Week 6.2: Bertolt Brecht & 3 Penny Opera

Although he would later try to pass himself off as having peasant origins, Bertolt Brecht was born to a conventionally middle class family in Bavaria in 1898. When World War I broke out, Brecht avoided service until he was eventually drafted. He served as a medical orderly far from the front. In the late 1910s, Brecht began getting involved in the theater, first writing drama reviews, and then directing and writing his first play Baal. He would continue to produce plays in Germany until the Nazis took power when he became an expatriate, eventually settling in the United States and doing some work for Hollywood. During the Cold War, Brecht left the United States and eventually settled in East Berlin. While he continued to write plays, they did not achieve the same notoriety of his earlier work. He died in 1956 of a heart attack.

Brecht was committed to Marxism for most of his adult life and his hope was for his plays to serve Marxist purposes. As such, he wanted his plays to have an instructive quality that would cut through bourgeois ideology. Brecht hopped to accomplish this by what he called "verfremdungseffekt" or "alienation effect." Unlike naturalist theater which tries to sustain the illusion of realism, Brecht attempted to point out to his audience that they were in fact watching a play. The audience is intended to observe themselves watching a play and export this critical skill to the world outside the theater.

Viewing & Reading:
Required: 3 Penny Opera, dir. G. W. Pabst
Screening will be September 30, 5:30 PM. The film is on reserve at the library.
Recommended: Brecht essays on theater (PDF) Reading is in our class packet


Study Question
1. What does the film have to say about society? What was the implicit argument of the film?

2. Bring in three discussion questions about 3 Penny Opera. These questions will be answered by your fellow students in class.

3. Summarize Brecht's main points in the reading for next session. What is the epic theater? What does Brecht want it to do? How might these ideas reflect what Pabst does with his adaptation of Brecht's Three Penny Opera? (3 pts e/c)

Week 4.2: Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Pyramid of the Capitalist System, issued by issued by Nedeljkovich, Brashich and Kuharich (1911)

issued by Nedeljkovich, Brashick and Kuharich,

Reading:
The Communist Manifesto, 17-26, 38-39
Recommended: The Communist Manifesto, 27-37

issued by Nedeljkovich, Brashick and Kuharich,

Study Questions:
1. How do Marx and Engels answer the following objections: 

• That they want to do away with private property
• That they want to do away with the family
• That they want to do away with the nation

2. Begin prepping for your debate on The Communist Manifesto. Be prepared to present your arguments on the points that your group assigned you to both your group and the class.  This will also involve some degree of preliminary research.

Week 4.1: Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Andy Warhol, Four Dollar Signs (1982)

Karl Marx (1818–1883) is  known  as a philosopher and a revolutionary communist, whose works inspired the foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century. It is hard to think of many who have had as much influence in the creation of the modern world. Trained as a philosopher, Marx turned away from philosophy in his mid-twenties, towards economics and politics. However, in addition to his overtly philosophical early work, his later writings have many points of contact with contemporary philosophical debates, especially in the philosophy of history and the social sciences, and in moral and political philosophy. Historical materialism — Marx's theory of history — is centered around the idea that forms of society rise and fall as they further and then impede the development of human productive power. Marx sees the historical process as proceeding through a necessary series of modes of production, characterized by class struggle, culminating in communism. Marx's economic analysis of capitalism is based on his version of the labour theory of value, and includes the analysis of capitalist profit as the extraction of surplus value from the exploited proletariat. The analysis of history and economics come together in Marx's prediction of the inevitable economic breakdown of capitalism, to be replaced by communism. However Marx refused to speculate in detail about the nature of communism, arguing that it would arise through historical processes, and was not the realisation of a pre-determined moral ideal. (Modified from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Before you begin the reading for our next class session, it will helpful to have a fuller understanding of some of Marx and Engels's terms as these might be unfamiliar. Read the following material below before doing the reading for our next session. I would also suggest taking a note card and writing down these definitions and using this note card as a book mark as you read.

