 Once again, here's Professor Resnick, and good day to you, whatever time of day it is. I want to pick up on that last idea. I want to ask the question is how this class exploitation, again, the assumption, assuming Marx is correct, how this class exploitation can continue, how can it occur and continue in capitalism given that it is this kind of ripping off of wealth of those who produce it without getting anything in return. Marx provides a part answer, there are many parts to this answer, which is that people are not aware, they're not conscious of class exploitation, and hence they don't move to eliminate it from their lives, so it's not aware that it's going on. They lack what is called in the Marxian tradition class consciousness, an awareness that that economic part of life is occurring and hence they don't move to get rid of something which they're not aware of. So one of the purposes of Marxism, and indeed this course, this online course, is to make people aware of something which is going on in their lives which they're not aware of, and that's what any theory does if you think about it. What a theory does is try and make us conscious of something which is occurring in our life which are not aware of, whether it be a physical object contains particles in it, so modern physics would make us try to be aware that all of nature is comprised of particles, whether it be a particular kind of disease that we're not aware of in our body, so your N.D. tries to make you aware that there's something going on in your body that you're not aware of so you can take your medication to deal with it, such as the case with Marxism. It's a particular kind of explanation or theory which is trying to make us conscious of something which is occurring in our lives so that we can get rid of it, so that we have hope that we can get rid of, since there's no inevitability that we will deal with the disease that the N.D. points out to us. There's always a hope of the theoretician that we will take action. So there's two parts then to this Marxian theory and I think that what Marx was trying to develop. Number one, Marxian theory is aimed at making us aware of class exploitation with a hope that we will do something about it, specifically eliminate it from our lives, just like we would eliminate any kind of problem that once we became aware of it. And the elimination of class from our life is so important to Marx and to the Marxists thereafter that they give a special name to the society in which there is no longer class exploitation, no longer this kind of social theft that we talked about last time. The label that's given to that kind of society, once again a society without class exploitation is called communism. So communism is not a society in which everybody has the same income or everybody wears the same shirt, everybody loves one another. I mean it's possible but that's not what Marx had in mind. Communism is a society without class exploitation so that may be a new kind of definition that you have in terms of what you have heard here before about communism. In terms of what we did last time, which we still have on the blackboard here, that means that the workers who produce this $12 trillion, $6 trillion of which is surplus, they get $6 trillion of wages, the workers who produce this surplus value would be the same collectivity that receives it. So communism is a society in which, according to Marx, that this surplus produced by workers above and beyond their wages would also be received by workers. So that's kind of a rigorous definition of what it would be communism in terms of what we have done. All right, next step, okay, that's the class part of life. If I may, I'm going to just erase this and introduce a still new idea here, which is going to be presented in your readings and you'll have quizzes on this, which is considered life, all of reality, all of the world, it's an infinity of things, let me write that in the blackboard, that's an eight on its side. There's lots of stuff going on in the world, okay. Marx identifies class as one of these. This production and this appropriation of surplus. But then there's everything else. If I can just have that kind of taxonomy, which I've divided the world, this is the world, into two parts, the class part and the non-class part, okay. And in the non-class part, there's everything, like what, well, obviously there's nature, there's the rest of economics, you know, markets, production and so forth, there's politics, and of course there's culture that kind of exhausts the set in terms of how I've divided non-class. There's the biological and chemical properties of the world. There's the market and there's production and technology. There's the making of laws and the disseminating of rules and laws. There's the production and dissemination of meanings and all different kinds of meanings. So Marx then, having focused upon class, he's going to ask the next question, which is, how does class connect to non-class specifically? How does the existence of class exploitation connect to the environment, nature, to economics, to politics, to culture? What's the relationship? What's the logic between the two? And what he's going to argue is that the existence of class is caused by non-class and the existence of non-class is caused by class. What he's going to argue here is that there is a connection between the two in which each is the cause of the other. And there is a fancy name given to that connection. It's called dialectics. So one of the things we have to examine in this course is this dialectical connection, this dialectical logic between class and non-class, specifically that they each cause the other. And that's part of what we're going to do and we're going to use a different word since dialectics is loaded with different meanings. I want to use a more modern word. The word over-determination in this course to describe this kind of causal connection between class and non-class, once again, that each is a cause of the other. Okay, so you've got to summarize. We have two things that are going to be discussed in this course. One is that what is class? We'll come back to it again and again, and it's a central idea in capital. Secondly, what's the connection between class and everything else? What causes class exploitation? That's how this causes this. How does the market help to cause class exploitation? How does politics, Marx is very provocative, he's going to give an argument that freedom and democracy are partial causes of class exploitation. And of course, as I said before, class exploitation shapes the market and shapes our notions of freedom and democracy. There's a third part of this course, which is after we've done all this, after we've focused on class, non-class, and how they connected to one another, that is after we've focused on the Marxian theory of society. That's class and non-class causing one another. Then how do we know that which we've studied is true? That's an interesting question. You go through this Marxian theory, you study it, you master it, and then you might wanna ask yourself, or other people are gonna ask you, how do you know what's the validity of what you have just studied? This particular class, dialectically constructed class idea of society. How do you know what's valid? And that third part of this course has got to do with a Greek term called epistemology, okay? And epistemology is a theory, the logic of theory, the logic of learning. So there we're gonna discuss how we go about assessing the validity of Marxian theory, and indeed the validity of any particular kind of theory. And as we'll see, Marx, we're gonna do in this course. And I'm gonna show you how there are three kinds of epistemologies here. And Marx affirms one of them. The three epistemologies will be two traditional ones. One of empiricism, the other of rationalism. And the third that Marx comes up with called dialectical materialism. And so what we wanna do in this part of the course is compare and contrast these different kinds of epistemologies. And our most important question after we do that, why does it all matter? So let me stop there with this second presentation. And then soon I will be back with the third.