Munch’s scream, after which followed the great breakdown of all forms in the early twentieth century. Here we are speaking of artistic avant-gardes, but also of scientific and philosophical ones, and the revolution of all other collective human forms, social, economic, political, under the tragic impact—1914!—of the first great European, and global, civil war. The tide of human progress—the belle époque—crashed against the wall of the worst massacre ever seen. But where danger is, deliverance also grows. Out of that inferno came the principle of hope: the most advanced revolutionary experiment ever launched. It was the Bolsheviks, alone and cursed, who made the leap; all that followed, in the course of their experiment, cannot cancel the gratitude which humanity owes for that heroic effort. One need not be a communist to understand this. And whoever does not understand—or does not want to understand—it is missing a part of the soul they need in order to exist and to act politically in this world. We had the good fortune to set out with this thought. We added the virtù of the ‘worker’s perspective’, and so began the intellectual adventure recounted here.
-Tronti - ‘Our Operaismo’
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"While productive labour is changing the means of production into constituent elements of a new product, their value undergoes a metempsychosis. It deserts the consumed body, to occupy the newly created one. But this transmigration takes place, as it were, behind the back of the labourer. He is unable to add new labour, to create new value, without at the same time preserving old values, and this, because the labour he adds must be of a specific useful kind; and he cannot do work of a useful kind, without employing products as the means of production of a new product, and thereby transferring their value to the new product. The property therefore which labour-power in action, living labour, possesses of preserving value, at the same time that it adds it, is a gift of Nature which costs the labourer nothing, but which is very advantageous to the capitalist inasmuch as it preserves the existing value of his capital. So long as trade is good, the capitalist is too much absorbed in money-grubbing to take notice of this gratuitous gift of labour. A violent interruption of the labour-process by a crisis, makes him sensitively aware of it."Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1 (NLR/Penguin 1972), pp. 314-5 [met him pike hoses]
He smiled, glancing askance at her mocking eye. The same young eyes. The first night after the charades. Dolphin’s Barn. He turned over the smudged pages. Ruby: the Pride of the Ring. Hello. Illustration. Fierce Italian with carriagewhip. Must be Ruby pride of the on the floor naked. Sheet kindly lent. The monster Maffei desisted and flung his victim from him with an oath. Cruelty behind it all. Doped animals. Trapeze at Hengler’s. Had to look the other way. Mob gaping. Break your neck and we’ll break our sides. Families of them. Bone them young so they metempsychosis. That we live after death. Our souls. That a man’s soul after he dies. Dignam’s soul… (Ulysses, James Joyce, (London: Bodley Head, 1960) pp.77-8) (via fuckyeahdialectics)
