Unit 1: Marxism Theory

 

Objectives

 

ü  To be able to describe literary criticism based on social and dialectic theories

ü  Students will be aware of the relationship between Marxism, literature, and theory

ü  To examine a text-based Marxist theory to find out: whom does the text benefit?

 

Introduction

   

      Marxists believe that economic and social conditions determine religious beliefs, legal systems, and cultural frameworks. Art should not only represent such conditions truthfully but seek to improve them. Marxism is a highly complex subject, and that sector of it known as Marxist literary criticism is no less so. Marxist literary criticism is a loose term describing literary criticism based on socialist theories. The English literary critic and cultural theorist, Terry Eagleton, defines Marxist criticism this way:

 Marxist criticism is not merely the sociology of literature, concerned with how novels get published and whether they mention the working class. It aims to explain the literary work more fully and this means sensitive attention to its forms, styles, and meanings. But it also means grasping those forms, styles, and meanings as the product of a particular history (Eagleton 67).

 

   

Marxist Criticism: A Marxist critic grounds theory and practice on the economic and cultural theory of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, especially on the following claims:

1. The evolving history of humanity, its institutions, and its ways of thinking are determined by the changing mode of its “material production”-that is, of its basic economic organization.

2. Human consciousness in any era is constituted by an ideology-that is a set of concepts, beliefs, values, and ways of thinking and feeling through which human beings perceive, and by which they explain, what they take to be reality. A Marxist critic typically undertakes to “explain” the literature in any era by revealing the economic, class, and ideological determinants of the way an author writes, and to examine the relation of the text to the social reality of that time and place.

3. Overview of Marxist Criticism

This school of critical theory focuses on power and money in works of literature. Who has the power/money? Who does not? What happens as a result? For example, it could be said that “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1928) by Washington Irving is about the upper class attempting to maintain their power and influence over the lower class by chasing Ichabod, a lower-class citizen with aspirations toward the upper class, out of town. This would explain some of the numerous descriptions of the land, wealth, and hearty living through Ichabod’s eyes. (Ichabod Crane, a fictional character, a lanky and unattractive schoolmaster who is the protagonist of Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.)

   

Marxism in the West is generally studied not in revolutionary terms – that is, as preparation for outright violent social revolt – but as a critique of bourgeois society and the capitalist economy upon which it is based. Marx and Engels envisaged a world in which globalized market forces reigned supreme, careless of the human damage they inflicted, and in which the gap between rich and poor had widened intolerably. Amidst widespread political instability, the impoverished masses would confront a small international elite of the wealthy and powerful (Eagleton, 2002, p. ix). Nevertheless, Marxism still holds considerable legitimacy as a critique of capitalism, and there is no reason to imagine it might not be reformulated and practiced in ways that might well succeed were earlier forms of it had failed. Marxism has indeed, in modern times, suffered the greatest defeat in its turbulent history. But why? Because the system it opposes has eased up, changed beyond recognition, thus rendering its theories redundant? It is because that system is more powerful and pervasive than ever – because it is business as usual, only more so – that the political left has proved unable to breakthrough. Marxist criticism will not, of course, do much in itself to reverse that failure. Most importantly, a political battle is among other things a battle of ideas.

 

          The various forms that Marxism has taken include Diamat or dialectical materialism, an economic slant (view)  that was central to Leninist - Stalinist thinking, the study of class relations and class consciousness typified by the work of Georg Lukács (a Hungarian Communist), cultural Marxism, which was advanced by Leon Trotsky but developed more significantly by the Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno, Marx Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas), existential Marxism, which is influenced mainly by the philosopher Hegel and was advanced in one form or other by Alexander Kojève, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Merleau - Ponty, and structuralist Marxism which at times overlapped with existential Marxism, but which is most generally associated with the writings of Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Pierre Macherey, and Roger Establet in their major collaboration, Lire le Capital (abridged in English as Reading Capital with texts only by Althusser and Balibar).

