Political Economy fails in many aspects through the eyes of Karl Marx. In the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” Marx makes a claim for the failure of political economy as he calls it, to promote the growth and progress of the very people that sustain this economic system; workers. In his explanation of the accepted values of this system, Marx states that workers are marginalized and alienated at various levels. One particular idea that provokes many thoughts in Marx’s essay is the relationship between labor (worker) and production and how he is alienated from it. In Marx’s words he believes workers are directly influenced to the amount of production they can make. He says “the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume, the more value he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes…”. This of course creates the notion that in reality, workers only have value for the employer, or that they just no longer belong to or form a part of the system. Marx calls this phenomenon”estrangement” and in my opinion it is one of the most powerful points in Marx’s argument. In other words workers are set aside or made to seem worthless in a system that is allegedly predicated on giving everyone an equal opportunity to progress and gain capital.

Another aspect of this alienation is the loss of identity that workers experience as a result of this liberal capitalist system. According the Marx when living in a political economic system workers see themselves as workers first, before they even see themselves are physical beings. He believes that workers get so consumed with the idea of competing and being better than others that they invest their physical and mental health to achieve a goal that has been forced upon him as labor becomes “not voluntary but, coerced”. In my opinion as a person living in a capitalist society, I believe that many things can be changed or improved. One of these things is the distribution of wealth, I believe that redistributing the wealth among the people in a more or less balanced manner could better society because most of the wealth is in the hands of the famous “1%”. Extreme poverty is not so abundant as it was during Marx’s days, however closing the gap between the 1% and the rest of the people could certainly help the economy and society better as a whole.

Antonio Gramsci begins questioning whether intellectuals can be a social class or does not have its own special category of intellectuals. According to Gramsci, everyone is an intellectual. There are two types of intellectuals, Traditional Intellectuals and Organic Intellectuals. The traditional Intellectuals autonomous independence while organic intellectuals are bound to class, and more practical.
The difference between the intellectuals and non-intellectuals, means to refer in reality only to the immediate social function of the professional category of the intellectuals, with the intention of  what direction the mind is set on based on a specific professional activity, whether towards intellectual elaboration or towards muscular-nervous effort. Meaning, as Gramsci puts it “although one can speak of intellectuals, one cannot speak of non-intellectuals, because non-intellectuals do not exist.” Gramsci states that “all men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals” meaning some may imitate the social function of the professional category of the intellectuals while others are primarily focus on the ‘muscular nervous effort.’ Nevertheless Gramsci also states that “there is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens”, whatever the profession may be Gramsci states that each person “carries on some form of [scholar] activity” such as a ‘philosopher’ who is consider to be “an artist, a man of taste, that contributes his moral conduct’ from the start to change the world. To be able to create a new stratum of intellectuals, it will take the effort to find the intellectual activity that is within everyone at a certain stage. The muscular-nervous effort by itself becomes the groundwork of a new idea for the world. Gramsci’s newspaper “Ordine Nuovo” states that he believes that worked is to develop a “new intellectualism and to develop its new concepts, which confirmed to the development of the real forms of life.” Gramsci states that there is “historically formed specialized category for the exercise of the intellectual function which is formed in connection with all of the social groups, especially the dominant social class. Classes that develop this dominancy struggles to understand the ‘ideologically’ of traditional intellectuals were quickly developed into organic intellectuals. In addition relating to Raymond Williams “Hegemony” from Marxism and Literature discusses the power of the ruling class to create consent for its position through the use of social and cultural forces.

I’ve just posted study questions for the entire unit with corrected page #s, FYI.  And I wanted to share with you an image of a “camera obscura” to make Marx’s metaphor a bit less, well, obscure:

[description from the Cabinet of Wonders blog]: The camera obscura works under the same principles as the pinhole camera: you make a small hole in the side of a box (either a real box or a room-sized box) and the light outside will get in through the hole and project itself onto a piece of paper or a wall, showing you a perfect image of the scene on the outside of the box. Because light travels in a straight line, and because the hole is small, the light on one side of the scene will have to come through at an opposing angle from the light on the other side of the scene.

As we discussed, the metaphor points at the way cultural representations preserve a kind of fidelity to social reality (i.e., the representation issues from the real thing) but in a distorted manner.  So the work of “ideological criticism” is to re-establish the relationship between reality and representation, a job that’s much more complex in most cases than the simple two-dimensional “flip” in a camera obscura would suggest.