Olive M Meadow
Professor Simpson
ENGL 418 – Critical Geography
3 September 2020
Response Paper: 1 September,
Method 1: Materialism, “The German Ideology: Part I,” “The Formation of
the Intellectuals,” “Introduction to A History of the World in Seven Cheap
Things”
Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels explore the effects of the Enlightenment on capital
and production in their book The German Ideology (written in 1846,
published in 1932). Their thesis puts post-Enlightenment society within a new
capitalism, one obsessed with materialism and the production of the individual.
With this text, I am not as concerned with the overall understanding of this idea,
but rather with the direct effect of it on the family unit and its socio-geographic
extensions: villages, towns, cities, states, nations, communities.
In
post-Enlightenment capitalism, importance lies not on consciousness, morality,
or religion, but on material production. This contrasts the earlier philosophy,
beginning with physical rather than ending with it. Production is not only the
center of the new society, but it propels it. Procreation, the extension of one’s
life into new life, is perhaps the most important aspect of this production:
without the recreation of Man, Man could not continue produce. This is where
the family enters the scene. The family is the first relationship one
encounters, and is the first community one creates. The style of the family, of
course, is set by the production that surrounds it. Antonio Gramsci’s essay “The
Formation of the Intellectuals,” a part of his 1920s Prison Notebooks, claims
simply that those intellectuals deemed essential are those that give the greatest
function to society. All might be an intellectual of their own morality and ideology,
but only those that uphold the will of the state are intellectuals of function.
Therefore, those who produce a social understanding similar to that of the
state are deemed as such, and those deemed as such set the communal style in
society. Gramsci continues here, stating that “The intellectuals are the
dominant group’s ‘deputies’ exercising […] hegemony and political government” (118).
This may be seen, as an example, in the 1950s, when production and reproduction
(as a result of WWII and continuing mechanization) lead to the “nuclear family,”
produced and reproduced in monotonous suburbs.
Focusing
on communal history, the family begins early and small. The immediate – nuclear
– family is the functional unit, the cell, of the community. This may consist
of, as is customary in the Western world today, a mother, a father, and a few
children. But this community grows: what about grandparents? Aunts and uncles?
In-laws? Earlier on, these families, too, are small and close-knit. Out of
these growing communities, villages grow. And as production continues, and the
need for production continues, towns grow. And then cities. And eventually we work
our way up the ladder to the national community, and even further: the
international community. Today, we might look towards global identities as
communities, or multinational corporations. The growth continues across many,
many scales. But these communities are still deputized! Where does the radical
community fit in? Can it?
Simply
put, the radical community breaks away from these conceived communities, those
based off of production and reproduction. It is focused on the metaphysical, on
the conscious, rather than the material. The radical community is made of
individuals, but focused on the whole, and it is void of intellectuals. Gramsci’s
claim that everyone is an intellectual, but only few are functional
intellectuals, is based off of necessity. A community oriented away from the
policing of its members has no need for deputies of the state. Yes, it has
thought, and consciousness, and all the anti-materialist aspects, but this community
has no need for the appointment, and therefore, no need for the formation of
the intellectual.
Our
third text this week, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore’s Introduction to their book
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2017) explore the modern effects
of production and materialism. Most notably, they identify seven aspects that
are commodified for continued productions: Nature, Money, Work, Care, Food,
Energy, and Lives. Inexhaustive as it is, this list gives an insight into those
social structures that continue to be deputized by modern intellectuals, and it
is from this list that I will produce the population of my radical community.
Inarguably, Europe’s colonization of nearly every plot of land on earth was an
important and destructive aspect in the production and growth of our modern
communities. Macro-communities grow the way they do because of the unhindered production
that has continued from Marx’s writing to my own. And this has been facilitated
through colonization, through Gramsci’s deputies taking advantage of Patel and Moore’s
list. To create the radical community requires those who have been taken
advantage of flipping the script. In other words, those communities that are used,
abused, and othered by capitalism’s ongoing production, must be able to
deputize their own production. This radical community consists of revolutionaries
born out of marginalization. This new community is, therefore, decolonized, queer,
multispecies; strata on all levels are eliminated. The limitation and subsequent
destruction of materialism in this way allows for a community focused not on
the individual, not on production and reproduction, but on the conscious collective.
Hi Olive -
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty new to explicit Marxist thought, so I might be off track, but I read something quite different in our texts when it comes to 'materialism.' For Marx, it seems that having a material-based understanding of the world is more powerful and real than an ideological one. He starts out by criticizing philosophers whose idealism is too far removed from reality to be of any real use to people.
I think there are slightly different uses of the words "idealism" and "materialism" in these texts than we might use in ordinary language. People use "Idealism" to talk about believing in the possibility of good and change for the good, (which is important!) but the philosophical term refers more to believing that reality originates with ideas (this ties in closely with a religious worldview). We often use "Materialism" to refer to a selfish preoccupation with acquiring things (or money) but the philosophical term means the belief that reality begins with material things, and that those material things are the most vital subject.
Marxist thought then, (as I understand it) begins with the assertion that people's material circumstances are what shapes them, and in order to have equality in all aspects of life, marginalized groups must first have equality in their material circumstances.
Does that check out?
I understand that Marx's materialism and colloquial materialism are quite different. What I am arguing here is not that Marx's materialism doesn't exist, or that it is the same as colloquialist understanding of "materialism." I'm arguing that Marx's materialism is problematic; it reinforces classist, racist, and homophobic ideas, and a radical society would not be based on materialism.
DeleteThe question of the radical community is an important one for Marx and Engels, Gramsci, and Patel and Moore and they each identify ways to think about that practice in each one of the texts themselves. Additionally, the family unit is an important practice to Capital, and Engels specifically took interest in the way that Capital and Private Property, create hierarchical identities based on class, race, gender, and sexuality. Two classic texts in this vein to pick up are Engels' "Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" from 1894 found here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/origin_family.pdf and, building off of that, is Gayle Rubin's "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the "Political Economy" of Sex" available here: https://summermeetings2013.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/rubin-traffic.pdf
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately marginalization does not make one radical, although one might come to that conclusion based upon some of the rhetoric of certain media these days. This kind of relates to the question you had in class, Olive, about the anti-intellectual. These terms tend to quickly result in an us against them, and either/or kind of logic which certainly wouldn't coincide with a radical or materialist approach. I encourage you to consider how Marx's materialism challenges such binaries, calls for a transformation in the social function of production (intellectual as well as physical), and in doing so provides a strong tool to contribute to a society that directly counters the logics of classism, racism, and homophobia and inequality in general.