MARXIST
CRITICISM
Karl Marx (1818-1883) a German Philosopher and
Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) a German sociologist were the joint founders of
Marxism. They themselves called their economic theories
‘Communism’. They designated their belief in the state ownership of industry,
transport etc rather than private ownership. They announced the advent of
communism in their jointly written ‘Communist Manifesto’ of 1848. As
Marxism is a materialist philosophy, it looks for concrete, scientific, logical
explanations of the world of observable fact. It doesn’t believe in the
existence of a spiritual world ‘elsewhere’. The aim of Marxism is to
bring about a classless society, based on the common ownership of the means of
production, distribution and exchange. Though they did not put forward
any comprehensive theory of literature, Marxism stresses that a writer’s social
class and its prevailing ‘ideology’ have a major bearing on what is written by
a member of that class.
In 1905, Lenin argued that literature must
become an instrument of the party. So, experimentation was banned
then. So, there were two streams, ‘Engelsian’ stream that stressed
the necessary freedom of art and the ‘Leninist’ stream that insisted an art
that committed to the political cause of the Left. In 1920s and
1930s ‘Engelsian’ which was also called ‘Russian Formalism’
flourished. The most prominent members of the group were Victor
Shklovsky and Boris Eichenbaum. The familiar world appear new to the
common man through Shklovsky’s idea of ‘defamiliarization’.
The French Marxist thinker Louis Althusser
(1918-1990) developed the Marxist approach through the introduction of various
concepts like 'Overdetermination' and 'Ideology'. Overdetermination that borrowed from Freud refers to an effect that arises from various causes rather than
from a single factor. This concept undercuts simplistic notions of
one-to-one correspondence between base and superstructure. Ideology
is another term of him. ‘Ideology’ is a system of representations of
images, myths, ideas and concepts endowed with an existence and has a
historical role at the heart of a given society. It obscures social reality by
naturalizing beliefs and by promoting values that support it. The
civil society spreads ideology through law, text books, religious rituals and
norms so that the people imbibe them without their knowledge.
'Decentering' is the key term of Althusser to
indicate structures which have no essence or focus or centre. Art
has a relative autonomy and is determined by the economic level only ‘in the
last instance’. Althusser then talks about 'Interpellation', a trick where
all are made to feel that they are choosing when really they have no choice.
Interpellation makes us feel like a free agent when things imposed upon us. He
also makes a distinction between the state power and state control. State power
is mentioned as repressive structures that include the law courts, prisons, the
police force and the army. They are the external
forces. But, the power of the state is also mentioned by their
internal consent. Althusser calls them as ideological structures or
state ideological apparatuses. They are such groupings as political
parties, schools, the media, the churches, the family and art that foster an
ideology, a set of ideas and attitudes. Then they feel that they are
freely choosing what is in fact being imposed upon them. This is
where the writers and critics of Leninist stream focused their attention and
tried to utilize literature as an instrument of the party. Apart
from Althusser Terry Eagleton, the best known British Marxist critic has also
had his contributions to Marxist criticism.
The founder of Italian communist party Antonio
Gramsci (1861-1934) was a politician, philosopher, and linguist. He
introduced concepts like 'Hegemony' and 'Subaltern'. 'Hegemony' is the
domination of particular section of the society by the powerful
classes. Most often it works through consent rather than by
power. It is the moral and intellectual leadership of the upper
class in a particular society. The term 'Subaltern' is a collective
description for a variety of different and exploited groups who lack class
consciousness. But, now it is being used to represent all
marginalized sections like Dalit, women and minorities.
Marxist criticism emphasizes on class,
socioeconomic status, power relations among various segments of society and the
representations of those segments. Marxist criticism is valuable
because it enables readers to see the role that class plays in the plot of a
text.
So, Marxist criticism has basically its conflict
with Post-Structuralism and Post –Modernism. Moreover, it is against
Psycho analysis that isolates individuals from the social structures in which
they exist. The Marxist critics make a division between the ‘overt’
(surface) and the ‘covert’ (hidden) content of the literary work and then
relate the covert subject matter of the literary work to basic Marxist themes,
such as class struggle, the progression of society through various historical
stages, such as the transition from feudalism to industrial
capitalism. Thus, the conflicts in King Lear is made to be read as
being ‘really’ about the conflict of class interest between the rising class
(the bourgeoisie) and the falling class (the feudal overlords). Moreover,
they also succeed in their explaining the nature of a whole literary genre in
terms of the social period which ‘produced’ it.
But they never discuss the details of a specific historical situation
and relate it closely to the interpretation of a particular literary text, like
the critics of new Historicism and cultural materialism with an archeological
spirit.
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