02 Tuesday Feb 22

Courtney Turner's Notes for February 22
We started off class today with Quiz #5 on Marxism. After the quiz, we took a look at the PowerPoint on Karl Marx. Marx (1818-1883) wrote the Communist Manifesto among other works. Some of his chief concepts include the ideas of base and superstructure, capital and wage labor, use-value and exchange-value, commodity and commodity fetish, and relation and production. He derived his ideas from feudalism and industrial capitalism. For example, his idea that the peasant hands a portion of his labor over to the capitalist and then keeps the rest of his labor for himself came from feudalism. Some of his key ideas were the following: wage is a commodity, labor-power alienates laborer form the product he produces, and the capitalist owns the labor and the products. To describe the ideas of use- and exchange-value, we used a table as an example. The use-value of a table is all the resources that went into making that table and the exchange-value is that certain table’s relation to other tables. We also looked at commodities and commodity fetishes. A commodity is everything that has use-value and a commodity fetish is the things we buy for their external value, like an iPod or iPhone. Some good examples of working in a commodity fetish environment that were brought up in class include working at a jewelry store, any retail store, or a gourmet shop. An example of a pre-capitalist society would be as follows: a weaver has three apprentices (who will eventually become weavers themselves) and looms which make the cloth which gets sold in the market. The looms are the means of production, the cloth is the commodity, and the relationship between the weaver and the apprentices are the relations of production. This is an example of a CMC or commodity-money-commodity market, where the money is the medium of exchange. In a capitalist society, the weaver would become the capitalist, the apprentices would become the wage-laborer, and a factory would produce the cloth that gets sold in the market. The factory in this case represents the shift in the means of production (from the looms to the factory) and this ultimately leads to a shift in the relations of production (from apprentices to wage-laborers). This is an MCM or money-commodity-money market where the commodity is the medium of exchange. We also talked about Gramsci and Althusser and their key ideas. Gramsci’s key ideas are rule, hegemony, and discourse. Althusser’s key ideas are ideology, repressive structures, and ideological state apparatuses. Althusserian Marxism deals with interpellation which is the feeling that we are freely choosing what is actually being imposed on us and overdeterminism which is the idea that multiple causes produce one effect. When applying Althusserian Marxism to the classroom we discovered that there is an enforcement of certain ideologies. There is an authoritative ideology where students assume that the teacher and/or text book author is accurate, an ideology that says that education is good and needed for success, an ideology that enforces good grades and following the syllabus, and there is an ideology on how a classroom should be set up. We also looked at the ideologies in the 1984 Apple commercial. They included the ideology that uniformity is bad while promoting ideologies that included individuality and a new view. The ideology that we derived from the Johnson Daisy commercial was that if you don’t vote for Johnson, your child will die. If you apply ideology to literature you find that novels contain ideologies about the middle class and sonnets contain ideologies about order. Finally, we discussed ideologies from Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.” We found ideologies that made manual labor seem ideal, promoted the working class hero, and romanticized the wage-laborer. There was also an ideology that made it seem that people were happiest when they were working and one that idealized America.

Katrina Hobbs' Notes for February 22
Tuesday’s classes revolved around Karl Marx’s idea of Capitalist and Pre-Capitalist Societies and Louis Althusser’s idea of Ideology. Our class found an example of the difference between the two types of societies. We also discovered ideologies within current day events and our own composed example. Our class created an example to describe the differences of Capitalist and Pre-Capitalist Society. Imagine you are a weaver with three apprentices. You and your staff work together on looms to make cloth for the market. Marx would consider the means of production to be the looms; the commodity is the cloth, and the relation of production to be the Weaver with his/her three apprentices. At this point in time the Pre-Capitalist society for the Weaver is a CMC, Commodities Market Commodities. Once this Weaver transforms into a Capitalist Society the equation becomes a MCM, Market Commodity Market, where the end goal is not to create more commodities but instead more capital. In replace of looms, a factory would be built to labor 50-100 workers. This setting creates a large shift in Relation of Production and Means of Production. In relation to Walt Whitman’s poem “I hear America singing” Marx also plays a role in its deconstruction. The class determined Whitman was Romanticizing wage labor and creating a false consciousness by removing the factors of money and labor from these physical labor jobs providing the commodity. Whitman continues to idealize by displaying the enjoyment from everyone doing his or her job. The class went on to describe their own personal wage labor jobs, and other jobs that could relate to Ideologies. We found a great example was the retail market. Many people go out and buy a specific brand when the same product can be found elsewhere. It is thought that these high priced brands, such as Hollister and Abercrombie, are sought after more because they are believed to have better quality. Regardless of some beliefs the same amount of work and effort goes into each product. Society acts on these ideas, when we purchase products, and even go to college, we are constantly engaging in ideological practices and we don’t even realize it. From a young age we are taught education is the way to succeed in life. The idea of what you do in the classroom is suppose to assist you in obtaining a job, the exchange value. There are also implicit beliefs of what a classroom should look like and how it should act. Students are found sitting at their desks listening to the teacher standing at the front of the classroom. These ideologies govern the classroom. Our class discussed that if someone where to get up and start dancing or yelling it would not not be accepted. Class on Tuesday took the ideas of Karl Marx and Louis Althusser and found many examples demonstrating their effectiveness. We left class that day with the notion that we are always in ideology that cannot be interrupted and sometimes we don’t even realize it.