 

         In France, thinkers associated with the Tel Quel movement of the 1960s advanced a structuralist understanding of language in terms of Marx’s notion of a mode of production, something that Jacques Derrida saw as a site for “deconstruction,” hence posing a set of different structural alternatives for Marxist thought. More recently, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have emerged as major figures in terms of advancing updated understandings of cultural hegemony (the cultural leadership or cultural dominance of one group over another, which have direct influence and authority over the citizens in a country) which stem from the work of the Italian Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci. Hegemony is an alternative to the standard Marxist understanding of class conflict and poses a much more plastic and flexible understanding of social coalition. Also, well known is the work by Fredric Jameson, an American Marxist known for his concept of the “political unconscious” (i.e. to articulate the implicit political dimension of creative works. It opposes the view that literary creation can take place in isolation from its political context. This approach to textual criticism turns not so much on the question of what does a particular text means as to why it exists in the form that it does). Besides, Slavoj Žižek blends Lacanian psychoanalysis with various forms of Marxist analysis, some of them harking back to Stalin and Lenin in the interests of putting certain social critiques into question, particularly, those of the “political correctness” movement (the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against. e.g. Asking a person about their “partner”, instead of using gendered terms like “girlfriend/boyfriend” or “husband/wife”).

 

 

What exactly is the Marxist theory? Let’s begin to answer that question by answering another: what would Marxist critics say about psychoanalytic criticism? They would say that, by focusing our attention on the individual psyche and its roots in the family complex, psychoanalysis distracts (to distract: to divert, sidetrack) our attention from the real forces that create a human experience: the economic systems that structure human societies. 

   If a theory does not foreground (make something the most prominent or important) the economic realities of human culture, then it misunderstands human culture. For Marxism, getting and keeping economic power is the motive behind all social and political activities, including education, philosophy, religion, government, the arts, science, technology, the media, and so on. Thus, economics is the base on which the superstructure (the ideologies that dominate a particular era, all that "men say, imagine, conceive," including such things as "politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc." (Marx and Engels, German Ideology 47) of social/political/ ideological realities is built. Economic power therefore always includes social and political power as well, which is why many Marxists today refer to socioeconomic class, rather than economic class, when talking about the class structure.

   In Marxist terminology, economic conditions are referred to as material circumstances, and the social/political/ideological atmosphere generated by material conditions is called the historical situation. For the Marxist critic, neither human events (in the political or personal domain) nor human productions (from nuclear submarines to television shows) can be understood without understanding the specific material/historical circumstances in which those events and productions occur. That is, all human events and productions have specific material/historical causes. Therefore, Marxist analysis of human events and productions focuses on relationships among socioeconomic classes, both within a society and among societies, and explains all human activities in terms of the distribution and dynamics of economic power. And Marxist praxis, or methodology, dictates that theoretical ideas can be judged to have value only in terms of their concrete applications, that is, only in terms of their applicability to the real world.

  From a Marxist perspective, differences in socioeconomic class divide people in ways that are much more significant than differences in religion, race, ethnicity, or gender. For the real battle lines are drawn, to put the matter simply, between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” between the bourgeoisie—those who control the world’s natural, economic, and human resources—and the proletariat, the majority of the global population who live in substandard conditions and who have always performed the manual labor—the mining, the factory work, the ditch digging, the railroad building—that fills the coffers of the rich. Unfortunately, those in the proletariat are often the last to recognize this fact; they usually permit differences in religion, race, ethnicity, or gender to separate them into warring factions that accomplish little or no social change. Few Marxists today believe, as Marx did, that the proletariat will one day spontaneously develop the class consciousness needed to rise in a violent revolution against their oppressors and create a classless society. However, were the proletariat of any given country to act as a group, regardless of their differences (for example, where they all to vote for the same political candidates, boycott the same companies, and go on strike until their needs were met), the current power structure would be radically altered. 

 

Bahktin and the Carnivalesque another form of Marxist Theory  

 

  Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the “carnivalesque” (a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos) bears more than some resemblance to the literary act of parody, though the literary act of carnival is a far more politically aware act than parody tends to be. Like parody, the act of carnival serves to critique and subvert norms of political, social, and cultural behavior. The act of carnival, then, serves through literature to critique notions and rules of the established order, attack, deconstruct and refuse to obey the rules and orders of systems of authority, which in turn allows for a critique of established laws and rules of a given society. In literature, the carnivalesque involves providing a public venue through which standards, norms, and laws of governing cultures and societies are questioned, reworked, tested, and countered.

 

 Conclusion

Overall, Marxism has a significant effect on social institutions and analyzes how certain classes hegemonize the working class and controls everything. The approach helped literary critics understand the cultural and ideological influence of the society a writer depicts in his/her writing.

 Summary 

 To summarize, Marxism Literary Criticism analyses literature in terms of the historical conditions which produce it. Like any other critical method, it has to be assessed by how much it illuminates works of art, not just by whether its political hopes have been realized in practice.

 It is, however, not merely ‘the sociology of literature. The business of Marxist literary criticism is ‘to understand ideologies—the ideas, values, and feelings by which men experience their societies at various times’ and ‘to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its, forms, styles, and meanings. So, the importance of the application of Marxist theory to literary analysis is undeniable.

