#the working class child's future labor is property of their future boss - the parent is the uncompensated caretaker of that future labor

[queen-mabs-revenge]

always on my marxist bullshit, but the idea that a parent must be solely devoted to their child to the wholesale detriment and complete exhaustion of themselves is exactly why the bourgeois family is an act of universal violence. no one gets the care they need in that situation, and the ruling class continues to profit off of unpaid reproductive labor through the propaganda that parental exhaustion and monomaniacal devotion is pure, noble, and the only way a child can be raised without harm.

blended families, extended families, and other forms of borderless communal childcare have been the norm for the majority of human existence. the bourgeois family is an unnatural, alienating imposition completely geared towards justifying ruling class generational wealth consolidation, and beatifying a system that compensates 0% of the labor it takes to provide care, comfort, safety, hygiene, etc. for the reproduction of both tomorrow's and the next generation's labor.

anyway real facts this is why mainstream storytelling never can hit just right when it tries to tell the stories of parents and children with both being fulfilled and complete human beings. it literally can't propose a resolution to those contradictions unless it wants to start asking a whoooooole lot of other questions about families and social reproduction under capitalism....

[viglianogis4680-blog]

Alienated Labour: The general concept Marx implements in his section on the Alienation of Labour makes clear sense to me except for one aspect. The aspect of “the worker becomes poorer the richer is his production”, from page 86, still perplexes me. I understand it in the sense that, the laborer becomes more and more exploited the more commodities he/she creates, BUT does this only apply to people within certain economic/social strata’s? While I get that generally Marx is contrasting the bourgeois and the proletariat class, I feel like there is a lack of critical differentiation within the proletariat class itself. For example, there are poor white’s as well as poor black’s, both are exploited for their labor, but does one have greater social mobility than the other, more specifically, does one have a greater chance of becoming “successful” from their labor…absolutely. So did Marx not consider the different sub-classes within the working class category, or was it intentional to group the working class as a whole?  

Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and Philosophy: I think it’s interesting that Marx labels Feuerbach’s great achievement as overcoming the old philosophy of the Hegelian Dialectic. Specifically, with #1, relating philosophy to religion, saying philosophy is simply religion rationalized, then by association would be another form of human alienation. That idea really encapsulates the radical criticism of social paradigms and structures. The belief that the societal structures that alienate us and inhibit our critical thinking, are also accompanied by the vary fields and disciplines that people use to liberate others from these structures, they somehow act in a way that liberates but also further alienates and enslaves us. Also, on page 110, when Marx begins talking about absolute knowledge and objectivity, it reminds me a lot of Michel Foucault and his beliefs on knowledge and power, and how the two are used as forms of social control through societal institutions.

Theses on Feuerbach: Marx second disagreement with Feuerbach is another similarity in my eyes between him and Foucault, and the idea of knowledge and power, which I will expand on. “Man must prove the truth”, but who is “man” referring to? Man refers to people in specific positions of power. Who has to prove the truth? The African-American teen that was unarmed walking home from school. Who doesn’t have to prove the truth? The cop that shot him dead. Only people who lack in power and “authority” have to generally prove the truth, people in high positions of power do not have to prove their logic and thinking, the current social position they are in constitutes unintellectual compliance and belief.

German Ideology: In The Premisses of the Materialist Method, Marx talks about the distinction between humans and animals. I strongly disagree with the general language used to differentiate humans and animals, and I think it lacks not only radical but basic scientific thought. Marx differentiates humans and animals by “consciousness, by religion, or anything else you like”. I’m not sure what he’s implying by “anything else you like”, but if he’s binding that with religion and insinuating animals have not created any sort of social construct, then he’s ignoring immense facts about the animal kingdom, (wolf-packs, gorilla herd hierarchies). In Private Property and Communism, the entire first paragraph is ridden with problematic views, while I am taking into account the time period this was written in, it can’t go unnoticed. Assuming the definition of “family” equals “a wife, and children” is gag-worthy. In Communism and History, on page 189, I’m unsure if Marx is stating that “productive forces, capital funds, and social forms of intercourse” are human nature, or qualities that society has deeply entrenched to the point that it is perceived as “human nature”? In Communist Revolution, the idea is presented that in this movement, it “overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse”. This is interesting to me because I always thought of a communist revolution as something trying to reverse and heal the wounds caused by capitalism, but this entry makes me think it’s far greater than that. It’s saying a communist revolution is trying to negate everything that’s happened since the damn Neolithic Revolution, and that concept in itself is radical as hell.

