Marx Lecture
7 March 2006

•	preamble:  intro (communism as state economic system + dictatorship, problems with this account), The Communist Manifesto (1847), “Estranged Labour” (1844).

•	history:  dialectical materialism
•	methodology:  start with material facts rather than with theoretical accounts or idealized (“state of nature”) accounts
•	ideology:  an ostensibly independent thought system that is in fact dependent on the material conditions of the society in which it is produced
•	history as class struggle
•	the rise of the bourgeoisie and, concomitantly, of the proletariat
•	associated with this – imperialism, globalism, technological development
•	the effect on the family
•	the effect on rural life/city life
•	constant upheaval, constant brinksmanship (metaphor of the sorcerer who can no longer control his spells:  Faust)
•	alienation of labour twofold:  1.  commodification of workers, 2.  alienation of workers from their work (assembly line work versus skilled trades)
Commodificaton
•	the worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces (Think:  Michael Moore)
•	devaluation of human world versus increase in value of things
•	labour produces itself as an object
•	a worker’s labour set against him (complete alienation)
•	economics fails to consider relationship between the worker and production; it thereby conceals the alienation of labour
Alienation of workers from their work
•	work is no longer part of the worker’s nature; it is therefore forced labour

•	private property is the result, not the cause, of this alienation
•	when labour is alienated from the worker, it is transferred to someone else (the capitalist) in the form of private property.  (In a sense, labour produces the capitalist, and not the other way around.)
•	this movement dialectical:  private property as the result becomes the new cause.

•	communism as a world-historical movement (although the struggle is at first national)
•	why the bourgeoisie no longer fit to rule
•	the bourgeoisie forges the tools of its own destruction; why the proletariat has nothing to lose but its chain
•	dictatorship of the proletariat
•	end of class, end of history