Marx & Modernity: Mind, Culture & Activity ( ) A talk by Andy Blunden, 16 February 2011
“History does Nothing!... It is people who do all that ” Social Formation
1. Theses on Feuerbach 2. The German Ideology 3. Grundrisse: The Method of Political Economy 4. Capital: Preface & 5. Chapter 1: The Commodity th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 7. The Communist Manifesto
Theses on Feuerbach Herder – Fichte - Hess
“Practical-critical Activity” Theses on Feuerbach
8. “All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.” Theses on Feuerbach
The point of philosophy Theses on Feuerbach
The German Ideology The Real Individuals Their Activity, and the Material Conditions The premises of the materialist method
Thought and Language The German Ideology “Language is the immediate actuality of thought” “Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm.”
The Method of Political Economy “The concrete is the concentration of many determinations... It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality.”
Preface to Capital “In bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour — or value-form of the commodity — is the economic cell-form.”
The Commodity Capital “The secret of the expression of value, namely that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities.”
Capital Alienation and Fetishism The Commodity
18 th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living.”
18 th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte “And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.”
The Manifesto of the Communist Party “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”
In Conclusion
Available for consultation: 2:30pm – 5pm Tuesday 15 th February 1:30pm – 4pm Wednesday 16 th February 2:30pm – 5pm Friday 18 th February 1:30pm – 4pm Monday 21st February 2:30pm – 5pm Tuesday 22nd February 2:30pm – 5pm Wednesday 23 rd February 12:30pm – 5pm Friday 25 th February Please book a time with Carol on
Program of Talks Tuesday 15 th Staff Lounge12:30pmThe Mind from Descartes to Hegel W’sday 16 th Senate Room 4:30pm Marx & Modernity: Mind, Culture & Activity Friday18 th Staff Lounge12:30pmVygotsky & Concept of Consciousness Monday 21 st Senate Room 4:30pmIs Science a Humanity? Tuesday 22 nd Staff Lounge12:30pm Units & Motives in Activity Theory W’nsday 23 rd Staff Lounge12:30pm Projects & the Problem of Context Monday 28 th Staff Lounge12:30pm Vygotsky’s Theory of Child Development
Genealogy of CHAT: Andy Blunden’s Home Page History of Philosophy on M.I.A.: