Marx

Freud

Freud continued

Property=Capital=Profit=Surplus Value=Accumulated or Congealed Labor (vs Living Labor)

Marx wants to abolish the private (vs. state) ownership of the means of production.

Not applicable. But recent theorists, combining Marx and Freud, talk about the fetish of . . .

. . . capitalism/goods: the "erotics" of accumulation: i.e., hoarding.

Property

Thru dignified, creative labor, nature is transformed into useful items (same as Locke, although Locke does not emphasize labor as being self-fulfilling).

Nature

Vast time in the sense of long historical periods of class struggle.

You may forget your childhood past, but your issues, then, get relocated in your unconscious….

…You are, to some extent, held hostage to past selves.

Time

Our individuality/selfhood is alienated by our labor being exploited; or our selfhood (the rich interiority the Romantics sought) is fulfilled in labor.

Preoccupation (because of Freud and post-traumatic stress disorders of WWI vets) with interior nervousness/wounded selfhood….

….Happiness, increasingly, becomes defined not just as resulting from the gains of possessive selfhood (accumulation of goods), …

… but also as the ABSENCE of neurosis (see all the pop psychology books in any bookstore).

Self
Defined as

Marx believed the conflict b/w bourg. and prol. would conclude in revolution. He was right in the case of Russia. In the U.S., we think classes don’t exist—just different amounts of $$$.

Not applicable, although it is important to note that Freud’s theories are in part based on observations ONLY of upper-middle class European families….

….For Marx, conflict is between classes; for Freud conflict is within.

Social
Classes

Victorian Age/Age of Industry (1830-1900)

Early 20^th Century Modernism/Anxiety

Modernism…

To…

Anti-Imperialism/Feminism/Liberation of Ethnic Identity

Historical
Era

Marx combines political liberty (that the Enlightenment progressive thinker sought) to the Romantic desire to expand a rich interiority (i.e. labor as self expression)

Freud, along with Darwin and Marx, sees individuals as determined by processes that extend beyond themselves (evolution’s biological determinism….

….Marx’s idea that you are largely determined by your class position and ideology; Nietzche's dismissal of "herd" think; Freud’s belief that you cannot escape the force of unconscious desire and compulsion).

Rejects traditional forms, experimental, fragmentary, draws upon unconscious processes, non-Realistic, aesthetically elite…

...and indifferent to "easy" interpretation. Modernism artists draw upon previous Romantic rejection of status quo and notion of alienated artist, but also tend to scorn self-indulgent emotionalism. Example: jumbled thoughts of Prufrock in Eliot poem=fragmentation; Prufrock scorned.

Modernism’s gulf b/w middle-class, complacent U.S. superpower culture and aesthetic radicalism (can you imagine your Mom liking a Picasso painting?) blurs with political radicalism, effort of previous marginalized groups to gain power and voice.