Transcription
[Music] Carl Marx was born in Trier in 1818. Coming from the Young Hegelians, he proposed the union of theory and practice to transform the world. He explained that the nature of individuals depends on material conditions. Political, religious, and legal institutions, as well as the ideologies through which men understand the world they live in, their place in it, and their own being, are conditioned by the economic base of society. Therefore, man can only fully realize himself in a truly rational and [Music] free society. Hello friends, how are you? Welcome. We are going to begin another excursion through the order of philosophical thought. Today we are going to talk about a thinker who had a fortune that philosophers rarely have. He was not only read by a few, not only had disciples, not only had influence in academic circles, but he was the promoter and initiator of a huge mass movement that shook the history of large European countries and that is still very influential in our world today. Carlos Marx was a Jew born in Trier who fundamentally dedicated himself to an economic study of the society of his time. Before that, he had also studied the ancient Greek materialist philosophers, Epicurus, Democritus, and lived much of his life earning a living as a journalist, and he was truly an extraordinary journalist. He has his strength, his irony, his ruthless sense of realism when he chronicles the world. It is truly attractive, beyond his other doctrines, if one reads books like "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" or other chronicles of the current events of his time, one feels the full force of an investigative journalist, as one would say today, truly remarkable. Marx's thought could perhaps be summarized in one proposition, in one sentence about one of the philosophers who studied him, Ludwig Feuerbach. He did a study with very brief theses on Feuerbach, and one of those theses, number 11, which has become the most famous, says: "The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." Perhaps that is the summary of Marx's philosophical impulse. He did not want to simply understand the world, but to transform it. But naturally, he knew that reality cannot be transformed without having understood it first. This is the premise. Based on this, Carlos Marx developed a complex thought with extraordinary historical impact. If you continue with us, we will summarize all of that history. [Music] Carl Marx's father was a prosperous Jewish lawyer with liberal ideas. When Prussia annexed the Rhineland region, it enacted regulations that, among other things, prohibited Jews from working in the administration of justice. Therefore, in order to continue practicing as a man of law, in 1824 he converted to Evangelism and had his wife and children baptized. Until 1835, young Carl pursued his studies at the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium in Trier and then studied law at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. As he was a very restless and brilliant young man, he also studied philosophy, history, art history, and literature. In 1841, he obtained his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena with a thesis on ancient Greek philosophy, "Difference between the Philosophy of Nature in Democritus and Epicurus." However, he decided not to pursue an academic and teaching career but to dedicate himself to journalism. Thus, in 1842, he published some articles in various left-Hegelian media and soon became editor of a liberal newspaper in Cologne financed by Rhenish industrialists. Around that time, he met who would henceforth be his best friend and most unconditional collaborator, Friedrich Engels. The following year, he married a childhood friend, Jenny von Westphalen. In those years, he also wrote several essays, among which the one titled "On the Jewish Question" is noteworthy, and he concluded his work "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right." For Marx, the state was not, as it seemed to Hegel, the rational realization of freedom, but the institutionalization of the exploitation of an entire class, that of the wage laborers, who were marginalized from full humanization. The contradiction between capitalists and proletarians demanded dialectical overcoming. Hegel did not see this, according to Marx, and thus his philosophy ended up legitimizing the status quo. However, it was not a matter of rejecting Hegel, but of making him firmly stand on the materiality of the real, using precisely Hegel's main discovery, dialectics, only that by virtue of this turn, it was no longer a dialectic, but a [Music] Materialist dialectic. The materialisms of antiquity, the materialism of a Democritus, an Epicurus, a Lucretius, were materialisms, let's say, in the scientific sense, meaning they explained that everything is made of atoms, that reality has no spirits, but that everything is body and things like that. But they did not enter the field of history. Marx's materialism effectively starts from these classical ancient materialists but introduces the historical dimension. The important thing is not only that the whole world is material, that the whole world is made of atoms and bodies, meaning that there are no supernatural spiritual elements in reality, but that this also influences history. Peoples, societies, the world, let's say, in which we live, are based on material conditions. We normally place ideals, great words, virtues, justice, the highest feelings above reality, and we don't realize that, Marx thinks, it is the material conditions that truly determine societies. We human beings live according to our technological possibilities, according to economic inequalities, that is, according to the hierarchy that arises from the fact that some possess and others have to work for those who possess and for their subsistence. Those material conditions, those conditions that arise from what we eat, what we produce, the technology we have for manufacturing, for traveling, and for knowing, all those material conditions are what determine everything else: our ideologies, the rational explanations we give of the world. All of that is subsequent to the material conditions. We believe that the important thing is the spiritual ideologies that explain the real. In reality, it is that base, that material infrastructure, that explains, that accounts for and expresses itself through political, religious ideologies, etc. It is a subversion in the strict sense of the term, it is turning things upside down and saying, if we want to understand the world, we have to understand, not listen to ideologues, but understand the materiality of the economic, technological relations, etc., in which people live. By understanding that reality, we see the truth of societies. The truth of societies