 Okay. Once again, good day. Right away, I forgot to do something. I want to introduce the recorder, Dan, who's doing this online recording, and there he is. Dan took this course as an undergraduate, so as I present this, I'm carefully watching his face to get his reactions and so that I can adjust as I go along. I put too much pressure on you. I appreciate it. But if you want to ask me the occasional question. And he said if I want to ask him an occasional question, I can do that. I won't put any more pressure on him than already exists. If I answer it incorrectly, I'm going to cut it out though. Okay. Let me begin with a biography of Mark's. You should know something about who the man was. And I also have another motivation for presenting this little story about Mark's. I'm going to also introduce the dialectic as I tell you the story of Mark's. So I'm going to tell you very briefly, just take me a few moments, this story of Mark's, the man, and the way he thinks this Marksian theory. But in so doing once again, I'm going to also present to you the methodology of Mark's that is this concept of over-determination. So there's two purposes here. First, Mark's was born in Germany in 1818, beginning of the 19th century, and he dies at the end of the 19th century, 1883. So the first thing we can say about this is that Mark's, in the way he thought about society, the development of his Marksian theory, was a complex product of the economic changes that were occurring in Germany and France and in England and so forth over these decades. Just like everybody else, we are all, including Mark's, a complex product, a complex effect of the economic times. And just to explore that for a moment, during this period of time in Germany, dramatic changes were occurring, which was the death of an old society, feudalism, and the birth of a new society, capitalism, that's always interesting, birth and death. So Mark's becomes intrigued with the following question. How does capitalism, that's the birth of capitalism, arise in society? And he's going to argue that the birth of capitalism arises in and out of the death of feudalism, and it's called within the Marksian tradition the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and it forms the end of volume one that I asked you to read in this course. So there you can read Mark's ideas about how one society moves to another. Be that in mind, because Mark's, and especially the Marksists after him, are going to also be concerned with a different kind of transition, which is the movement, the transition from capitalism to socialism and communism. So there is a lot at stake in this kind of theoretical analysis that Mark's is going to present in terms of the movement of one kind of society to another. So one of the things that Mark's then does, he begins to theorize the movement of one society from another because that was occurring during his day and people were asking, what's the birth of this capitalism, how did it come about, and so forth. Next, there's no question as you all know that this is a period of time in Europe in which there's enormous industrialization occurring as part of this growth and development of capitalism, the industrial revolution roughly, in England from 1750 to 1850 and then another one from 1850 to World War I, the revolution in textiles and consumer goods in the first 100 years and then the revolution in all kinds of capital goods and heavy industry in the second from 1850 roughly to World War I. That's occurring in Germany and Western Europe as well. It's a little bit later than what occurred in England, but nonetheless tremendous industrialization. So Mark's answers or tries to come up with an answer to the questions of the day, producing all this industrialization, what is the nature of it? Third, Mark's title of his book is called Capital. That's an interesting question. People want to know in this development of capitalism and this tremendous growth of industry, what is capital? So Mark's begins to theorize, provide an answer to the economic questions of the day, not only transition from feudalism to capitalism, not only what's causing industrialization, but what is capital and of course you can see the next question of what is a capitalist? So Mark's is going to provide nuances to this question as well as things like the following. What produces the value of something? How do we explain price of both inputs and outputs? So Mark's is going to provide in Volume 1 of Capital, again that which we're reading here, an explanation for the price of something. And let me pick up since it connects to what we're already done and we may as well make use of it. What Mark's is going to try and show is that the price of something, I left it on the blackboard, the price of something in the market is connected to class exploitation. There's going to be a very famous and important part of his theory. What he's going to show is again that the price of an apple, the price of a car in the market contains within it class exploitation. That's consistent with what we did before. Finally, since it's appropriate today, Mark's is going to provide a theorization of the ups and downs of capitalism. The incessant business cycle that capitalism suffers from. So the booms followed by the busts followed by the booms. Mark's is going to provide, and we're going to do that in exquisite detail in this course, a theorization, an explanation of the business cycle. So to summarize. Mark's in his thinking is a complex product of the economic changes of the day. But that's not all of it, right? That's only a small portion of it. Mark's in his thinking, or obviously like all of us, a complex product of a variety of other things. For example, Mark's is a product, he's complexly shaped by the influences of his mother and