Lily

According to Selden, "The people who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its proper use; but when it becomes the thing worked for, it distorts all the relations of life (72)." Selden represents everything that Lily is not. Lily believes in money and the importance of class. On the otherhand, he says, "My idea of sucess, personal freedom...From everything-from money, from poverty...from all the material accidents" (70). Selden is different from Lily, but he is attractive to her. Lily abandons the cause of Mr. Gryce for Selden. At the same time however, she also wants the rich life. She is amibvalent in her feelings on the direction of her life. It is strange how throughout the novel Lily is indecisive in her actions.

"...The means of labor and the external conditions of labor belong to private individuals" (Marx 298). Capitalists provide a means of substinence for the proletariat because they control the means of labor. For the proletariat to live, they must use this means of substenance. Therefore, the proletariat is bound to this capitalist system. To Marx, this capitalist system is a cruel system whioch has no escape. The proletariat is not enslaved like previous peoples in that the bourgeoise own them. The proletariat can quit there job and leave anytime they want to. However, the proletariat need a substinence and this is what keeps them under the thumb of the capitalists. This freedom the factory workers and laborers appear to have exists only ijn name. They have no real freedom. The capitalists know that the laborers will stay under their contorl because they have no other means of surviving. The bourgeoise help the proletariat to just barely survive so the children will have to work. Then, these children will be uneducated and they will be only able to work factory jobs. This will go on in a continuing cycle unless something in society is radically changed. This way the factory owners have a fresh supply of workers every generation to replace the retirees and produce for the capitalists.

More Work=Less Happiness

According to Marx, "... the misery of the worker is inversley proportional to the power and volume of his production..." (58). Marx seems to be saying that a workers unhappiness is a product of his production. I see this especially in the case of demanding jobs like doctors and lawyers. It seems the more one works and the more he produces, the less happy he will become. He is ignoring his humanity and in the desire just to gain commodities and material goods. It is unatural to subject oneself to eighty hour work weeks and 12 hour work days. Although Marx is arguing in terms of the proletariat and how he does this just as a means of substinence and is not making nearly as much money as a doctor or a lawyer, the same idea resonsates with them.

Truth exists outside mind

Going back to the example of the inverted image in the retina on page 111, I found a quote which I think most clearly and simply describes Marx's way of philosophizing. He states, " Consciousness does not determoine life, but life determines consciousness (112). This sumarizes Marx's whole argument in that section of the book. Marx talks about how heaven descends to earth in the Young Hegelian Philosophy. He discusses how these Young Hegelians make assumptions based on religion. Marx believes his reasoning based on production is better because there is evidence that supports it and he makes no assumptions. He is saying life does not determine consciousness because religion and what is in our mind cannot determine what is outside our minds in reality. This important because whenever we are trying to make an argument we can only use actual evidence.

man is not the only being that produces

Marx states that, " [Man] begins to destinguish himself from the animal the moment he begins to produce his means of substinence...By producing material food, man inderectly produces his material life itself" (107). I disagree with this statement because technically, man is not the only organism that produces his own food, his "means of substinence" (107). Bees make their own honey and hives. Bacteria process substances in their environment with enzymes to produce food for themselves. Plants produce their own food, glucose through photosynthesis. Thus, there are many example of animals that can produce their own "means of substinence" (107).

Civilization

Marx states, "The bourgeoisie...compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compells them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves."(162). I found this interesting because this work was written by English Communists commentung on english society and how it developed. These English Communists have the same ideas that Ghandi had about the word "civilization". They both agree that civilisation has a connotation held by many of the bourgiose class or western capitalists: the degree to which a state has been mechanized and has been modernized. A society would be considered barbarous not based on its values, but on how technologically advanced it had become.

Marx and Machinery

Marx's ideas about machinery seem to parallel Ghandi's. Acccording to Marx, "[Man] becomes an apendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him (164). Ghandi also believes that machinery is not good for man because it enslaves man. Marx says that machine enslaves man so much that man actually becomes a part of the machine.