NOTES TO A MARXIST PHENOMENOLOGY: THE BODY AND THE MACHINE IN ENGELS’ “THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24193/subbphil.2022.1.04Keywords:
handwork, machines, technology, Industrial Revolution, Friedrich Engels, factory work.Abstract
In his The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels outlines systematically the miseries of the workers in England in the context of industrialization. A key to his argument concerns the interface between the human body and the machine. In this article I argue that Engels provides a kind of a phenomenology of the body in his analyses of the relation of the worker to the new machines. The limited secondary literature on Marxism and phenomenology has not been attentive to the detailed attention that is given to the body of the worker in this book.
References
Angus, Ian H., Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021.
De Waelhens, Alphonse, “Phénoménologie husserlienne et Phénoménologie hégélienne,” in Revue Philosophique de Louvain, tome 52, no. 34, 1954, pp. 234-249.
Engels, Friedrich, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England. Nach eigner Anschauung und authentischen Quellen, Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1845.
—, The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. by David McLellan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Expósito, Noé and Agata Bąk, “Phenomenology and Marxism according to Landgrebe: On ‘The Problem of Teleology and Corporeality in Phenomenology and Marxism,’” in Analecta Hermeneutica, vol. 12, 2021, pp. 1-14.
Kirkland, Frank M., “Husserl and Hegel: A Historical and Religious Encounter,” in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 16, no. 1, 1985, pp. 70-87.
Landgrebe, Ludwig, “Das Problem der Teleologie und der Leiblichkeit in der Phänomenologie und im Marxismus,” in Phänomenologie und Marxismus, ed. by Bernhard Waldenfels, Jan M. Broekman, Ante Pažanin, vols. 1-4, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977-1979, vol. 1, pp. 71-104.
—, “The Problem of Teleology and Corporality in Phenomenology and Marxism,” in Phenomenology and Marxism, ed. by Bernhard Waldenfels, Jan M. Broekman, Ante Pažanin, trans. by J. Claude Evans, Jr., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984, pp. 53-81.
Lauer, Quentin, “Phenomenology: Hegel and Husserl,” in Beyond Epistemology: New Studies in the Philosophy of Hegel, ed. by Frederick G. Weiss, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975, pp. 174-196.
Marx, Karl, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, Erster Band, Buch I: Das Produktionsprocess des Kapitals, 2nd improved edition, Hamburg: Otto Meissner, 1872 [1867].
—, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, The Process of Capitalist Production, trans. by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, New York: International Publishers, 1967.
—, “Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844,” in Marx-Engels-Werke, vols. 1-46, ed. by the Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus, Berlin: Dietz, 1956-2018, vol. 40, pp. 465-588.
—, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. by Robert C. Tucker, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978, pp. 66-125.
—, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, in Marx-Engels-Werke, vols. 1-46, ed. by the Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus, Berlin: Dietz, 1956-2018, vol. 42, pp. 15-959.
—, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin, 1993.
—, “Thesen über Feuerbach,” in Marx-Engels-Werke, vols. 1-46, ed. by the Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus, Berlin: Dietz 1956-2018, vol. 3, pp. 5-7.
—, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. by Robert C. Tucker, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978, pp. 143-145.
McBride, William, “Marxism and Phenomenology,” in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 6, no. 1, 1974, pp. 13-22.
Nemeth, Thomas, “Capital and Phenomenology,” in Studies in Soviet Thought, vol. 16, nos. 3-4, 1976, pp. 239-249.
[Newton, Isaac], Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and his System of the World, vols. 1-2, trans. by Andrew Motte, ed. by Florian Cajori, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934.
Patočka, Jan, Body, Community, Language, World, trans. by Erazim Kohák, Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1988.
—, An Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. by Erazim Kohák, Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1996.
—, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. by Erazim Kohák, Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1996.
—, “Intellectuals and Opposition,” in Thinking After Europe: Jan Patočka and Politics, ed. by Francesco Tava and Darian Meacham, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, pp. 7-21.
Pike, Shirley R., Marxism and Phenomenology, London and Sydney: Croom Helm 1986.
Smyth Bryan and Richard Westerman (eds.), Marxism and Phenomenology: The Dialectical Horizons of Critique, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020.
Staehler, Tanja, Hegel, Husserl and the Phenomenology of Historical Worlds, London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.
Stewart, Jon, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion as a Phenomenology,” in Filozofia, vol. 75, no. 5, 2020, pp. 386-400.
—, Hegel’s Century: Alienation and Recognition in a Time of Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
—, “Hegel’s Phenomenological Method and the Later Movement of Phenomenology,” in the Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Phenomenology, ed. by Cynthia D. Coe, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 457-480.
Tava, Francesco, “The Heresy of History: Patočka’s Reflections on Marx and Marxism,” in Thinking After Europe: Jan Patočka and Politics, ed. by Francesco Tava and Darian Meacham, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, pp. 183-200.
Thao, Trân Duc, “Marxisme et phénoménologie,” in La Revue internationale, no. 2, 1946, pp. 168-174.
—, “Marxism and Phenomenology,” trans. by Nicolas de Warren, in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 30, no. 2, 2009, pp. 327-335.
Waldenfels, Bernhard, Jan M. Broekman, Ante Pažanin (eds.), Phänomenologie und Marxismus, vols. 1-4, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977-1979.
Waldenfels, Bernhard, Jan M. Broekman, Ante Pažanin (eds.), Phenomenology and Marxism, trans. by J. Claude Evans Jr., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.
Wartofsky, Marx W., “Consciousness, Praxis, and Reality: Marxism vs. Phenomenology,” in Interdisciplinary Phenomenology, ed. by Don Ihde and Richard M. Zaner, Dordrecht: Springer, 1977 (Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, vol. 6), pp. 133-151.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philosophia
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