 Typical questions:

Ø What is the social class of the author?

Ø Which class does the work claim to represent?

Ø What values does it reinforce?

Ø What values does it subvert?

Ø What conflict can be seen between the values the work champions and those it portrays?

Ø What social classes do the characters represent?

Ø How do characters from different classes interact or conflict?

 

Practical Application of Marxism Theory:

 

Task one: Use Marxist Literary Criticism to Read Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” (1919)

If We Must Die 

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O, kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men, we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

 

Task Two: Using the social-class lens, what is the significance of this passage?

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb. (Gatsby 40)

 

This passage depicts the development of technology during the period. The juicer machine was a new contraption and had to be included......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

 

Themes

Finish this sentence:

From the social-class perspective, The Great Gatsby is a novel about..............................................................................................................................  

 

Activity three: Read some passages of your choice from The Great Gatsby again to answer the following questions about society and class

1. In The Great Gatsby, does wealth alone decide which social class a character belongs to?
2. What are the various markings of the upper class in the novel? What distinguishes it from the other classes?
3. Is Gatsby in the same social class as Wilson? If not, is he closer to Wilson's class, or to Tom's? Where does Meyer Wolfsheim stand in all of this?
4. Does Gatsby love Daisy, or does he love the lifestyle she represents? Is she only his ticket to the upper classes? If so, does Gatsby realize this?

Activity Five: Discussion

Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.

Ø  In The Great Gatsby, the only element not restricted to one social class is unhappiness. All members of all classes are equally unhappy.

Ø  In The Great Gatsby, social norms are insurmountable barriers between people. Inter-class relationships are impossible.

Activity Six: How does Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque serve to question social and political norms and rules in Shakespeare’s Hamlet?

Possible Answer

Mikhail Bakhtin, a Marxist scholar, used the term carnivalesque to describe a dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos. The original word carnival is Latin for Carne vale, meaning farewell to the flesh. In the Catholic Church, Lent is the season to deny oneself of physical pleasures such as smoking, sex, drinking, and eating a certain food, as a means to purge the body and bring the spirit closer to God. Being such a rough period for most of the church, many began to store up before the season on the guilty pleasures. 

Bakhtin has a theory that the carnivalesque used in literature can be linked to the behavior that takes place in pop-culture carnivals. The social classes mingle to enjoy the fleshly pleasures. Heaven and Hell mingle as do fact and fantasy. Michael Bristol’s article, “‘Funeral bak’d-meats’: Carnival and the Carnivalesque in Hamlet.” uses Bakhtin’s made-up term to describe Hamlet in a way that you may or may not agree with. (Bristol, “ ‘Funeral Bak’d Meats,’” p. 255).

 Hamlet, in many respects, serves as the perfect example of the Carnivalesque, especially in the famous “Mousetrap” scene in which the actors reenact the very scene of Hamlet’s father’s death. In this scene, in particular, the standard political and social rule is subverted and over-turned, however temporarily, to critique, mock, and question standard authority and norms of behavior within the political world of the play.

  The gravedigger scene was carnivalesque. Two poor men burying someone of high importance just tells the story of how in the end it doesn’t matter who or what you did, we are all equal in the end. Also, the thought of getting to have a Christian burial when it was obvious you weren’t adhering to Christian morals is in its way carnivalesque. It pokes fun at the people who are the true hypocrites, even in death.

The idea that Hamlet uses carnival to go up against Claudius is an obvious gesture. Hamlet almost makes a mockery of Claudius. Hamlet also intends to show the whole kingdom what kind of a person Claudius is by his actions. When Hamlet directs the play to the kingdom, he shadows the death of his father and the marriage of Claudius. The play was surely a carnivalesque gesture. Perhaps, this is the first action Hamlet took to being carnivalesque.

Conclusion 

   Although the characters carry the traits of carnival, and the play can be perceived as an allegorical battle between Lent and Carnival, infertility and the lack of reproduction give the carnivalesque approach a slight twist and in many senses, it seems the play offers rather an anti-carnivalesque solution. The pattern of festivity is completed in the final scene in which Claudius arranges a feast with sports and games, albeit lethal ones. At the end of the drama, Carnival and Lent eliminate each other leaving the stage empty for something upcoming and new. Even though Hamlet offers no proper carnivalesque outcome (present, e.g. in the marriages at the end of the comedies), some sort of renewal and regeneration does occur in the end: the restoration of the pre-carnivalesque framework of “remembering” and reason. 

