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| Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers (oil on canvas, 1875) |
Thanks for another fantastic class! I really appreciate the care and consideration you put into responding to the Blood bot's latest tweet.
Given our familiarity with scenes of forced labour in Nazi concentration camps, it's entirely understandable why some of you initially mistook the German worker for a Jew.
On closer inspection, however, we can see that the cartoon depicts, not a labouring Jew, but rather the pervasive anti-semitic trope identifying Jews with wealth, money and capital.
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| Anti-Semitic Cartoon (Germany, circa. 1923) |
I hope my review of Jews in the Rhineland, alienated labour and capital as a social relation of production helped to contextualize Young Marx's complex and seemingly inconsistent arguments in On the Jewish Question.
We'll delve deeper into Marx's views on history, religion and bourgeois society in our third unit on drugs.
For this week's blogging assignment, I'd like you to tell me about the worst job you've ever had. Do Marx's accounts of alienated labour and/or capital as a social relation of production help to explain why the job was so terrible?
As always, if you prefer, please feel free to articulate one question which arose for you in relation to this week's readings, lecture and/or tutorial.
I look forward to reading your blogs!