Jean Baudrillard and Postmodernism
Aim - To examine and contextualise Jean Baudrillard's theory
of hyperreality.
Objectives: (1) To foreground Baudrillard's position, by showing
how it develops out of a Marxist critique of capitalism; (2) To examine how
Baudrillard's analysis of advertising
led him to argue that a consumer's engagements with commodities had begun
function like a language; (3) To explore how Baudrillard extended this analysis
into a fully blown theory of postmodernism.
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I'm giving three
lectures as part of the Contextual studies course this term. Our topic today is
the Jean Baudrillard's vision of hyper-real postmodern society, and the crisis
that he feels the abundance of advertising, retail display, and televisual
imagery, has generated in the fabric of social reality.
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This will be
followed on the 9th February by a lecture on Gilles Deleuze and
Felxi Guattari, who deal with similar issues of reproduction and mediation, but
see potential for the creation of new forms of social life within these
processes.
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Then, on the 23th
February we will draw together these analyses to examine how artists and
designers, deal with issues of social
change in their work, by focusing on the issue of institutionality.
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Throughout the
late 1960s Jean Baudillard examined how the increased productive capacity of
western nations in the post war era, and the rise of corresponding industries
of marketing and advertising transformed the structure of consumer experience.
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Baudrillard
argued in texts such as The System of Objects (1968) that with the rise
of consumer society, promotion and advertising began to take on a primary role
in determining the commodity's value, and the consumer's disposition towards
it.
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In the 1970 and
1980s in texts such as The Mirror of Production (1973), and Simulacra
and Simulations (1981) he integrated the rise of the mass media into this
analysis, and developed the argument that our engagement with material reality
had now been superseded by a system of representations that saturate our
perceptions.
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As Harrison and
Wood note Baudrillard's “Critique of the political economy of the sign turned
into a thesis that reality itself, as something separable from signs of it, had
vanished in the information saturated, media dominated world”[1].
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This was
Baudrillard's version of postmodernism; a hyper-real world where what we call
reality was in fact grounded in simulacra.
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In Baudrillard's
analysis simulacra have no natural link with a pre-existing reality. One can
determine if an image is a simulacra, if one cannot identify a pre-existing
concrete reality which that image can be understood to copy.
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For Baudrillard
simulacra became the dominant form of image production in postmodern society.
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This idea was
explored in films such as Bladerunner (1982), and grasped the popular
imagination in the 1999 with the film the Matrix. The Matrix is a dystopian story
about a young man Neo who starts to question the reality of the world he inhabits,
and with the help of a gang of renegades, led by a character called Morphious,
he leaves the matrix and fights the machines that created it. In this scene
Morphious takes Neo back into the Matrix to explain its history and how it is
able to function so effectively.
Play Matrix – “What is real extended clip” “Welcome to
the Real
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In the Matrix
reality has been reduced to a blank white expanse, which is filled with
constructed images. Here we can start to have a sense of what Baudrillard means
by simulacra. They are pure constructions and refer to no reality outside of
themselves, and on mass serve to corrode any sense of a tangible reality.
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Thus, in
Baudrillard's analysis the postmodern consumer's sense of the world around them
is generated by the manner in which they are continually bombarded by
simulacra.
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Baudrillard's
theories can appear outlandish to some, and I want to demonstrate how the
conclusions that he drew in the 1980s developed out of a Marxist critique of
capitalism and towards a fully fledged postmodern theory.
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Baudrillard's
early writings were grounded in Marxism. The dynamic development of our
practical involvement with the world forms the basis of Marx's thought, and the
investigation of how this involvement developed in the postwar period shaped
the focus of Baudrillard's investigations.
Slide One – 18th Century German Harvest
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For Marx our
involvement with the world occurs through 'labour', a concept which encompasses
both how we shape our environment through our industry, and how our own
experiences are rooted within and conditioned by our environment. In Capital
Marx defines labour as “the universal condition for the metabolic interaction
between man and nature, the everlasting nature imposed condition of human
experience”.[2]
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Thus within this
Marxist framework man's relationship with his environment determines the
character of his consciousness.
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For Marx a
determining factor in this relation is man's own productive capacity and his
relationship with the products of his labour.
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Marx considers
that man's industry generates products, “external objects”[3]
that are useful, as they “satisfy human needs”[4]. The usefulness of the physical properties
of a product makes its use value.
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However, as soon
as conditions arise where different products can be exchanged for one another
they become commodities.
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Commodities are
possessed of an exchange value, a quantitative relation of equivalence that
allows one commodity to be exchanged for another.
