Week 11.1: Invisible Hands (Resource Extraction)

Harold C. Harvey, St. Just Tin Miners (1935)

Reading:
Invisible Hands, 191-196
Either Albert Mwanaumo or Clive Porabou interview
Viewing: Harold C. Harvey, St. Just Tin Miners (website)

Study Questions:
1. Consider the shape of the oral histories that you've read so far. How do they all begin? How do they progress? Where have they tended to end? How might you use this in shaping your own oral history?


2. What strikes you as the most interesting/significant aspect of the oral history that you read today? What do you believe you should take away from the oral history? What do your peers need to know about the oral history you read?

Week 10.2: Invisible Hands (Agriculture)

Jules Breton, Calling in the Gleaners (1859)

Reading:
Invisible Hands, 107-112
Acuna-Arias (Akolkar Interview)
Cortez-Hardy (Opa Interview)
Hendriksz-MacCarillo (Cocon Interview)
Myers-Sage (Guzman)
Sedighi-Zapeda (Cuello)
Viewing: Jules Breton, Calling in the Gleaners (website)

Study Questions:
1. What connections can you make between the reading you did for today and the reading that you did for last session on "The Garment Industry"? What seems similar between the two narratives? What seems unique?

2. Read over the oral history very carefully. Select the largest section of the narrative and try to imagine what questions the interviewer asked to get the subject to talk? How do you imagine these questions were phrased? What questions would you ask? 

 Review:

Week 9: Wall-E

Today (10/20) we will be watching Andrew Stanton's Wall-E (2008). Film is a text and it demands to be interpreted critically just as any written work does. As we watch Wall-E, I want you to answer the following questions. You will read these questions before attending our screening and you will print these questions out and take notes as we watch the movie. You will turn in the study questions the day we conclude our discussion (10/22). Your answers will be typed.

1. What does this film have to say about work?

2. What does this film have to say about consumption and buying?

3. Wall-E is a collector. Explain how Wall-E produces property using John Locke's theories of labor?

4. Wall-E plays homage to the silent film comedies of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. What role does sound play in the film? Who gets to speak and who does not? What role does language play in the film? 

5. What is the film's point of view on the light-track on which everything moves on The Axiom? What does this say about freedom, creativity, etc.?

Week 7: Clifford Odets, Waiting for Lefty

Clifford Odets (1906-1963) was born to immigrant parents in Philadelphia and was raised in the Bronx. He began his career as a playwright in the Group Theatre, which promoted the American adaptation of method acting. During the 1930s, Odets was a member of the Communist Party and his plays show an intense concern for the working class. Like many others, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Red Scare. However, unlike his fellow playwright Arthur Miller who refused to testify,  Odets explained why he had been involved with the Communist Party and cooperated by answering the committee's questions. From the mid-1930s to his death, Odets worked for Hollywood. He worked on other people's screenplays and produced his own original works. In the 1950s he began to produce scripts for television anthologies. His last work appeared on The Richard Boone Show (1963-64).

Study Questions:

Day 1 (Episodes 0-2):
1. What is the effect of placing actors in the audience? Does this produce a distancing effect (like Brecht) or does it merely produce a more inclusive illusion?

2. What is the purpose of episodes one and two? How do they relate to the strike?

POLISHED WORKING DRAFT DUE!

Day 2 (Episodes 3-5):
1. How might episode three relate to episode one (Joe and Edna) and episode two (Lab Assistant Episode)?

2. Why is the medicine episode (episode five) in the play? How might it relate to episode two?

3. What is the effect of the play's ending?  

4. As a work of agitprop, Waiting for Lefty is meant to convey a political point of view and convince its audience. However, the play is only successful if it works as a piece of art. What do you find artistic about the play?

Week 6.1: Tillie Olsen, "I Stand Here Ironing"

Pieter de Hooch, A Woman Peeling Apples (1663)

Tillie Olsen (1912-2007) is internationally known and honored for her powerful, poetic writing depicting the lives of working-class people, women, and people of color, with respect, profound understanding, and deep love. Her books, Tell Me a Riddle, Yonnondio from the Thirties, Silences, and her essays and lectures, have been translated into twelve languages. Her works are considered by many to be central to working class literature, women’s studies, and the understanding of creative processes and the conditions, which permit imagination to flourish. (From Tillie Olsen.net)

Reading:
Tillie Olsen, "I Stand Here Ironing"

Viewing:  Pieter de Hooch, A Woman Peeling Apples (website)
Today's Reading Can Be Found in Our Course Packet

Study Questions:
1. Who won the debate from last class and why? What strengths did your own team possess? What weaknesses? What strengths did the other team possess? What weaknesses did they posses? 

2. What does "I Stand Here Ironing" have to say about the work involved in mothering? How does it compare to the work we read about in Studs Turkel's Working?

3. How do issues of social class influence Olsen's story?

Week 5.1: Studs Terkel, Working

J. Howard Miller, We Can Do It (1943)

Studs Terkel's multifaceted life produced an equally rich and varied legacy of research materials. After graduating from University of Chicago's Law School in 1934, Terkel pursued acting and appeared on stage, in radio, and in the movies. He was a playwright, a radio news commentator, a sportscaster, and a film narrator, and worked as a jazz columnist, a disc jockey, and a music festival host. He even served briefly as a civil service employee but is best known as a radio network personality and as a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of books. His award winning books are based on his extensive conversations with Americans from all walks of life that chronicle the profound and often tumultuous changes in our nation during the twentieth century. On "The Studs Terkel Program," which was heard on Chicago's fine arts radio station WFMT from 1952 to 1997, Terkel interviewed Chicagoans and national and international figures who helped shape the past century. The program included guests who were politicians, writers, activists, labor organizers, performing artists, and architects among others. Terkel was remarkable in the depth of his personal knowledge of the diverse subjects explored on his program and his ability to get others to talk about themselves and what they do best. (from Studs Terkel: Conversations with America)

Reading:
Studs Terkel, Working:People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (excerpts) PDF
Today's Reading is in Our Class Packet

Study Questions:
1. What similarities do you see between the first two paragraphs of Terkel's introduction and the theorists whom we have read in the first five weeks of the class?

2. Working is an oral history, meaning that rather than compose a narrative account of what happened, it records the thoughts and expressions of individual people on a particular topic. What are the advantages of this form of history over those forms of history you are probably more accustomed to reading in either high school or college history courses? What strengths does it have when compared to the philosophy that we've read?

3. All of the excerpts we are reading from Working come from Terkel's women correspondents. What commonalities can you find in these oral histories that might relate to the speakers' genders? 

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"?