MARXISM - Detailed Essay

Foundations of Marxism

Marxism was founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who announced the advent of Communism in their jointly written Communist Manifesto in 1848. It is a materialist philosophy that seeks concrete, scientific explanations for the world of observable facts, rather than spiritual ones. At its core is the belief that history is driven by class struggle, a competition for economic, social, and political power between the bourgeoisie (owners) and the proletariat (workers).

Under capitalism, this struggle involves the exploitation of the working class, where profit is generated by extracting surplus value from their labour. This leads to alienation, a state where workers are "de-skilled" and perform fragmented, repetitive tasks. A key result of this process is “reification”, a term from Marx’s Das Kapital describing how workers are stripped of their humanity and thought of as "hands" or "the labour force"—in essence, people become things.

The Evolution of Marxist Literary Theory

The "simplest" Marxist model of society consists of an economic base (the means of production) and a superstructure (the cultural world of ideas, art, and religion). This lead to “economic determinism”, the belief that the superstructure is "determined" or shaped by the base. In the 1930s, this solidified into what is called "Vulgar Marxism," which assumed a direct, rigid cause-effect relationship between a writer’s social class and their literature. Critics like Christopher Caudwell exemplified this by arguing that a poet's vocabulary was a direct product of their class status.

In contrast, "Engelsian" criticism remained more flexible, suggesting that great art possesses a degree of freedom from prevailing economic circumstances. For example, Engels valued fiction that captured the "truth of social life" even if the author did not provide an overt political commentary. However, under Vladimir Lenin and later Soviet rule, a "harder line" was taken, leading to Socialist Realism, which demanded literature be a simple tool for state propaganda and stigmatized experimental writers like James Joyce and Proust.

Formalism

A significant influence on Marxist aesthetics came from the Russian Formalists. Key figures included Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, and Boris Tomashevsky. Tomashevsky introduced the distinction between “fabula” (the actual sequence of events) and “sjuzhet” (the artistic presentation or plot), emphasizing that literature does not simply mirror reality but represents it through systematic procedures.

While some, like Mikhail Bakhtin, remained in Russia, others like the linguist Roman Jakobson went into exile. Jakobson founded the Prague Linguistic Circle and later influenced “New Criticism” in America, which prioritized the close verbal analysis of literary texts as a medium with its own characteristics.

Althusser, Ideology, and Power

In the later twentieth century, Louis Althusser shifted Marxism toward a more complex understanding of ideology. Althusser challenged the simplistic "one-to-one correspondence" between the economic base and the cultural superstructure. He introduced the term overdeterminism (borrowed from Freud), which suggests that a cultural effect arises from a variety of causes acting together, rather than from a single economic factor. This leads to the concept of relative autonomy, the view that culture, art, and literature possess a degree of independence from economic forces and are only determined by them "in the last instance". This process is known as decentering, which implies that society has no single "essence" or focus (like the economy) that dictates all other aspects of life. Ideology is not just "false ideas" but a system of representations—images, myths, and concepts—that individuals "live" within every day. It is the medium through which we perceive our relationship to the world, making certain power structures feel "natural" and unquestioned. Drawing on a Philip Goldstein quote, ideology is defined as "a system... of representations (images, myths, ideas or concepts...) endowed with an existence and an historical role at the heart of a given society". ". He explained that the state maintains this order through

·       State Power (Repressive State Apparatus - RSA): This is maintained through external force or the threat of it. It includes "repressive structures" such as the law courts, prisons, the police force, and the army.

·       State Control (Ideological State Apparatus - ISA): This is more subtle and maintains power by securing internal consent. These "ideological structures" include political parties, schools, the media, churches, the family, and art (including literature). While an RSA uses force when consent fails, an ISA works quietly to shape the very ideas and attitudes that make force unnecessary

Althusser describes Interpellation as a "trick" by which individuals are hailed to see themselves as free agents when they are actually being socialized into a system. For example, a democracy makes us feel we are freely choosing our government, even though the actual differences between parties may be far smaller than the system suggests4. We recognize ourselves in the values offered and, in doing so, help reproduce the system.

Despite his influence, Althusser was often viewed as a "particularly dogmatic" thinker. He was attacked by many on the left, such as the historian E.P. Thompson in The Poverty of Theory, for promoting "theory" as a separate, elite realm. Critics felt his rigid formulas ignored actual experience, practice, and political activism. However, his "loosening" of the monolithic fabric of traditional Marxist thought made the theory more acceptable to radicals in the 1960s who sought a more flexible way to analyze culture

Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony which is defined as the way dominant groups win consent from the ruled by making their "world-view" seem like common sense. The ruling class maintains power through consent rather than force, using cultural institutions like media and literature to make their values seem "natural"

What Marxist Critics Do

Marxist critics typically perform the following five activities:

1. Divide texts into ‘overt’ (surface) and ‘covert’ (hidden) content, relating the hidden matter to basic Marxist themes like class struggle.

2. Relate the context of a work to the social-class status of the author, assuming authors are often unaware of what they are revealing about their class6.

3. Explain a whole literary genre in terms of the social period that produced it (e.g., relating the rise of the novel to the expansion of the middle classes).

4. Relate the work to the social assumptions of the time it is ‘consumed’, a practice common in cultural materialism.

5. Perform the ‘politicisation of literary form’, claiming that literary forms themselves (like the sonnet or realism) are determined by political circumstances.

Case Study: Twelfth Night

Marxist critics treat a text as part of a larger social process, asking who benefits from the world of the text and whose viewpoint is excluded. A Marxist reading of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night reveals that the playful world of Illyria is actually organized by class privilege. Only the aristocracy is allowed "the morality of indulgence," while the character Malvolio is punished for his "social aspiration" to cross class boundaries. The play’s happy ending restores the social structure, making class divisions appear "natural and inevitable," thereby serving a clear hegemonic function.