From Socrates to Sartre EP22 ⟩ “Marx II: Alienated Man”

These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.

Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.

Marx II — ALIENATED MAN

Beware: Charon Thelma—the supreme universal mistress of intellectual accessibility without vulgarization—is at the helm now … to ferry us across the Styx of contemporary mental illness and into the heart of the heart of our especially weird contemporary heart of darkness. If you are reading this, it is your own heart, and it’s also outside in physical stuff, where it disguises itself as the way things are, always have been, just natural.

All aboard! Charon Thelma—the supreme universal mistress of intellectual accessibility without vulgarization—will take us there. Here. By following the Munch-swirls down the vortex of volitional death and madness whose historical depth and structural violence most public thinkers dare not even name, let alone autopsy.

Lavine does both.

Step one: elevate the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 to their rightful place at the center of any serious inquiry into Marx’s philosophical development from philosophical anthropologist of alienation to mechanical engineer of historical transformation.

Step two: everything that comes after this.

Break Observers

Here is a brief chronology of those who noticed and named aspects of the early/late Marx break —

• 1920s — Georg Lukács: Reads early Marx as a Hegelian ontologizer of subjectivity. Sees some necessity in the recipe that makes the logos that’s driving the history ship. The protagonist of history is radically free subjectivity striving to realize itself through a dialectic of mediation–overcoming, estrangement–return, but becomes really stuck when its powers become both externalized into real concrete matter, and also perverted by this accidental “class” business. So our personalities get body-snatched and the self-abusing Class Antago tumor becomes natural or necessary and, well, Soylent Green has to be people because of the beast within or something in propagandized mythology. The subject's own powers get externalized—labor, social coordination, creativity—and come back as alien forms: wages, contracts, legal personhood, market forces. These are frozen social relations that now act like they’re in charge. Like Nietzsche’s coin—long use has made them seem normal. It’s just Chinatown, Jake.
• 1930s–1950s — Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse): Marx is Mr. Humanism. Marcuse especially reads continuity; in fact, the later economic categories are a reification of earlier anthropological concerns.
• 1960s — Louis Althusser: Proposes the “epistemological break” thesis (For Marx, Reading Capital). The early Marx is pre-scientific, ideological, and Hegelian, whereas the mature Marx is structurally rigorous and anti-humanist.
• Now — Žižek and Post-Althusserians: Suggest the break may be internal to Marx’s own categories—that the fantasy of a fully reappropriated self is itself an ideological surplus invented by certain suppositions of the deep nature of the fully happy self.

Lavine shows us the true path and model—the early-to-late Marx transition is actually a dialectical unfolding, a development through contradiction, and not Marx abandoning anything.

Structure of the Episode

1. Rediscovery and marginalization of the 1844 manuscripts, especially post-WWII.
2. Philosophical genealogy, tracing Marx’s debts to Hegel (dialectical method) and Feuerbach (species-being, projection theory).
3. Taxonomy of alienation, divided into four kinds: (a) from the product of labor, (b) from the act of labor, (c) from species-being, (d)
   from others.
4. Dialectic of overcoming: From “raw communism” to fully-realized human emancipation via material reappropriation of estranged powers.

So, the passage from The German Ideology to scientific socialism is really just a ___ of the essence of the former into ___ ___.

Key Philo Parts

• Labor is objectification: the act by which human essence goes external and physical (and political and aesthetic and motivational and …)
• History is estrangement: like the Gnostic God, Geist (species-being) becomes alien to itself through its own productive acts. Very ironic.
• Money is inverted metaphysics: she reads the whole famous quote.
• Communism is recovered humanity: redistribution is only secondary, humans can make themselves like art objects. Intentional self-shaping.

Her discussion of “raw communism” is great. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx critiques der rohe Kommunismus (Thelma’s raw communism) as a half-formed, reactive, negative communism that only abolishes private property—without transforming the engine that reproduces the forces that shape, motivate, force, and wire human acting and even desire. So RC abolishes private property and thereby universalizes greed, leaving the “libidinal economy” of capitalism, the mycelia of the Pod People, still in charge. In doing so, she anticipates Fromm, Marcuse, Lacan, Žižek, Debord, Roderick, early Lyotard, Deleuze/Guattari, and all people who do “Theory” from the 80s to today.

Best of all, I found something so amazing. A new two-minute video that captures our sickness with unnerving precision. Which isn’t surprising, since it comes from the crème of the avant-garde culture industry—those Netflix auteurs spinning out variations on the same trauma loop across a thousand sexy-dark, algorithmically optimized worlds. These narrative chassis may be recycled, but sometimes the concrete content can be amazingly our-time expressive.

I will get this clip up within 24 hours—OR ELSE upload a video of myself doing 100 pushups, which is physically impossible. So, by disjunctive syllogism, this gem of a video—one that will take you out of your mind and put you back in the wrong way—will be up by the deadline.

Lern-O-Matik™ Answer Key
1: recoding or translation
2: autonomous-mechanical categories

METHOD

Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:

• Thelma Lavine: From Socrates to Sartre

Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:

• THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE

Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.

She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.

View all of our coming episodes here.