Marx on the BBC

German bastards

The BBC have covered Marx on multiple occasions recently
Masters of Money (Episode 3): Marx (2012, presented by Stephanie Flanders) 60 minutes
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01n6z4s
Owen Jones did a short piece on Karl Marx for the Daily Politics 1 November 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3XnrcKmNKc
There are also a variety of radio programmes on Marx

The School of Life have done this short video on Marx, which is pretty good but I'm not sure it portrays Marx's views entirely accurately https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSQgCy_iIcc

I think most of what was said was good though.

It's pretty bad. Not outright misrepresentation, but like High School History teacher level stuff. They completely miss the meaning of commodity Fetish, and give alienation an outsized focus.

I don't mind giving alienation an outsized focus, since in my understanding commodity fetishism is basically the capitalist form of alienation...There were some nice biographical touches early on, but it got more and more and more annoying when she tried to show how Marx's ideas were already out of date by the time he died, and when she warned us how Marx's words can themselves become ideology and give birth to Stalin and co, without the slightest attempt to analyse the historical conditions which gave rise to Stalinism. And yet despite these grand conclusions, I agree that it was pretty obvious throughout that she really hadn't read much Marx.

Sorry, I was referring to the School of Life one.

This 1983 documentary on Marx by Stuart Hall is probably the best one I've seen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8bdndigRA8

I know it's Mark Steel but I always enjoy this, especially the bit where the spy describes the state of Marx's house, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02ddGtKZuSU

I thought the BBC documentary above in Noah's post was very good, I'm not suprised the presenter disagrees with Marxism but I found it very interesting. The School of Life videos are always short and introductory.

Craftwork

This 1983 documentary on Marx by Stuart Hall is probably the best one I've seen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8bdndigRA8

This was good but I feel it didn't really represent Bolshevism as a distortion of Marxism, or atleast it tried to justify, it seemed to me, the Bolshevik dictatorship under Lenin and it's oppression. If not then perhaps not enough emphasis on that.

Pennoid

It's pretty bad. Not outright misrepresentation, but like High School History teacher level stuff. They completely miss the meaning of commodity Fetish, and give alienation an outsized focus.

So, how would you define commodity fetishism?

To be clear, I was referencing the youtube video.

"Marx believed that capitalism forces everyone to put economic interests at the heart of their lives so that they could no longer know deep honest relationships. He called this psychological tendency commodity fetishism."

Marx was not referring to a psychological tendency. What he was referring to might best be rendered as a 'social objectivity':

Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.

That is, something which appears natural or 'objective' (value) which is not natural, or objective, but socially determined (though objective from the perspective of the individual).

In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#27

"Marx believed that capitalism forces everyone to put economic interests at the heart of their lives so that they could no longer know deep honest relationships. He called this psychological tendency commodity fetishism."

Yeah, that is just terrible.

Surely you at least take "under commodity production relations between men take the form of relations between things" as your starting point when it comes to commodity fetishism.

deleted

I've got to be honest here. I don't think I have a clue as to what any of that means.

Noah Fence

potrokin

I've got to be honest here. I don't think I have a clue as to what any of that means.

I know what you mean. I only wanted to let people know Marx was on the telly and I end up with an inferiority complex! Perhaps the Freud episode on Thursday will help me with that? I won't be posting about it on here though - I don't want you all knowing how I used to long to wet my mums knickers in church.

Oh shit, too late...

Note: the word 'wet' in the above was supposed to be 'wear ' but I've left it in. Freudian typo.

Lol! Yet another great and hilarious post. Congratulations :)