LITERARY

CRITICISM AND THEORY

MODULE III - CHAPTER I -
MARXIST THEORIES
Saturday, 25 July 2020 7:14 PM

INTRODUCTION

• Marxism is the name for a set of political and economic ideas, first introduced in the 1850s by Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels.
• They believed that the world is divided into two classes:
→ Most people are called 'workers' because they work in factories, offices or farms for money. They
belong to the 'working class' (or 'proletariat').
→ The other class are the 'capitalists' (or 'bourgeoisie'). They are the ruling class or the dominant
class. They own the factories, land, and buildings that the workers work in and exploit the workers.

1.1 Marxist Model of Society

According to Marxist theory, the society consists of two parts:

Base and Superstructure

• Marx defines the base as the social relations between men which create and produce materials that
are eventually put up for exchange. Simply, put it refers to the economic structure of a society.
• From the base comes a superstructure in which laws, politics, religion and culture legitimize the power
of the social classes that are formed in the base. Marx argued that the superstructure grows out of the
base and reflects the ruling class' interests.

• Marx and Engels called their theories ‘Communism’ (rather than ‘Marxism’) and announced the advent of
Communism in their jointly-written Communist Manifesto of 1848.
→ Communism - was a movement whose goal was the establishment of a communist society structured
upon the ideas of common ownership of the means of production (the raw materials, instruments,
money etc. used by workers to make the products) and the absence of social classes.

• To create a classless society and end capitalism was their ultimate aim, because capitalism thrives on
exploiting its labourers. It turns people into things. The capitalist mode of production generates a view of
the world in which ultimately all of us function as objects.

1.2 Ideology

• For Marxism we are blind to our own condition because of the effects of what it calls ideology. Ideology is
that which makes us experience our life in a certain way and makes us believe that, that way of seeing
ourselves and the world is natural. In so doing, ideology misrepresents reality and falsely presents as
natural what is artificial and contradictory. If we succumb to ideology we live in an illusory world, in what in
Marxism has often been described as a state of false consciousness.

• And it was the French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser who gave an influential answer to the question
of exactly how was ideology able to hide authentic reality from us. For Althusser, ideology works through
so called ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, which are all subject to the ruling ideology. Althusser’s ideological
state apparatuses include organised religion, the law, the political system, the educational system – in
short, all the institutions through which we are socialised.

1.3 Marxism as a Materialist philosophy

• Marxism is a materialist philosophy: that is, it tries to explain things without assuming the existence of a
world, or of forces, beyond the natural world around us. Its opposite is idealist philosophy, which does
believe in the existence of a spiritual world elsewhere that would offer, for instance, religious explanations
of life.

• But whereas other philosophies merely seek to understand the world, Marxism seeks to change the world.
They see this change or progress as coming about through the struggle for power between different social
classes (class struggle).

1.4 Marxist Literary Studies

• Marxist literary criticism maintains that a writer's social class and its prevailing ideology have a major
bearing on what is written by a member of that class. So instead of seeing authors as primarily autonomous
inspired individuals whose genius and creative imagination enables them to bring forth original and
timeless works of art, the Marxist sees them as constantly formed by their social contexts in ways which
they themselves would usually not admit.