  References 

Althusser, Louis. Reading Kapital. London: New Left Review/Verso, 1998.

Bender, Frederic, ed. The Communist Manifesto: A Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 2013.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. The USA, Harvard University Press, 1999

Brien, Kevin M. Marx, Reason, and the Art of Freedom. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 

2006.

Bristol, Michael D., “‘Funeral Bak’d Meats’: Carnival and Carnivalesque in Hamlet” in Shakespeare’s Tragedies--Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Susan Zimmermann, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998, 237-255, p. 250. 

Eagleton, Terry. Marx and Literary Criticism. Oakland: the University of California Press, 1976.

---. Marx and Freedom. London: Phoenix House, 1997.

----. Why Marx Was Right. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.

Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. The Great Gatsby.1st ed. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1998

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. The USA.Cornell University Press, 1981

Kolakowski, Leszek. Main Currents of Marxism trans.byPaul Stephen Falla, New York, W.W Norton, 1978

Lee, Wendy Lynne. On Marx. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002.

Lukacs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1966.

Mulhern, Francis. Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism, Harrow, Essex: Longman, 1992.

Sitton, John. Marx Today: Selected Works and Recent Debates. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Voloshinov, V. N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. L. Matejka and I.Titunik, New York: Seminar Press, 1973

Williams, R. Marxism, and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977

 

   Classrooms that only focus on Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” as a racial uprising are missing the meaning in Claude McKay’s most recognizable poem as a human struggle against oppression as seen through a Marxist literary reading of the poem. Based on McKay’s life and political stance, using Marxist literary criticism would be the best fit for finding meaning in McKay’s poems especially “If We Must Die.” Claude McKay (b.1889 –d.1948) is considered by many to be a major writer who sparked the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance with his collection of poems Harlem Shadows (NAAL 1005). His poem “If We Must Die,” published in Harlem Shadows, was, as the author said, “an outgrowth of the intense emotional experience I was living through (no doubt with thousands of other Negroes) in those days” (Bloom 140). McKay never mentions that his poem was about race but acknowledges its popularity with African Americans because “to them, the poem that voiced the deep-rooted instinct of self-preservation seemed merely a daring piece of impertinence” (141). Through the use of different literary criticisms, there can be multiple ways of reading the text; however, McKay was focused on the human struggle but it was African American readers that embraced the poem as their own. There can be multiple ways of reading the poem legitimately but it is Marxist literary criticism that is the easiest way to come to the author’s intent. McKay did have his African American critics, like William S. Braithwaite, who denounced McKay as a “violent and angry propagandist, using his natural poetic gifts to clothe arrogant and defiant thoughts” (140). The “New Negro,” who sympathized with the Marxist ideals of the time, was not only seen as more bold and masculine than the Old South Negro but also more educated, well-traveled, and urbanized (Smethurst 53). The New Negro, one who would use violence for change and counter white people violence as well as benefit from the Harlem Renaissance, is a transformation—not a replacement—of the “Old South Negro”; the New Negro is “both more modern and yet also a return to the cultural wholeness (and virility) of Africa before the fall into slavery” (53). McKay, who had lived in Europe for some years before settling in the United States, fits the New Negro label, one that addresses oppression and class as much as Marxist literary criticism exposes oppression and class. Claude McKay’s Marxist sympathies with socialism did earn him a trip to the Soviet Union in 1923, but he felt he was more sideshow than an important member of a like-minded society. Marxism for McKay was about racial equality (Bloom 136). No African Americans participated in the founding of the American Communist Party in 1919 because “the Communist Party had considered the problems of African Americans subordinate to a larger class struggle” (Garder). Even though McKay was against writing socialist propaganda material (Bloom 140), his poems lend themselves easily to a Marxist Literary Criticism because of his socialist views. While McKay was impatient with racism, his concern with political consequences made McKay “a worker for social change” (NAAL 1006). James Keller, in his article about McKay’s protest sonnets, has found McKay’s “agenda for social transformation does not involve fundamental change” (456). McKay’s writing expresses that a struggle against the status quo is not monopolized by African Americans; instead, the struggle against the status quo is prioritized by the oppressed. Keller states that McKay, through his writing, exposes America’s hypocrisy:

 [McKay] indicts America for its failure to live up to its principles. By pointing out ideological contradictions and by undermining racial stereotypes, he is inviting the power structure to amend social inequities, to develop a consistent and truly equal policy toward all Americans. (456)

      By using a Marxist approach, “If We Must Die” can be read as a poem for class struggle and human survival instead of a simple one-sided racial defiance and retaliation poem. Indeed, using a Marxist approach to McKay’s finest poem puts into context what message the author intended. When “If We Must Die” is taught as a message from the Harlem Renaissance, the theme expressed to students, regardless of literary criticism used, should be a human struggle, which is the universality McKay was trying to convey. However, as found on English Education at Saint Xavier University web site, with a lesson plan for “If We Must Die,” in the class discussion of the poem students are asked: 1. Does this poem capture the identity of African Americans in the early 20th century? How? 2. If you were an African American at this time, would you be inspired? 3. Do you think you would have a strong sense of identity as an African American after reading this poem?

