From Socrates to Sartre EP23 ⟩ “Marx III: Class War”

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 III — CLASS WAR

I was so overwhelmed by the quality of this presentation that I passed out from despair due to my inability to express its wonderfulness adequately. This trance-inducing performance has to be seen to be believed. All I can do is sketch the following dull outline.

I. Opening Image — Marx’s 1856 Red Cross Warning

Thelma is the master of the dramatic opening. But this one tops them all. In a London speech, she begins, Marx evoked the medieval German Vehmgericht that marked houses with a red cross in order to signal the owner’s impending doom. Marx warned that all the houses of Europe now bear such a mark. History, he said, is the judge, and the proletariat will be its executioner. Capitalism is logically, historically, and inexorably doomed and sentenced to destruction by the very class it exploits. Here is Marx’s version of the Sermon on the Mount—an uplifting and encouraging promise of reversal that calls the meek and poor in spirit to inherit the earth by inaugurating a new, human, rational, dignitarian order.

II. Historical Materialism — Core Doctrine of Mature Marxism

Marx’s “new materialism” departs from both ancient Greek and from 17/18-cent mechanistic materialism (Descartes, Hobbes, Newton). These older materialisms saw humans and consciousness as passive results of matter in motion. Marx, by contrast, saw human labor and consciousness as active, creative, causal-closure-breaking forces that transform nature, including human nature. We make the world that makes humans who act to make the world. Societies are organic-Hegelian totalities, but produced and guided by … our acts of production and guidance.

III. Economic Base — Three Components

Marx revealed what is common sense today: that the foundation of (any) society is its mode of production, made up of:

1. Conditions of production — climate, geography, raw materials, population.
2. Forces of production — skills, tools, technology, labor supply.
3. Relations of production — property relations and how production is organized and distributed.

IV. Division of Labor — From Efficiency to Enslavement

Marx took Adam Smith’s notion of specialized labor and agreed fully with what Smith said about it, as Chomsky himself points out in this great video. (Here’s the link, cued up to the shocking revelation for you.) Specialization confines workers to narrow roles, stunting human potential, breaking the link between labor and subsistence, reducing human relations to economic transactions, and alienating workers from one another. Most significantly, it entrenches the split between capital and labor.

V. Superstructure — Culture as Class Expression

The economic base shapes the cultural superstructure: law, politics, religion, philosophy, morality, and art. Marx’s maxim was that social existence determines consciousness. The ruling class dominates both material and mental means of production, and its ideas present a distorted picture of reality that serves its own interests.

VI. Ideology — Systematic Distortion

For Marx, an ideology is a class-conditioned worldview that promotes ruling-class interests while presenting itself as universal truth. Examples include the French bourgeoisie’s rhetoric of freedom and equality, which facilitated their own rise, and Christianity’s emphasis on obedience, which supported secular authority. Marx’s concept of ideology generated a lasting suspicion: every theory, philosophy, or cultural product may conceal a class interest.

VII. Historical Change — The Dialectic Materialized

Marx recast Hegel’s dialectic in material terms. History advances through conflict between the forces of production and the relations of production. In early stages, these relations aid productive growth; later, they become fetters that protect the ruling class. The resulting rupture drives revolutionary transformation.

VIII. Revolution — Mechanism and Stages

When relations of production block the growth of productive forces, the producing class suffers. Acting collectively, it overthrows the ruling class, seizes political power, and establishes a new mode of production with its own cultural superstructure. Feudalism’s fall to the bourgeoisie is the clearest historical case. Capitalism now faces the same internal contradiction and thus produces its own gravediggers.

IX. Historical Sequence — Modes of Production

Marx outlined the following stages:

1. Primitive communism (no division of labor, communal ownership).
2. Asiatic mode (despotism, large irrigation, no private land).
3. Ancient mode (slavery alongside communal property).
4. Feudal mode (serfdom, land-based economy).
5. Capitalist mode (industrial proletariat).

X. Prediction — The Proletarian Future

Here Marx breaks with Hegel by claiming to predict the next historical stage. The proletariat will overthrow capitalism, establish a dictatorship of the proletariat as an interim stage, and ultimately create a classless communist society — no private property, no division of labor, no exploitation, no alienation, no ideology. The arc runs from primitive communism, through the long era of exploitation, to an advanced industrial communism. The Communist Manifesto ends with the call that still echoes wherever reason and literacy prevail: Workers of the world unite!

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

Here are the summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs of the episodes we cover. Click on the green Current Episode: Class War link for this week’s goodies:

• 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.

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