is not in their ideology, in the sometimes self-complacent discourse they have about themselves, but in their economic, social, technological relations, etc. That was the great turn, the turning of things upside down, that Marx's thought carried out. [Music] In 1844, Marx settled with his wife in Paris, where he tried to live off his journalistic contributions to various newspapers and magazines. He began to study the English classical economists thoroughly, the League of the Just, a secret communist society, as well as various workers' meetings. Marx found great affinity between his own opinions and the doctrines of the communists, who radically questioned the capitalist system and proposed common ownership of the means of production. In those years, he wrote his "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts," which would remain unpublished for almost 90 years. In that text, Marx denounced the alienated nature of work under capitalism, contrasting it with a society in which men could develop freely within a framework of cooperative production. He also associated with the anarchists and, together with Engels, wrote a book published in 1845 that questioned the German academic world of that time, "The Holy Family." He was also involved in a German-language seminar with a clearly anti-Hegelian tendency published in Paris. When the Prussian government, annoyed by the criticism it was subjected to, requested the French Ministry of the Interior to take measures to put an end to that publication, all the columnists and journalists of the weekly had their visas revoked, including Marx. Expelled from France, he went to Brussels. There he drafted his famous "Theses on Feuerbach," the most famous of which states: "The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." He also wrote "The German Ideology" at that time, a book that became known after his death. He explained there that the nature of men depends on material conditions, and the institutions and ideologies through which men regulate their relationships, understand themselves, and comprehend the world in which they live are conditioned by the economic base of society. Therefore, according to Marx, men can only fully realize themselves in a free and rational society. Now, in capitalist society, large sectors of the population are relegated to inferior living conditions in the name of the principle of the division of labor. This means that, in Hegelian terms, capitalist society lacked rational reality. In 1847, Marx published "The Poverty of Philosophy," a work in which he polemically responded to the philosophy of poverty of the anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon. In the same year, he founded the German Workers' Society of Brussels with Engels. He was elected vice-president of the so-called Democratic Action and shortly thereafter participated in the Second Congress of the League of Communists held in London. He was then commissioned to draft, together with Engels, a manifesto. That text, "The Communist Manifesto," was published in February 1848. There, Marx and Engels stated that the history of societies is always the history of class struggles. This principle was the basis of what would later be called historical materialism. In 1849, Marx published "Wage Labour and Capital" and also an article on the history of the Prussian Empire, which resulted in his immediate expulsion from German territory. He then settled with his family in London as an irregular immigrant. He could not access stable employment, and his only possibility of subsistence consisted of writing articles for various newspapers. Although he had some success in that field, it was a poorly paid job, and the financial situation of the Marx family became frankly bad. His children died in those years, and the health of his wife and his own deteriorated irreversibly. In reality, he could only survive thanks to occasional financial help from the good Engels. However, Marx did not stop studying and producing. Among other things, he improved his command of English and French and learned Spanish and Russian. Every day he attended the library of the British Museum, where he read and wrote. In 1850, he published "The Class Struggles in France," and in 1852, "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte." Around that time, he also conceived the project of elaborating a critique of classical political economy. Due to his financial, family, and health problems, the work was much slower than he had anticipated. In 1859, he published as the first part of the projected work his "Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," a work that had a good reception and in which Marx explains that the historical stage we call capitalism must be overcome by virtue of its radical irrationality. It is clear that such irrationality still needed to be clearly proven. The continuation of this text would be dedicated to that, a detailed study of [Music] "Capital." The strength of his work focuses on an essential economic theme, that is, Marx thinks that we human beings, who are obliged to work to reproduce our societies, to obtain the food, shelter, protection we need, and in short, to develop our common life, we human beings, I say, are alienated in the sense that most of us are not truly owners of what we do and of our work. Why? Because there is a socially unjust distribution. There is a world of owners of capital, of, let's say, the fundamental economic mass of a given society, who provide and contribute the money for production, for machinery, etc., in which the rest of the members of society will work, and they obtain that product. But they also obtain an surplus part of what those workers produce, which instead of going to the workers who produced it, goes to the owners of the means of production of that capital, of that economic accumulation, which is the substance, let's say, the base of a developed bourgeois economy, etc. That is, the owner of capital naturally obtains what he has invested in the work of, in paying and covering the work of others, but also a surplus value, an excess amount that allows him to accumulate more and more, while the workers never fully become owners of what they are doing, of what they are building, etc., etc. Well, this is an infinitely more complex, richer theory that he wrote in his great work "Capital," and which has given rise to a historical movement. That is, communism was a group of people who gradually spread throughout Europe and caused the revolution in Russia, etc., of people who think that this capital should not be in private hands, but that all workers should somehow also be owners of that surplus they are producing, and that it should be distributed equally in society. "The Communist Manifesto" is one of the most famous and most, let's