Video of a talk I gave at the Communist University 2020, organised by the CPGB (UK). 1 hour of talk, followed by over an hour of discussion. (Accompanying article is here).
The question I address is whether Marx’s “real God” is metaphor or science.
βThe essence of money is … the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man’s operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator β instead of man himself being the mediator for man β man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself.β
K. Marx, Comments on James Mill, 1844.
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