The Labors of Karl Marx: Tekhnç, Valorization, Revolution
Open Access
- Author:
- Roberts, William Clare
- Graduate Program:
- Philosophy
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 01, 2005
- Committee Members:
- Daniel Joseph Conway, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
John Philip Christman, Committee Member
Mitchell Aboulafia, Committee Member
Nancy Love, Committee Member
Terrell Carver, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Karl Marx
labor
capitalism
political economy
revolution
history - Abstract:
- This dissertation comprises a comprehensive re-reading of Marx’s understanding of labor. In order to make sense of Marx’s emphasis on labor, I argue, we must take his own productive activity seriously. Doing so obviates many of the standard objections to Marx’s critique of capitalism. It does so by redirecting attention towards Marx’s effort to transform his readers from isolated individuals into a revolutionary laboring multitude. I begin with an examination of “concrete labor”—the intentional production of useful things—which reveals that this is the motor of human history for Marx because our products escape from the intentions that formed them. The materiality of production, Marx shows, confounds the idealism of intentionality. This dynamic is greatly exacerbated by capitalism, to which I turn next. The abstract logic of capitalist production is so divorced from its material effects that it threatens to utterly use up the earth and the workers on which it depends. Having reconstructed Marx’s account of labor and capital, however, only establishes the terms of the problem. The idealisms of concrete labor and capital have brought society to an impasse. In order to show how Marx confronts this impasse, I argue that we must recognize the profound self-reflexivity of Marx’s writings. Marx does not just write about labor, he engages in his own form of productivity. He endeavors, though his own writing, to redirect his readers away from both traditional intentionality and capital and towards the revolutionary materiality that conditions and frustrates these idealisms. My reading here gives special attention to Volume I of Capital, which is Marx’s most elaborately developed attempt to work this transformation on his readers. I demonstrate that Marx in fact extensively modeled Capital on Dante’s Inferno. Adapting the structure and purpose of Dante’s poem, Marx leads us on a descent through the mystifying categories of modern economics (the idea of capitalism) in order to free us from the fear of eternal imprisonment in this modern equivalent to Hell. Overcoming this paralyzing fear is Marx’s real labor. His hopeful materialism is an affirmation of what he calls “the movement that overcomes the present.”