SOCI 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Free Market, The German Ideology
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●The critical attitude of marx’s professors got them into trouble -> influenced marx to be
more radical
●Marx prizes those things that ordinary citizens of his time would prize
○Voting
○Parliamentary government
○Debate, public argument
●Marx became more and more critical of civil society
●Human beings had a right to freedom from political control
●Humans with resources can do whatever they want, while those who do not have
resources will continue to be exploited
○There is a freedom but also an unfreedom for a majority of the population
●We want to look at the most basic reality of what humans are right
○Humans labor
○Human beings are the only species that make their own form of subsistence
○Humans make things
○We must look at humans as they labor -> look at economists
●All wealth is a product of humans laboring
○Labor is the source of wealth
○What humans are really selling is themselves
○Our labor is a commodity
○Humans must sell their labor to work, laborers are not free
■Economists believe that everything is done in a free market, but the
laborers are not free
●No free market for the laborer
●“Free market is the best for everyone” is false
●“alienation”/ “estranged”
○Used by Hegel philosophically
■Logic of history and philosophy
■A certain state of affairs is generated, but also generates opposition ->
alienation
○Marx’s definition: human beings go to labor and when they do, they are created
through labor
■The goal of labor is creation
■Look at the real conditions of real people
■Laborers enrich the world with commodities but they don’t make enough
to afford these commodities
●Wage rates only reflect what the employers want to give
●Laborers enrich the world but impoverish themselves
■Labor is a practice by which human beings take a part of themselves and
mix it with their creation
●Laborers deplete all their creative ability through their creation,
and then their creation is taken away from them
■Humanity- labor is the life activity of human beings, the key to what we
are