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One commodity has
many exchange values, as its ratio of equivalence is realised through its
exchange for varying quantities of other commodities. In their equality they
are both equitable to a third thing, a universal equivalent, money.
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The exchange
relation is expressed through the abstraction of use value. In the exchange
relation one use value is only worth as much as another, to which it is deemed
to be equivalent.
Slide Two – 19th Century Factory.
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Under capitalism
the worker's labour becomes a commodity that he or she must sell in order to
live. This separates the worker from the products of his labour and makes them
alien to him. Marx notes “The externalisation of the worker in his product
means not only that his work becomes an object, an external existence, but also
that it exists outside of him, independently, alien, an autonomous power,
opposed to him.”[5]
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Thus in summary: (1) when people produce goods for
the market, the value of those goods is not set by their usefulness, but by
their ability to be exchanged for other things; (2) the labour embodied in
these goods is valued not for its usefulness, but for its ability to generate
exchange; (3) people's labour also becomes a commodity, to be bought and sold
for a wage.
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Marx notes that
as soon as a simple object, such as a table “becomes a commodity, it changes
into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on
the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head,
and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if
it were to start dancing of its own free will”.
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The transformation
of production and consumption Baudrillard theorised can be rooted in the
rationalisation of capitalist production proposed as early as F. W. Taylor's The
Principles of Scientific Management (1911), which advocated the breakdown
of each labour process into a series of requisite actions, and organising
production around work tasks based in time and motion study.
Slide Three - Henry Ford, Assembly Line
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Such an approach
informed the development of Henry Ford's automated car assembly line in
Michigan in 1913. Ford separated the production process into a series of
individual tasks allotted to individual labourers. Each worker fashioned or
attached a particular part of the car in a synchronised production process that
involved the cooperation of multiple workers, who each contributed to the
production of individual cars as they travelled down the production line.
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Ford's
five-dollar, eight hour day was only envisaged in part as a way of securing the
discipline that working in a highly productive car assembly line required. It
was also meant to give workers sufficient income and leisure time to consume
the products of mass production.
- Slide Four – Volkswagon factory Wolfsburg
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The form of mass
commodity production initiated by Ford was brought into maturity in the
advanced capitalist countries in the post war period period, and generated a
boom that lasted until the early 1970s.
Slide Five – Billboards in a 1970s American city
centre.
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In the post war
period this massive expansion in productive capacity needed to be met with a
corresponding rise in demand, and as factories continually produced large
quantities of the same commodities, this demand needed to be made consistent.
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Thus a
corresponding industry developed; publicity and advertising. During this period
advertisements became a ubiquitous phenomenon, colonising both urban space, and
home life.
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Individual
competing adverts would sit alongside one another, or be broadcast in a
sequence, yet they acted on the consumer as a system.
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John Berger
notes, “Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing messages: it is a
language in itself which is always being used to make the same general
proposal. Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and that
cream, this car and that car, but publicity as a system only makes a single
proposal. It proposes that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying
something more”.
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Judith Williamson
develops this point considering how advertisements seek to address consumer
desires, and aspirations, rather than showing how the products they promote
might be useful to us. “Advertisements have to translate statements from the
world of things, for example, that a car will do so many miles per gallon, into
a form that means something in terms of people. Suppose that the car did a high
mpg: this could be translated in terms of thriftiness, the user being a clever
saver, in other words being a particular type of person. Or, if the mpg
was low, the ad could appeal to the 'above money pettiness', daredevil kind of
a person who is too trendy to be economising. Both statements in question could
be made on the purely factual level of use value by the simple figures of
50mpg, and 20mpg. The advertisement translates these thing statements to us as
human statements; they are given a humanly symbolic exchange value.”
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Thus in
Williamson's analysis commodities are made equitable to desires or aspirations,
and through our continual immersion within advertising, the language of
publicity becomes a way in which we comprehend how we might find
fulfilment.
Slide Six – 1957 - Miller High Life advert. “For the
taste of your life “go first class” with Miller High Life.
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In his 1968 Essay
The System of Objects, Baudrillard examined the ramifications of the
rise of marketing outlined by Williamson. Baudrillard's claimed that
advertising codes products in a way that determines the consumer's relationship
with them.
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Poster notes,
“advertising codes products through symbols that differentiate them from other
products, thereby fitting the object into a series. The object has its effect
when it is consumed by transferring its
“meaning” to the individual consumer”.
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Baudrillard draws
emphasis to the motivational research of Ernest Dichter, noting how he used
focus groups to encourage consumers to divulge their emotional relationships
with products, providing advertisers with information that they could then
shape their advertising campaigns around.