• The Communist Manifesto (1848) is first and foremost a critique of capitalism. In Marxist analysis, capitalism is a socioeconomic system based on private ownership of the means of production and the exploitation of the labor force. 
• As its name implies, capitalism is dependent on capital. In Marxist terms, capital is not money or wealth, per se. Rather, capital is generated when one buys an object in order to sell it at a higher price. The profit earned through this exchange is capital and will be reinvested in order to yield more capital. 
• Such transactions rely on objects having exchange value in addition to use value. The difference between these things is rather quite simple. The use value of a hammer, for instance, is that it is good for hitting nails. It's use is dependent on its physical values. An object only gains exchange value when it is sold on the market. Thus, a hammer has an exchange value of $15.00. In capitalist economies, exchange value predominates because almost  everything can be exchanged for money. Exchange value obscures the real value of any object, namely the amount of labor it took to produce an object. It is labor-value that ultimately determines the price of objects. 
• Those with capital constitute the dominant class. For Marx and Engels, this class is the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie are the middle class, but we need to qualify this term a bit since we use it differently today than Marx and Engels did in 1848. By middle class, Marx meant those who were neither members of the aristocracy, the peasantry, or industrial laborers. He also did not mean what we mean by the term today, those who need to work to pay their bills, but are financially comfortable and most likely live in the suburbs. Rather, Marx and Engels were referring to those who owned the means of production. By means of production, Marx and Engels meant "the tools and raw materials to produce a product." This might take the form of farm land or a factory. Essentially, the bourgeoisie are the owning class in society. 
• The bourgeoisie are thus separated and opposed to the proletariat. The proletariat consists of the "lower" or working class who must sell their labor for wages in order to survive. Since the proletariat does not own the means of production, and since they do not work directly for themselves, they are alienated from their labor. According to Marx and Engels, it is this group, the clear majority of people, who will lead a communist revolution and overthrow the bourgeoisie.

Reading:
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 3-16

Study Questions: 
1. According to Marx and Engels, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (4). What do they mean by this?  According to Marx and Engels what two forces were then engaged in class struggle? What do you think of this assertion?

2. In a famous passage, Marx and Engels write, "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with kind" (6). What do they mean by this? Why do you think that this important to Marx and Engels?

3. Bring in a passage that you find interesting either because it made you think or because you didn't fully understand it. Fully transcribe the passage and write about what you think about the passage. You will be sharing this with your peers.

Week 3.1: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Grant Wood, American Gothic (1930)

Reading:
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 28-36, 69-79, 120
View: Grant Wood, American Gothic (website)

Study Questions:
1. According to Weber, why are Calvinists especially scared of going to hell? How does this drive them to work more?

2. Please bring in any questions about the text or any passages you had difficulty with so that we can address them in class. Explain why you had difficulty. Chances are that if you had difficulty with them someone else did as well.

Week 2.2: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Joseph Duplessis, Benjamin Franklin (1778)

Arguably the foremost social theorist of the twentieth century, Max Weber (1864-1920) is known as a principal architect of modern social science along with Karl Marx and Emil Durkheim. Weber's wide-ranging contributions gave critical impetus to the birth of new academic disciplines such as sociology and public administration as well as to the significant reorientation in law, economics, political science, and religious studies. His methodological writings were instrumental in establishing the self-identity of modern social science as a distinct field of inquiry; he is still claimed as the source of inspiration by empirical positivists and their hermeneutic detractors alike. More substantively, Weber's two most celebrated contributions were the “rationalization thesis,” a grand meta-historical analysis of the dominance of the west in modern times, and the “Protestant Ethic thesis,” a non-Marxist genealogy of modern capitalism. Together, these two theses helped launch his reputation as one of the founding theorists of modernity. In addition, his avid interest and participation in politics led to a unique strand of political realism comparable to that of Machiavelli and Hobbes. As such, Max Weber's influence was far-reaching across the vast array of disciplinary, methodological, ideological and philosophical reflections that are still our own and increasingly more so. (From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) 

Read:
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 120 (first section), 1-20 (middle of the page), 23-28

Watch: 

Study Questions:

1. Weber structures his argument inductively, meaning that rather than starting with a thesis he works from examples and from that generates a conclusion. While this is a perfectly logical way of structuring an essay, if you are used to a more deductive form of argumentation it might seem unwelcoming. In order to help your comprehension of the piece, I would like you to summarize pages one through seven. What is the problem that Weber poses? Where does he seek to find the solution?

2. How does Benjamin Franklin represent the "spirit of capitalism"? How does this relate to the concept of a "calling"?