Hegel for Beginners: This outline of Hegel’s dialectic is helpful, but I don’t understand one thing. Hegel states that absolute knowledge can only be attained at the end-point of the think process, but if the think-process is also marked by negation, then what would he constitute as the true end-point?

The Fragment of Machines: This piece, specifically under [693] really touches base with the concepts from the section “Alienation Labour”. My only question is, Marx conceptualized the shift from man power to machinery as a further alienation, and dehumanizing process, making the human’s work almost unnecessary; so how is it the capitalist class is able to keep the work of the man, as well as the machines? I’m thinking more in the modern sense, with more advanced technology as well. Also as a side-note, I find the analogies and personification of machinery and humans used in this section to be very provocative.

Capital: Something that came to mind while reading the section Commodities: Use-Value and Exchange-Value, is the slippery definition of what a commodity is. A question that came into my mind was, is a sex-worker a commodity? This coincidentally directly relates to the next section, The Fetishism of Commodities. This section also shares an interesting concept to me, the idea of social product. In the Sale Of Labour Power section, on page 491, a reality is brought up in the issue of labor that I did not previously acknowledge which is the laborers mortality. This mortality has to be met with a market approach of procreation, an equal substitution for thus mortality. This is one of Marx’s concepts that I think can be critically translated into modern times. It’s easy to assume that we don’t market our kids off anymore as laborers, but what is the college application process exactly? In most cases, parents paying $50-75 so their child can essentially prove their value to an institution that is going to spit them out into the labor force. So technically, we still have this process of marketing off your child for labor, there’s just an added step in the middle now, which is higher education.

The Civil War in France: On page 597, another example of Marx’s provocative language, in which he relates the state apparatus control over the society to a boa constrictor. Marx also talks about when the Revolution of 1848 happened, the French government as well as the governments of all continental Europe began further oppressing these movements and defining their monopolization on violence. I find this topic very interesting , the idea of a State’s monopoly on violence in relation to the nations ‘reactionary’ violence, (even though I would argue Franz Fanon’s idea that the violence of the people is not their violence at all but the states own violence redirected back at them), but anyway, it would be interesting to know what it would be like to live in that time during this revolution, and to see how the state would try to mask their violence by hyper-visualizing the ‘violence’ created by the revolutionaries.

Louis Zukofsky’s poem section 8: In class we were asked which parts of this piece sounded like Marx, and aside from the parts we discussed in class, there is one section on page 51 that not only sounds like Marx but just carries out so much emotion in it. The stanza that starts with “To be flooded in case of war?”. That entire stanza sticks out to me, not only because it was one of the few stanza’s I could understand without reading the secondary source, but because it reminds me of current boss-employ attitudes in the work force today. “You took off this day, not only will you not get paid for it, but you will be punished for it; in fact, not only will you be punished for it, but your kid will also have to pay for your lack of labor”.

Excerpt from George Oppen’s book: Stanza 6 caught my attention on the first run through and even again after reading the explanatory readings. Is this poking at the power of knowledge and the process of proving the truth that I was speaking of earlier? To me it seems very similar. It almost insinuates to me that we designate things as facts, thus we have decided what is reality and what isn’t. If something is discovered that contradicts our current understanding of ‘reality’, it becomes an explosion of a number of emotions. Also, stanza 11, reminds me of Marx, and his ideas of abolishing private property, “Hollow, available, you could enter any building, You could look from any window, One might wave to himself, From the top of the Empire State Building-“. In my opinion this doesn’t only represent the end of private property, but also presents a sort of optimistic future, of further social mobility, maybe even no need for social mobility at all.