say, extraordinary subversive elements, a gospel, let's say, of a new class that has never been written. And Marx did not limit himself to being a theorist, but at the same time he promoted this entire movement of renewal and transformation in accordance with his idea that it is not just about understanding the world, but that we must [Music] change it. The study of "Capital," projected by Marx as a continuation of his "Contributions to the Critique of Political Economy" published in 1859, was delayed for various reasons. On the one hand, Marx dedicated several years to drafting a voluminous study on the different theories of surplus value, that is, capitalist profit. On the other hand, in 1864, he was elected to the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association, or as it was later known, the First International. This activity consumed enormous effort. In fact, Marx was the author of almost all the documents produced by that organization. He opposed the anarchists there, maintaining the need for workers to adopt effective forms of action, without excluding the formation of a party. Finally, in 1867, under the title "Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Book One," Marx published his long-awaited analysis of the capitalist production process. The text had immediate and overwhelming success and was soon translated into different languages. According to Marx, wealth is not produced by capital but by human labor, and what originates capitalist profit is nothing other than the exploitation of workers. The originality of the approach lies in the application of the dialectical method to political economy. Where classical economists see relations between commodities, Marx discovers social relations, that is, relations between people. The very exchange value of the various commodities derives from the socially necessary time to produce them. The use of money and the quantification of the value of articles suggest what Marx calls the fetishism of commodities, which consists of attributing values to things as if they were their natural properties, forgetting that all valorization is resolved in the mutual relations of human beings as producers and exchangers of goods. This false consciousness, which sees relations between things, finds a particular expression in the commodification and sale of labor power. In this simple fact of considering labor power as a commodity among others that can be bought and sold in the market lies capitalist exploitation. By selling his labor power, the wage earner receives in return an amount of money equal to the cost of sustenance and other needs, which can vary historically. The owner of the means of production pays this sum and acquires the right to use the worker's labor power, appropriating the surplus value created. If, let's say, half of the workday corresponds to the value of the products necessary to reproduce labor power, the other half is unpaid labor appropriated by the entrepreneur. Marx shows that the production of surplus value in capitalism is only the appropriation of unpaid labor. This surplus unpaid labor is accumulated again and again by the capitalist class in an expansive form. In fact, capitalism can be defined as a system in which the sole object of production is to increase this accumulation of capital without limit, instead of satisfying the needs of the community. Here lies precisely the essential irrationality of the capitalist system, which Marx reveals. From 1869 onwards, Engels was able to secure Marx a fixed annual income so that he could worry less about money. Nevertheless, his terrible health and the deaths of his wife and eldest daughter overshadowed his last years. He died in London on March 14, 1883. Shortly before, referring to those who claimed to speak in his name and represent his thought as if it were something fixed and finished, he had declared to Engels: "I, for one, am not a Marxist." The next two volumes of "Capital" had been finished by Marx in the years immediately following the appearance of the first, but he continued to correct them until his death. It would later be Engels who would revise and publish them posthumously. Book Two appeared in 1885, and Book Three in [Music] 1894. It is obviously no secret the impact Marx's work has had on history. Marxism is not simply a philosophy, but it is also a transformative social force and sometimes also an excuse for totalitarian, autocratic movements, etc., which, with an ideological veneer provided by Marx, have discovered or invented new bureaucratic tyrannies over peoples. In any case, few people, few individuals have had such an extraordinary personal influence as Marx in history, at least certainly in contemporary history, I believe no one. His work has been discussed by economists, it has also been discussed for the practical repercussions it has had when carried out in some countries. There have been, let's say, fundamental mismatches. Marx was convinced that the true revolution could only occur in developed bourgeois countries. He expected the revolution in England or in Germany, and instead, it was in the most backward Russia, which was the country where precisely there was no bourgeoisie, but what existed was a peasantry and a movement, let's say, aristocrats ruling over peasants, and that is precisely where the revolutionary movement arose, more or less according to Marxist doctrine. In any case, no matter how much his work is discussed from a theoretical economic point of view, no matter how much the historical effects it has had in some countries can and should be discussed, and obviously the repercussion on the loss of freedoms or even the backwardness in some societies that have wanted to follow Marxist principles with excessive orthodoxy, there is no doubt that Marx's theoretical effort was extraordinary, and above all, that he brought to the table a problem that is there, whether Marxism is true or not: it is material conditions that form societies. Until they are transformed, as long as the world is divided between owners and dispossessed, between those who can take advantage of the need of others and those who have no choice but to do what they are told if they want to survive, as long as that premise exists, which is not a premise that comes from the heavens but arises from the organization of society, it cannot be said that there will be authentic freedom in countries. That challenge, let's say, of Marxist thought, beyond whether its solutions are better or worse, remains valid and continues to be a problem to be solved by us, by the people, the citizens who live today. We have arrived here with this distinguished, important work. Next time, if you allow us, we will continue with another philosopher, with another [Music] [Music] perspective. [Music] [Applause] [Music] a [Music] i