Professor Stuart Hall at the Inaugural Karl Marx Memorial Lecture, Sheffield, 1983

A lecture by Professor Stuart Hall (1932-2014), Professor of Sociology at the Open University on the importance and influence of Karl Marx. The lecture took place in the City Hall. Professor Hall is introduced by Professor Royden Harrison of the University of Warwick. It appears this inaugural memorial lecture was arranged by Sheffield City Council on the centenary of Marx's death.
Sheffield Local Studies Library ref. VID 244.

[@DJWESG1]

One of the greatest thinkers of our time, we were honoured to be alive at the same time as this man, his passing was a real loss to everyone.

[@thesmithsmaf]

What a find!! Thank you for posting - I was in Sheffield in 1983 - I missed this though

[@justininfrance]

Superb.

[@lio97el78]

Oh wow, where did this come from.

[@patrickholt2270]

Two thoughts. Firstly, it seems to me as a layman that so much of the traditional Marxist schema of world history and prognostication about what comes after capitalism and if it's socialism and how we get there, is based on only one case of a historical transformation from one mode of production to another that could be understood in detail, which being the transformation from feudalism to capitalism in Europe. And that is not a sufficient number of cases from which to develop a whole theory of such transformations and account of history as a whole.
Secondly dialectics doesn't come from Hegel in the first place, it comes from Saint Thomas Aquinas. It's a method developed in post-Aristotelian philosophical theology, which Hegel misappropriated to his heretical project of validating the existing order as divinely conceived rather than the outgrowth of sin needing to be transformed utterly as in Biblical eschatology. Marxians need to be aware and respectful of the debt of Marx to theology and of the fundamentally theological nature of the critique of capital as fetish (=idol) , of money as fetish, of the process of capital accumulation and valorization as fetishism (=idolatry in process), and all the other instances of fetish and fetishism in Marx and Engels' analysis. If you write off theology out of hand, you blind yourself, especially to understanding Marx's underlying philosophy and its actual antipathy to Materialism and the fetishization of materialism which is contained in assertions to the effect that future history is controlled and determined by material forces rather than by human beings and human agency. The goal of human liberation is also liberation from apparent control by inhuman material forces and the reclamation of human agency and conscious human control of history from that fetishization of materialism which is in origin ruling class thought and bourgeois ideology.

[@Sazi_de_Afrikan]

👍🏾

[@DJWESG1]

😂 'as a lay person... (proceeds to write a full critique of marxist thought)

[@Sazi_de_Afrikan]

@@DJWESG1lol right