My group presentation was for March 17th, the Marxist group. I contributed greatly to the group. First of all, I was integral in planning to meet at a particular time, as well as with Andrew, and we spent a lot of time e-mailing back and forth over our various ideas that we wanted to portray through our presentation. It was Andrew's idea to simulate a real-life market, but I added to and supplemented his ideas with my own and strived to make the presentation representative of capitalism as a whole. During the meeting time with the group members I was very vocal, as I often am during class, with my ideas for what we should do. I had numerous ideas, such as passing out quotes from Karl Marx to members of the groups and having them interpret them to earn extra marx-cash. I then thought that we should pass out quotes to every individual member of the class, and if they are running low on resources they would then have the option of explaining their quote aloud to the class in order to earn more resources from our group, the so-called "Government". It was also my idea that one group should be the Bourgeoise group and that the rest of the groups should be wage-laborers, or Proletariats. As far as the division of labor within our group (no pun intended), I took it upon myself to get the fake money that we would distribute amongst the groups, and also to make cookies so I could plan my own small presentation of what a commodity is by showing the intrinsic value of a commodity (ie the cookie). This way the class could get cookies and at the same time learn about how the concept of Value is established according to Karl Marx. Overall, our presentation was planned in order to let the class members demonstrate their own knowledge of Capitalism and make it fun and interactive, rather than lecturing them about the principles behind the concepts.
Will Capitalism still live on into the future? Is it possible that in thousands of years, human beings living on galaxy satellites will still be reliant upon a base of wage labor, and the ever-flowing trade of commodities? Karl Marx once wrote that "the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of product and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society"(5). Constant revolution is also another way of saying constant destruction -- the destruction of the social hierarchies that come before, and the destruction of the ruling class as a new revolution creates a new ruling class, and so on. However, once we've revolutionized so far, and become so advance there must be a point at which we top out. There must be a place where the machines are so state-of-the-art that they cannot be made more efficient, when production and input are equal. Once human beings have achieved this maximum amount of production we will still need to find new ways to encourage the market to grow, and for jobs and labor to be valuable. A society in which human beings are totally reliant upon machinery and technology, and all work is produced through this fashion would be a society that lacked the labor-power of human beings. There would be no one to buy things, and thus the system would fail, since "the condition for capital is wage labor". Here what Zorg proposes is in order to stimulate capitalism, and life, men must "become an appendage of the machine", by only being employed as laborers and engineers to create new machines. The destructive force that Zorg would promote would destroy all things created by man, and therefore require the machines to clean up the mess. The new machines would need to be created by someone, and this would supply human beings with jobs. This is quite an extreme measure in order to keep the market growing and capitalism stimulated. But this is nothing new, in fact Karl Marx himself wrote that "in these crises[of overproduction] a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed...society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce". To see it written so plainly by Karl Marx is to shed a new light on the character of Zorg. Yes, he is advocating for destruction and death, but capitalism is founded on the constant renewal of itself -- and there can be no renewal without destruction. The fact that this argument takes place with a priest is very insightful. Is there a meaning behind this? The priest represents God, or mans communion with God directly. He is a symbol of religiosity -- and here he is, vehemently opposed to the ideas that Zorg is voicing about capitalism. But what does he do? Just as Zorg, who in all his awfulness represents the ugly side of Capitalism is about the choke, and perhaps snuff out the hideousness of Capitalism with him, the priest gives him a hearty slap on the back. The slap on the back is like the slap of a new born infant to start his breathing, and here the priest is literally resuscitating Zorg and all he stands for, thus insuring the continuance of Capitalism and with it, destruction.
Marx, Karl. “The Manifesto of the Communist Party.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. Chapter 5.
Freud was the first to suggest that the human brain contained something he called the "unconscious" and that it was "a repository of repressed desires, feelings, memories, and instinctual drives, many of which...have to do with sexuality and violence"(389). This plethora of repressed feelings could be channeled through dreams and could manifest themselves in people by showing signs of neurosis. The unconscious was something we all created internally through our first repressed act, which would have been, according to Freud's Oedipus Complex, the realization that our sexual desire for one parent was impossible, and not an acceptable feeling. That first repression, as it was referred to, would be the metaphorical sewing pattern for a huge bag of emotion that we would all end up carrying around with ourselves, whether or not we realized it. CoCoRosie's song "Werewolf" deals heavily with a girl who was abandoned by her father at a young age, and spends her adult life helplessly searching for him, or some aspect of him to own. The song begins with the line "In a dream I was a werewolf", automatically drawing up the possibility for Freudian analysis of an unresolved Freudian complex. The band interweaves a narrative of sexuality, abandonment, and dream-like qualities to the scene they paint. Lines like "broken sun down, fatherless show down, gun hip, swollen lip, bottle sip, yeah I suck dick" are shocking to hear. It draws on Freud's idea of the Oedipus complex, and one's early suppressed desire to be sexually involved with the parent of the opposite sex. It's uncommon, and seems wrong, or offends our sense of morality, to hear a song that mentions someone's father and oral sex in the same line. But obviously the subject, because her father left, was never able to resolve the issues of the Oedipus complex and has unresolved sexual feelings towards the father figure that abandoned her. She speaks about her "schizophrenic father" and how she is "searching for {her] father's power". Throughout the song she makes reference to the fact that her childhood was affected by the absence of a father. Lines like "evil doer doing evil from a baby carriage" and that he was "the bastard that broke up the marriage". All of this is represented through the telling of a dream that the subject is having, a dream that has now been interpreted as a repression of the pain that her father inflicted upon her when he left. In the last full stanza, the speaker seems to be addressing a lover and her father at the same time. She sings that "I don't mean to close the door but for the record my heart is sore/you blew through me like bullet holes/ left stains on my sheets and stains on my soul" and then later refers to a stranger she sees in her dream as having "your hands and my fathers face". This type of sexual relationship, where a person has specifically chosen someone because of their similarities or resemblance to a parent can be a manifestation of an Oedipal complex that was never resolved at all. And how could it have been, when she was left without a father? Now, as an adult, she is choosing lovers who remind her of her father and who "blow through her", or leave her, just as her father did to her mother. Constantly throughout the song there are references to the dreams that the subject is having. This song could almost be dissected and put into a dialogue of a patient speaking to a therapist. It is full of Freudian symbolism -- the unresolved sexual feelings towards a father, the over-flood of emotions (sexual and violent) through the manifestation of bizarre dreams.
Work Cited Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
