Marxist Criticism

MARXIST CRITICISM

WHAT IS MARXISM?

It is the basis of a system of thought that sees inequitable economic relationships as the source of class conflict.

Marxist theory has provided a revolutionary way of understanding history. it would lead to a revolution in which workers would overturn capitalists, take control of economic production, and abolish private property by distributing all fairly, with these events, class distinctions would disappear.

LITERARY WORKS RELATED WITH MARXISM

·         The German Ideology (1845) – Karl Heinrich Marx

·         Communist Manifesto (1848) – Karl Heinrich Marx and Friederich Engels

·         Das Kapital (1867) - Karl Heinrich Marx

·         Marxism and Literature (1938) - Edmund Wilson

MARXIST CRITICISM

Although Marxism was not designed as a method of literary analysis, its principles were applied to literature. In this way, Marxism provided a new way of reading and understanding literature through Marxist criticism.

AUTHORS

The first major Marxist critic was George Lukács, a Hungarian critic, who was responsible for what has become known as reflectionism. He saw literature as a reflection of a society’s consciousness.

It was further developed in France thanks to another Marxist critic, Louis Althusser, a French philosopher. He saw that literature and art can affect society, even lead it to revolution. Althusser thought that the working class is manipulated to accept the ideology of the dominant class, a process he called interpellation.

Finally, we have two more Marxist critics Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton. They propose that a Marxist critic seeks to uncover those buried forces and bring them to light.

PLACE & TIME OF ORIGIN

ORIGIN: It started in the nineteenth century and continued to develop in the twentieth century.

PLACE: It started in Hungary with George and continues in France with Louis.

CHARACTERISTICS

1. ECONOMIC POWER

According to Marx, the moving force behind human history is the economic system, for people’s lives are determined by their economic circumstances.

This means that to explain any social or political context, any event or product, first it is necessary to understand the material and historical circumstances in which them occur.

Classless society in which everyone has equal access to its goods and services, such as food, education, and medical care. Unlike capitalism, which is a flawed system that involved maintaining the power of a few by the repression of many.

People who control production have a power base, they have many ways to maintain their position. They can manipulate politics, government, education, arts, entertainment and news media.

The result is commodification, where people take an attitude of valuing things not for their utility but for their power to impress others. Marxist criticism is against it.

1. Materialism versus Spirituality

Marx held that reality is material, not spiritual.

It is not our philosophical or religious beliefs that make us who we are, because we are not spiritual beings but socially constructed beings.

This affects people's world view is probably false; the critic's obligation is to expose the oppression and consequent alienation that have been covered up.

1. ART, LITERATURE AND IDEOLOGIES

According to Marxists, these topics are believes systems produced, by the relationships between the different classes in a society.

Marxist critics must do more than explain how a work conforms to certain literary conventions by taking into account the socioeconomic aspects of a particular culture and its ideologies. With this an ideology can be positive and lead to a better world for people, or it can be negative and serve as a repressive system.

The Marxist critic will look for the description of the inequalities and injustices and the imbalance of goods in the social classes, also, know how the proletariat or working class has to be in the rightful place in social level.

In this way, the function of art and literature is to make the population aware of social evils and understand the actions that will allow these evils to disappear.

1. Class conflict

At this point we can talk about "forces of production", defined as:

In a capitalist society, the way in which goods and services are produced will generate conflicts between social classes created by the way in which economic resources are distributed and who benefits from them.

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