father. Mark's carried with him, if you remember correctly, a picture of his father next to his heart for the rest of his life and was buried with that picture. So, you know, did his father have an influence upon him? I mean, I just think of what I just told you. Just like your father and my father had an influence on each of us and our mothers and our grandmothers and grandfathers and brothers and sisters. So this personal impact that our families have upon us and the way we think. Also, his education. Mark studied at the University of Bonn for one year, then he went to the University of Berlin, a very famous university in Germany. He studied there. He studied there, by the way, at Berlin, and he made this transfer from Bonn to Berlin at the urging of his father. His father thought that Berlin was a more serious place for Mark's, so he went there at the urging of his father. And he studied there the curriculum of the day, you know, law and politics and so forth, philosophy. He got his PhD there in his dissertation for his PhD. He studied Greek philosophy. And one of the things that Mark's worked on in his dissertation and one of the things that Greeks were interested in, and we're going to come back to it in this course, is the notion of causation. There were two, if I may summarize this, there were two ideas of causation that many of the Greeks struggled with. One was a cause and effect idea in which A causes B causes C and so forth. The other was very different. The other was held by people who were skeptical that you could kind of order life into A causes B and causes C. They were called skeptics and they argued something quite different. They argued that every cause was an effect and every effect was a cause. People like Epicurus and Zeno, they were skeptical that you could order the world. They didn't think that the entities that were being ordered were independent of one another and hence you couldn't order them in such a way because they were not independent, such that A would cause B, B would cause C and so forth. In any case, Mark's notion of dialectics was influenced by his study of these Greek philosophers. So did his studies affect him the way he thought? And so of course they did, just like you and me. Mark's marries a young woman, Jenny, Von Westphalen, if I remember correctly, their last name. Did his marriage affect him? I mean that's a silly question, of course it did. Mark's had a friendship with a number of people, the most important with whom was Engels. So as you all know, Mark's in Engels. Engels had a profound influence on Mark's as Mark's did on Engels. Mark Engels was a man of fairly wealthy means who owned some factories in England and he helped to support Mark's, much of Mark's life besides their intellectual relationship with the other and their political relationship with one another. They were comrades, but Engels also wrote checks. They helped support Mark's. Mark's suffered from poverty over much of his life and the question did poverty affect him? Of course it did. So his friendship with Engels, his marriage, the economic events of the day, his studies, those all helped to shape the way he thought. Mark's was also a student of French socialist writings. He was both enamored with and criticized the French socialists. The French socialists were unhappy with the capitalism of the day. So Mark's was attracted to these individuals who were unhappy with the capitalism of the day as it was growing up, especially in France. But Mark's differed from them as well and provided a criticism of them. Once again to pick up what we did before. And the reason is because the French socialists, according to Mark's and according to Engels, did not have a class criticism of society. They criticized society, the poverty of the day and so forth. The business cycle, but they did not connect their criticism to surplus value. And so that Mark's is going to provide a critique of them for that reason. He also studies British political economy that was growing in the day. He studies Adam Smith. He studies David Ricardo and still others. So he begins to study economics, not just Greek philosophy, not just the French socialist, not just history, but also economics. And in part he's going to come up with an economic theory that is different from Smith and Ricardo, but he's always very respectful of those mighty thinkers. It just goes on and on. Let me just give you one more. Mark's was a political refugee. That is, even as a young man, he became noted to the authorities as a person who was a problem, a problem in Germany, a problem in France, a problem in Belgium. And so he was moving from one society to one country from another as he came under increasing pressure of the police, the political authorities of the day because his ideas were troublesome, as I told you. They produced an element of fear amongst the people. Don't forget that Mark's and Engels were the two individuals who produced something in the 1840s called a communist manifesto. They were asked by a league of workers in France to produce a manifesto for them. And Mark's and Engels responded by saying, okay, here is a blueprint for you workers. And that blueprint for the workers was very, very important in the revolt of the workers across Eastern and Western Europe in the 1840s. So Mark's was a problem. That aspect of his being a problem and his being a political refugee ends up in England affected him, just like anyone being a political refugee has his or her ideas and his or her experiences colored in part by that experience. Let me summarize this then, okay, because there's a theory here. So what I'm going to do now, I told you a little bit about the story of Mark's, but I want to now use it to kind of get across, if I can, this notion of the dialectic or over-determination.