[P2P-F] Fwd: [NetworkedLabour] What is Karl Marx? (1913) by Alexander Bogdanov

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Orsan <orsan1234 at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, May 17, 2015 at 9:14 PM
Subject: [NetworkedLabour] What is Karl Marx? (1913) by Alexander Bogdanov
To: "<networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org>" <
networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org>


....

What did Marx do? *He changed the point of view*. He looked at society from
the point of view of those who produce, from the point of view of the
working class, and everything turned out to be very different. It turned
out that the center of life and development of the society was found there,
that this was the Sun on which depended the ways and the movement of human
beings, groups and classes.

Marx was not a worker; but through the power of his mind he was able to
fully understand the position of the worker. And he found out that with
this transition everything immediately changed its contours and forms. The
powers of things and causes of events were revealed to the human eyes in a
way that was not possible from the old point of view. Reality, truth, even
the everyday appearance of things changed and became something different,
often something opposite to what it was before.

Yes, even the way things appear to us! What can be more obvious for a
capitalist than the fact that he feeds the worker? Does he not provide the
worker with the work and the salary? But for the worker it is no less
obvious that they are the ones who feed the capitalists with their labor.
And in his discussion of surplus value Marx demonstrated that the first
view was an illusion, an appearance that was similar to our everyday
perception that Sun moved around Earth, but the second view was the truth.

Marx discovered that all human thought and feeling received different
direction and were formed differently depending on the class to which these
human beings belonged, that is, depending on their position in relation to
production. Different interests, habits and experiences lead to different
conclusions. What is reasonable for one class is ridiculous for another,
and conversely what is just, lawful and normal for one class is injustice
and misuse of power for another. What appears as freedom to one class,
looks like slavery to another. The ideal of one class causes horror and
disgust of another class.

Marx summed it up thus: “it is their social existence that determines their
consciousness.” Or, in other words, thoughts, aspirations and ideals are
determined by the economic situation. It is with the help of this idea that
he transformed social science and philosophy. It is on this idea that he
founded his great doctrine of the class struggle and its role in the
development of society. He studied the path of this development and showed
where it leads and which class would create the new organization of
production, what this organization would look like and how it would end the
division of classes and their long struggle.

Marx was not a worker. But it was in the working class that the great
teacher found the foothold for his thought, the point of view that allowed
him to penetrate the depth of reality and to help him discover his idea.
The essence of this idea is the self-consciousness of the working
proletariat. That is why Marx more than any other thinker belongs to the
proletariat.

....
Full text:
http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1951-what-is-karl-marx

_______________________________________________
NetworkedLabour mailing list
NetworkedLabour at lists.contrast.org
http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour




-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org


P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates:
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/p2p-foundation/attachments/20150517/923bd75e/attachment-0001.htm