Thinking Activity:Marxist Criticism

Marxism

👉Definition

Marxism is both a social and political theory, which encompasses Marxist class conflict theory and Marxian economics. Marxism was first publicly formulated in the 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which lays out the theory of class struggle and revolution. Marxian economics focuses on the criticisms of capitalism, which Karl Marx wrote about in his 1867 book, Das Kapital.

It originally consisted of three related ideas: a philosophical anthropology, a theory of history, and an economic and political program. There is also Marxism as it has been understood and practiced by the various socialist movements, particularly before 1914. Then there is Soviet Marxism as worked out by Vladimir Ilich Lenin and modified by Joseph Stalin, which under the name of Marxism-Leninism (see Leninism) became the doctrine of the communist parties set up after the Russian Revolution (1917). Offshoots of this included Marxism as interpreted by the anti-Stalinist Leon Trotsky and his followers, Mao Zedong’s Chinese variant of Marxism-Leninism, and various Marxisms in the developing world. There were also the post-World War II nondogmatic Marxisms that have modified Marx’s thought with borrowings from modern philosophies, principally from those of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger but also from Sigmund Freud and others.

👉Key Concerns of Marxism

1. In the Marxist literary analysis, the evolving history of humankind, of its social groupings and interrelations, of its institutions, and of its ways of thinking are largely determined by the changing mode of its “material production”— that is, of its overall economic organization for producing and distributing material goods. 

2. Changes in the fundamental mode of material production effect changes in the class structure of a society, establishing in each era dominant and subordinate classes that engage in a struggle for economic, political, and social advantage.

 

3. Human consciousness is constituted by an ideology—that is, the beliefs, values, and ways of thinking and feeling through which human beings perceive, and by recourse to which they explain, what they take to be reality. An ideology is, in complex ways, the product of the position and interests of a particular class. In any historical era, the dominant ideology embodies, and serves to legitimize and perpetuate, the interests of the dominant economic and social class. 

👉Seminal Writers and their works

• Marx and Engels -The German Ideology,
• The Hungarian thinker Georg Lukács, 
• Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheime-. 
• Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (1982),
• Walter Benjamin, 
• French Marxist Louis Althusser
•  Pierre Macherey, in A Theory of Literary Production (1966, trans. 1978)
• Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci
• Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe-Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) 
• Raymond Williams
• Terry Eagleton-A leading theorist of Marxist criticism in England
• Fredric Jameson- The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981),

👉Examples

Coolie by Mulk Raj Aanand

👉The novels of Mulk Raj Anand which address the life of the untouchables, coolies and ordinary workers struggling for their rights and self esteem. It is true that they can be traced back to the class conflict prevalent in the Indian society M.T. Vasudevan Nair, a noted Malayalam novelist wrote about the breaking up of the feudal tharavads in Kerala. But in the final analysis his stories reveal the filtering of the bourgeois modernity in Kerala society and how it enters into a conflictual relationship with the values of feudalism. Thus traces of this connection can be identified in various forms of cultural production.

👉In this novel, Munoo is posed that he is suffering although he belongs to one of the highest castes, and that another boy who he belongs to the higher-caste namely; the Brahmins are occupied on a higher position than that of a domestic servant. In spite of lack of humanity, Munoo finds capitalism, industrialism, and communalism that all adds to his misery.

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👉In Coolie, Anand has presented the misery of socially backward class and coolies in India. This novel is a powerful indictment of modern capitalistic Indian society and feudal system and the oppression of the colonialist