Madmen clip – “Focus Group on madmen” 20 seconds to
3:20 mins (interview room observation room)
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Dichter notes
“one of the fundamental tasks of all advertising is to permit the consumer to
freely enjoy life, and to confirm his right to surround himself with products
that enrich his existence and make him happy”.
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Staging a focus
group became a common aspect of planning advertising campaigns in the post-war
period. In response to the findings of the focus group adverts were then
specifically designed to match products with particular desires or fears.
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As a continual
presence throughout urban space and within the home, advertisements served to
generate associations between consumer needs and products.
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Thus in this
context the point of sale is re-formulated. The consumers sense of the
product's usefullness is superseded by a set of codified emotional connections
generated by advertising prompts. Baudrillard notes “the act of buying is
neither a lived nor a free form of exchange. It is preconditioned
activity where two irreducible systems and confront one another […] this is the
forced integration of the system of needs with the system of products”. Further
to this such a codification of needs is necessary as mass production requires
constant demand for consumer goods if it is to be sustained.
Slide Seven – 1970 Dodge Challenger Convertible “Our
plum crazy Challenger R/T is no shrinking violet”
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For Baudrillard
this array of advertising messages takes on the character of a language. This
is made evident with the example of a car, “it is not the concrete structure of
the auto mobile engine that is expressed, but rather the, form, colour, shape,
the accessories, and the “social standing” of the object”. He goes on, “Needs
disappear into products which have a greater degree of coherence. Parcelled out
and discontinuous, needs are inserted arbitrarily and with difficulty into the
matrix of objects”. This then is the work of advertising, to cohere desires to
commodities.
Slide Eight – 1970s Storefront
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In his essay of
1970 Consumer Society Baudrillard relates this earlier analysis to the
layout of store-front displays and the interior layout of department stores.
Slide Nine –Meat Counter in a 1960s Woolworth's
foodhall
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“Large department
stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods and clothing, are like a
primary landscape of affluence. […] by purchasing a portion one in effect
appropriates the whole crumbling pyramid of oysters, meats, pears, or canned
asparagus”.
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The consumer
desire for abundance finds representation in the halls of department store,
which are are made to signify surplus, affluence and feasting. Products are
arranged in stacks, displays or collections that the consumer distinguishes
from each other in terms of the needs, desires or fantasies that embody for
them.
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For Baudrillard
“The display window, the advertisement,
the manufacturer, and the brand name here play an essential role in
imposing a coherent and collective vision”.
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Baudrillard
understands that products arranged such a manner take on a similar character to
that of the linguistic sign in the analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure.
Slide Ten – Saussure Diagram
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Saussure examined
the status of signs as part of a wider language structure. He considered that
linguistic signs were made up of two parts. A sound made by the vocal chords
when speaking, or the graphic marks that comprise a word.
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Inseparable from
the signifier in any sign and indeed, engendered by it, is what Saussure called
the signified.
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This is the
mental concept. Saussure considered that the linguistic sign is an arbitrary
construct, produced purely through agreement between users of a given language
system.
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We can see this
by looking at how the same objects are named by different words in different
languages.
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For example in
France the word for dog is “chien”, and in Germany “hund”. The only reason that
the signifier does entail the signified is because there is a conventional
relationship at play.
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Saussure
considered that a sign signifies by virtue of its difference from other signs.
Saussure called this system of differences between signs “langue”, which he
differentiated from individual speech acts “parole”.
Slide Eleven – Supergiant Supermarket 1960s.
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Similarly,
Baudrillard argues that one cannot comprehend the nature of the consumer's
psychological attachments with the commodity if it is considered directly.
Rather, one must consider how these attachments converge as a system of signs,
which like Saussure's notion of collective signification “langue” are
structured by relations of difference. One can see this process in a commercial
break on television where adverts converge arbitrarily, and in the distribution
of different adverts on billboards throughout the city.
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In Baudrillard's
argument continual consumer exposure to these campaigns and the presentation of
commodities within retail environments themselves, constitutes a system of
signification that constructs consumer desire.
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The Mirror of
Production (1973) marks Baudrillard's
break with Marxism. He argues throughout that core Marxist notions such as
labour and use value are in fact mirror images of capitalism that are only
comprehensible in relation to it.
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He argues first
that the very idea of use value is produced through relations of exchange. “The
presupposition of use value – the hypothesis of a concrete value beyond the
abstraction of exchange value, a human purpose of the commodity in the moment
of its direct utility for a subject – is only the effect of the system of
exchange value, a concept produced and developed by it”. Thus Marx's notions of
use value and unalienated labour, are re-conceived here as mere fantasies
constructed from within our experiences of wage labour and commodity
production.