      While the “combination of militancy and introspection was central to the literature of the Renaissance,” McKay’s poem was not meant to be exclusive to African Americans but a bitter and angry response to the race riots of 1919 that McKay saw as detrimental to establishing equality among the American races (Wintz 71).

       If Marxist literary criticism is used to read “If We Must Die,” then McKay’s intention for the poem will be made clear without falling into the trap of pure emotion and failing to find a more universal meaning and intention of the poem. Churchill did correctly view the poem as a human struggle and a uniting against the status quo, inspiring to die fighting rather than die in passivity. Marxist literary criticism easily exposes the meaning of the poem in part because of McKay’s socialist leanings and in part because of how Marxists generally view literature “not as works created by timeless artistic criteria, but as ‘products’ of the economic and ideological determinants specific to that era” (Abrams 149). Before “If We Must Die” can be approached using Marxist literary criticism, there must be a common definition of Marxist literary criticism that is easily attainable and understood. According to Michael Delahoyde, where he sets the groundwork for the approach a critic would take, states that the Marxist literary critic “simply is a careful reader who keeps in mind issues of power and money, and any of the following kinds of questions: • What role does class play in the work; what is the author’s analysis of class relations? • How do characters overcome oppression? • In what ways does the work serve as propaganda for the status quo, or does it try to undermine it? • What does the work say about oppression; or are social conflicts ignored or blamed elsewhere? • Does the work propose some form of utopian vision as a solution to the problems encountered in work?” 

     A reader keeping in mind issues of power and money helps rule out emotion as the driving force in finding meaning in a text. Based on Delahoyde’s easy-to-follow Marxist literary criticism questions, which combine key points of the criticism, a reader can easily apply Marxist literary criticism to the poem “If We Must Die.” By no means do Delahoyde’s Marxist literary questions water down the literary criticism but instead makes it attainable for the average reader; keeping in mind, however, Delahoyde does use key points of Marxist Literary Criticism from different, established sources to achieve readability and usability of the literary criticism to any text.

      The responsibility tied to using a Marxist literary criticism approach to the text is important because the Marxist literary criticism approach is just a guide since such “critical literary approaches challenge long-standing assumptions about power, authority, and teachers (or adults)” (Weimer 13). However, Marxist criticism does not form a single body of work. It is a body of works fractured by various points of cultural and political focus, as pointed out by Jonathan Dollimore in his chapter titled “Subjectivity and Social Process” (154-155). The philosophical ancestry of Marxism included several philosophers, like Nietzsche1 and Jean Rousseau2, as well as Machiavelli and Galileo (154). Even Marx declared himself to be ‘not a Marxist’ due to its progression and change of its initial direction. Traditional Marxists, for example, look toward history as their theoretical foundation, seeing the dichotomies that exist in the world as being based on material things (155). ” The literary criticism is simply a pair of glasses through which to view and understand the text. Figuratively speaking, having the wrong “pair of glasses” skews the view of the text as seen in Saint Xavier University English Department’s lesson plan for “If We Must Die.” Marxist literary criticism reflects “an author’s class or analysis of class relations, however piercing or shallow that analysis may be” (Delahoyde). It is obvious that using the Marxist approach with McKay’s poem does expose McKay’s own analysis of race and class relations. With this objective of Marxist literary criticism, readers and students will be able to view texts in a social, political, and economical view that takes them beyond their familiar world (how far depends on the development stage of the readers) and that is why “If We Must Die” is not simply a poem about “Black Struggle” but of human struggle against oppression and passivity when oppressed. 

     Marxist Literary Criticism is easy to learn and apply as seen with Delahoyde’s literary Marxist questions. Therefore, other Protest poems, and texts that lend themselves to Marxist criticism, can be read and interpreted correctly instead of only relying on reactionary feelings. Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” should be read in the classroom but it must be done using the proper tools to find and understand the meaning of the poem.