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Discourse exclusively on the basis of historical materialist methodology.
Forum rules: No one line posts please. This forum is for discussion based on Marxism, Marxism-Leninism and similar revisions. Critique of topics not based on historical materialism belongs in the general Communism forum.
By Leigh94
#14370757
Hi I'm trying to write an essay with regards to Marxism within the spectrum of idealism. It is a university essay for the subject on capitalism with regards to Marxist theory. The essay question is: Capitalism has meant - and still means - the wholesale transformation of social relations. Discuss drawing either on Marx or on Weber.

I don't want to ask the answers for what to write but I was hoping you could help to give me a basic outline on how to structure my essay and the key points to include. I wasn't sure whether to go into Marxist materialist theory where all reality is based on matter and for social achievement to take place it had to be laboured to arrive at, and contrast this with the opposing idealist theory where "free will" is central and poverty, for example,miss not a social phenomena.

Hope you can help a bit
Regards
Leigh
By Decky
#14370793
I suggest you look at the reading list your lecturer would have handed to you at the start of the course and read some of the books that are on it.
User avatar
By The Immortal Goon
#14371017
The structure should look something like this:

Introduction: Marx: Saint or Savior?
Body: Black Widow Having Lesbian Sex with Octobrianna: Hot Marxist on Marxist Action
Conclusion: The Winter Soldier: An Analysis of How Marxism Made a Cooler Super-Soldier Than Capitalism

I think that your essay should get an A doing this.

Either that or look at the reading list your lecturer would have handed to you at the start of the course and read some of the books that are on it.

I don't mean to be flippant (well, I guess I do), but you should cater your essay to your class expectations instead of that of an internet resource. Further, a Marxist (like Decky and myself) will be unlikely to put that much effort into a long essay that you can then put into your essay and then never think about Marxism again.
By RonPrice
#14512135
Rather than off you advice as two people have done so, I'll recommend you go to this section of my website where I integrate philosophy and Marxism. If you don't like this, I'll post a prose-poem I just wrote below. This poem comes at the subject somewhat tangentially, but the poem is hot off my literary press. Just stop reading when you find it to be irrelevant to your needs and interests.-Ron Price, Australia
-----------------------
http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/PHILOSOPHY.html
----------------------------------
THE SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL and ME

Part 1:
The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization active from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution in 1972. It was composed of an exclusive membership of social revolutionaries who were avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. I had just begun my adolescent years in Ontario in 1957 and, by 1972, I was teaching high school in the port city of Whyalla South Australia. By 1972 I had also married, completed four years of university, and been a member of the Baha'i community for more than a dozen years. Baha'i was, and is, an inclusive, revolutionary group which, by 1972, had more than a million members, and now some 6 million. In all my reading during those 15 years from the 1950s to the 1970s, I never came across the SI.

The intellectual foundations of the SI derived primarily from strong anti-authoritarian Marxist thought which derided the centralized bureaucracies of China and the Soviet Union in the same breath as capitalist systems and societies. These intellectual foundations were also derived from the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, particularly Dada and Surrealism. Schism haunted the SI.

SI theory represented an attempt to synthesize a diverse field of theoretical disciplines into a modern and comprehensive critique of both mid-20th century art and advanced capitalism. The Society of the Spectacle (1967) by Guy Debord(1931-1994) established situationist analysis as Marxist critical theory. I did not come to study Marxist critical theory until the 1990s.

Part 2:

The intellectual foundations of the Baha'i Faith derived from the writings of two god-men who claimed to be Prophets-of-God, and the interpretations of Their writings from 1892 to 1962 by two appointed successors, as well as by an internationally elected body in and after 1963. After some 150 years this faith, this religion, has kept its unity firmly intact and has been freed from schism. Schismatic and divisive forces were ever-present in the last two hundred years creating, by the 21st century, a complex picture at least in cyberspace, if not in real space, of believers and x-believers, defectors and detractors, dissenters and apostates, deceivers and disbelievers, the disgruntled and the inactive, covenant breakers and antagonists.

SI recognized that capitalism had changed since Marx's formative writings, but maintained that his analysis of the capitalist mode of production remained fundamentally correct; they rearticulated and expanded upon several classical Marxist concepts, such as his theory of alienation. In their expanded interpretation of Marxist theory, the situationists asserted that the misery of alienation and commodity fetishism were no longer limited to the fundamental components of capitalist society, but had now spread themselves to every aspect of life and culture in advanced capitalist countries.

Part 3:

As technology progresses, and daily work in society becomes exponentially more and more efficient, the tasks themselves become exponentially more and more trivial, so went the SI argument as late as the 1970s. This, of course, is now only partly true. SI theory resolutely rejected the idea that advanced capitalism's apparent successes—such as technological advancement, increased income, and increased leisure—could ever outweigh the social dysfunction and degradation of everyday life that it simultaneously inflicted.