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“The use value of
labour power does not exist any more than the use value of products or the
autonomy of signified and referent. The same fiction reigns in three orders of
production, consumption and signification”.
Slide Twelve – Time Square in the
1980s
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From here
Baudrillard then developed a fully blown theory of postmodernism. These later
writings examine the relationship between images and reality, and consider
relevance of the concept of the simulacrum to discussions of contemporary life.
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These later texts
place emphasis upon the way in which experience has become saturated by media
imagery. Within these circumstances representation, which we traditionally
think of as following reality, as an image of it, in fact begins to shape the
way in which we interpret reality itself.
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Baudrillard
argues that such simulacra, do not have any referent or ground in reality, and
that our cultural condition becomes one of “hyperreality”. In hyperreality
images of take on lives of their own and become templates for new realities.
- Simulacra colonise reality overtaking it, and shaping
the manner in which we interpret and respond to our environment. Baudrillard
considers that these simulacra form into a code that extracts meanings from
concrete social relations, and redeploys them within the media.
- In his essay Simulacra and Simulations (1981)
Baudrillard cites the example of Borges's story of an empire whose
cartographers create a map which exactly replicates and covers the whole
territory. Once the empire falls into decline the map becomes ruined, leaving
shreds and tatters distributed throughout a desert. Baudrillard considers this
to be a “fine allegory of simulation”.
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Slide Thirteen – Frontierland
at Disneyland, 1955
- He also considers Disneyland to be a prime example of
such a hyper-real landscape. “Disneyland is a perfect model of all the
entangled orders of the simulation. […] It is a play of illusions and
phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world etc. He argues that the overtly
fantastical environment within the park serves to distract attention from the
equally vacuous reality outside it, first encountered in the solitude of the
massive car parks that surround the theme park.
Slide Fourteen – The Twin
Towers
- Baudrillard also considered that the Twin Towers stood as
an architectural sign of how a concrete social life was being superseded by a
code that was free of reference to any reality outside itself. The two towers,
whose mute structures replicated one another, ignored the architectural bustle
an competition that surrounded them. They
existed as one for the other, immune to their surroundings, as a closed series
of two.
Slide Fifteen - 9/11
2001
- Indeed, the terrorist attack that finally destroyed
these Towers can be seen as an example of how the media representations can
shape concrete social events. Weren't the spectacular explosions of 9/11,
strangely reminiscent of the explosive finales of many Hollywood action films.
- Baudrillard considers that examples such as these are
indications of how social events themselves are now shaped through the
influence of simulacra generated by media culture. Baudrillard notes “all hold
ups, all hijacks and the like are as it were simulation hold ups, in the sense
that they are inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of
the media”.
Slide Sixteen –
Blair Election 1997
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In Baudrillard's
analysis simulacra also invade political policy. Wants, desires, and beliefs
forged by the propaganda and advertising, are recorded in opinion polls, which
are closely monitored by politicians, and inform the policy decisions.
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This vision of
hyper-real society formulates Baudrillard's sense of postmodernism, which for
him is an era in which progress has come to a standstill. Bertans notes
“Baudrillard's relentless dystopic vision of late modernity, as he saw it in
the seventies, or postmodernity as he has come to see it, leaves no exits”
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Baudrillard
himself states “postmodernity […] is a game with the vestiges of what has been
destroyed. This is why we are “post” - history has stopped, one is in a kind of
post history, which is without any meaning”.
American Psycho clip - Intro to Patrick Bateman
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We might consider
Patrick Bateman, the main character in Bret Eastan Ellis's American Psycho as
an example of the kind of personality that hyperreal society might create. His
values are almost entirely constructed through marketing, and he exists in a
world of fantasies where his desire to be the envy of others turns into
murderous rage.
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In summary, Jean
Baudrillard's theory of postmodernism developed out of a Marxist critique of
capitalist production, focused upon how, in the postwar period, the rise of the
advertising industry served to shape and regulate consumer demand, in ways that
could meet the increased productive capacity created by the rationalisation of
industrial production.
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He extended this
analysis by focusing on how advertisements, and retail environments formed into
a language, which continually re-iterated the same prospect of happiness and
fulfilment through consumption.
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Then, in the
1980s his focus shifted onto how the proposals made by advertisements and the
growing media culture influenced decision making, the construction of social
space, and even political policy, ultimately arguing that this replication of
social reality brought history to a standstill.
[1] Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in
Theory 1900 – 2000, (Oxford: Blackwells, 2003) p 1016.
[2] Karl Marx, Capital Vol 1, (London:
Penguin, 1976) p 290.
[3] Ibid, p 127.
[4] Ibid, p 127.
[5] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844, ed. David Mclellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp 78-79
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