The Polemical Summation of the Marxist World Outlook
Schedule:
Here we step back from Marx’s analysis of the categories which constitute capitalist society to the wholistic view of nature and society which forms the point of departure for this analysis. A view which is simultaneously the culmination and the negation of bourgeois enlightenment and therefore of the entire history of philosophy. Those who want to reduce Marx to a bourgeois critic or sociologist condemn such “worldview Marxism” because they want to remain at the superseded level of bourgeois liberalism. For those of us who want to move onward to something higher it remains the indispensable predicate and it has no better summary than Anti-Duhring.
Session One: General Premises of Scientific Socialism
In this session we discuss the need for expertise in scientific popularization, how socialism emerged out of bourgeois enlightenment, what exactly makes scientific socialism scientific and what are the basic characteristics of scientific methodology.
Readings: From the June 11 1878 Preface to Chapter Four of Part One: World Schematism in Anti-Duhring.
Session Two: Philosophy of Nature
In this session we discuss the static world conception of idealism, the impossibility of eternal truth, the difference between quantitative and qualitative change, the class base of morality, the bourgeois origins of human equality, and the relation between freedom and necessity.
Readings: From Chapter Five: Time and Space to Chapter Eleven: Freedom and Necessity of Part One of Anti-Duhring.
Session Three: Dialectics:
In this session we ask how does the principle of contradiction constitute mathematical operations, what differentiates the Marxist from the Hegelian dialectic and what it means to negate the negation.
Readings: the three chapters of the Dialectics section of Anti-Duhring.
Session Four: Political Economy:
In this session we discuss political economy, its object of investigation and the primacy of production within it. We discuss what it means to say that socialism is necessary and the inherent relation between exploitation and the full development of free and equal exchange. We examine the role of slavery and of coercion in general in history and clarify why Marx’s conceptual schema of capitalist society incorporated not two but three classes.
Readings: the Political Economy section of Anti-Duhring.
Session Five: Socialism
In this session we further examine the distinction between utopian and scientific socialism, and ask what exactly we mean when we refer to the contradiction between private appropriation and socialized production. We also investigate what exactly socialism is and how it relates to state ownership and the abolition of value.
Readings: The Socialism section of Anti-Duhring.
Further Reading for Course Two
Engels: Dialectic of Nature
Lenin: Materialism and Empiro-Criticism
Lenin: Philosophical Notebooks
Hegel: Science of Logic
Hegel: Lectures on the History of Philosophy
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