Text of the Matter Text of the Matter

In this episode of Text of the Matter we continue through Capital Vol I, Book 2, going into detail on how Marx conceives Capital as a thing different from money, commodities, and their circulation. Through human labor, technology, materials, spaced, etc. are transformed into some sellable; just as human labor itself becomes the proletariats only means of earning their keep. Within this industrial context, is it possible to harness these technologies in a different way? As technology increasingly removes human intervention from production has the character of Capital changed? And how do we imagine revolutionary politics after these major shifts?

Today we divert from Capital to set the stage for what was to come. The Communist Manifesto, unlike Marx's later work, was a polemic that contains many seeds of method that Marx would use later in his life. Coinciding with European revolution across the continent, we give a bit of historical context to expand the reasons that led to the writing of Capital and the explosion of revolutionary thought and action in the 19th and early 20th century.

We begin our dive into Karl Marx's masterwork Capital I. In this episode we analyze his concepts of labor, commodities, fetishism, circulation, and hoarding as we work toward his central concept of Capital itself. Alongside our past work on dialectics, we may now elaborate and demonstrate what Marx means by dialectical materialism and how it is a unique contribution to the history of philosophical, political, and historical analysis. Unlike our previous analyses, Marx engages with a world of history and events that does not treat the mind as form in itself, but rather an element of human existence embedded in a world of economy.

We begin our dive into Karl Marx's masterwork Capital I. In this episode we analyze his concepts of labor, commodities, fetishism, circulation, and hoarding as we work toward his central concept of Capital itself. Alongside our past work on dialectics, we may now elaborate and demonstrate what Marx means by dialectical materialism and how it is a unique contribution to the history of philosophical, political, and historical analysis. Unlike our previous analyses, Marx engages with a world of history and events that does not treat the mind as form in itself, but rather an element of human existence embedded in a world of economy.

We apologize for some sound issues and will post the second episode soon.

Today we continue our conversation on how the idealist dialectic transitions from a form of idealist rationalism to a materialist theory of history and economy. To understand Marx, it is important to grasp the important tool that generated his form of thinking, on contradiction, on labor, and on alienation. While this own't be the last you hear about Hegel, it is our last direct confrontation in this series. Marx transforms Hegel's abstract and speculative drives into direct analysis of real economy and history. Thank you for joining us.

Today we begin a transition, from the deeply philosophical and idealist dialectics of W.F.Hegel to the historical, economic, and materialist dialectics of Karl Marx. To begin this transition, we must in someway produce a closure of our analysis of Hegel, however difficult that may be. To do so we will move through multiple concepts at the heart of Hegel's analysis of the human subject and society: the family, the community, the nation, and the Absolute. With the grounds that we have lain, beginning with Kant, we are now prepared to enter the political and economic field and the contemporary problems that populate it.