Essential to situationist theory was the concept of the spectacle elaborated in Debord's 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, mentioned above. In its limited sense spectacle means the mass media, which are its most glaring superficial manifestation especially in advertising. Debord said that the society of the spectacle came to existence in the late 1920s.

Marxism and the Baha'i Faith are both radical movements, one political and one religious. Both arose in the 19th century in response to the injustice and corruption of the period. The history of the Baha'i Faith is nowhere near as dramatic on the global scene, as Marxism which captured the imagination of a large part of humankind. It is not my purpose here to outline the similarities and differences between the two. This has been done elsewhere in fine detail.1

Part 4:

SI provides a unified critique of advanced capitalism. The primary concern of SI was the progressively increasing tendency towards the expression and mediation of social relations through objects. The situationists believed that the shift from individual expression through directly lived experiences, or the first-hand fulfilment of authentic desires which was the pattern and style in history. In the last century a shift has taken-place to individual expression by proxy through the exchange or consumption of commodities, or passive second-hand alienation. This has inflicted significant and far-reaching damage to the quality of human life for both individuals and society. Situationists defined the spectacle as an assemblage of social relations transmitted via the imagery of class power. Capitalist development had resulted, so SI theory held, in a situation in which all that was once lived has moved into representation.

The situationists argued that advanced capitalism manufactured false desires, especially by means of ubiquitous advertising and the glorification of accumulated capital. This manufacturing of false desires was also accomplished more broadly through the abstraction and reification of the more ephemeral experiences of authentic life into commodities. Another important concept of situationist theory was the primary means of counteracting the spectacle; the construction of situations, moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing the feeling of life and adventure, and the liberation of everyday life.

Part 5:

When the SI was first formed in the 1950s, it had a predominantly artistic focus; emphasis was placed on concepts like unitary urbanism & psycho-geography. The latter was the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. Gradually, however, that focus shifted more towards revolutionary and political theory. By 1962 when I began my travelling-and-pioneering for and in the Canadian Baha'i community, the SI movement had split at least twice. The international Baha'i community, which I had been associated with by then for a decade, though also threatened with a split in the years 1959 to 1962, maintained its unity. Those who were not loyal to Baha'i administration and its apex in Haifa Israel centred on the Universal House of Justice were an insignificant few, an insignificant few which became internally divided several times over the next half century thereby weakening both the legitimacy and the authority of the organization form representing those few.

The SI reached the apex of its creative output and influence in 1967 and 1968, with the former marking the publication of the two most significant texts of the situationist movement, The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord and The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem. The expressed writing and political theory of these two texts, along with other situationist publications, proved greatly influential in shaping the ideas behind the May 1968 insurrections in France; quotes, phrases, and slogans from situationist texts and publications were ubiquitous on posters and graffiti throughout France during the uprisings. Though the SI was a very small group, they were expert self-propagandists, and their slogans appeared daubed on walls throughout Paris at the time of the 1968 revolt. By 1972, Gianfranco Sanguinetti and Guy Debord were the only two remaining members of the SI.

Part 6:

Those who did not accept the authority of the Universal House of Justice were also a very small group, but they became more vocal when the internet gave publicity to their existence. In 1972, when the SI came to its end, I was just beginning to establish my career as a teacher and lecturer in secondary and post-secondary school education. By 2007 the Orthodox Bahá'í Faith, the name given to a small band of Baha'is which was formed in 1960 by Mason Remey, and subsequently the name used by Joel Marangella after he claimed to be Remey's successor, numbered about 40. Other than on the matter of leadership and organization, there are few differences between the orthodox and mainstream Bahá'ís in matters of doctrine.

As a group who believed that Mason Remey was the second Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith, they are considered heretical Covenant-breakers by the majority of Bahá'ís who followed the leadership of the Universal House of Justice. In addition, it should be emphasized that the Baha'i Faith now has a history of some two centuries and, in many ways, cannot be compared to the SI movement. This prose-poem makes a comparison out of personal interest and not historical significance.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Circle of Unity: Baha'i Approaches to Current Social Issues, editor, Anthony Lee, Kalimat Press, Los Angeles, 1984.

Part 7:

His Art and his Time,(1)
your autobiographical
film produced before
your suicide in 1994,
was never released, &
I was just beginning
my autobiographical
project more than 20
years in the making
now as I go through
my 70s into the late
evening of my life.

I found the comparison
between SI & my Faith
of interest.....although I
suspect this may be of
little interest to readers.

(1) The French Ministry of Culture declared that "he has been one of the most important contemporary thinkers, with a capital place in history of ideas from the second half of the twentieth century." Similarly, Debord once called his book, The Society of the Spectacle, "the most important book of the twentieth century". He continues to be a canonical and controversial figure particularly among European scholars of radical politics and modern art.

Ron Price
15/1/'15.

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