Makalah Marxist Criticism

Marxist Criticism

A. Theory Of Marxist Criticism
Marxist criticism is a loose term describing literary criticism based on socialist and dialectic theories. Marxist criticism views literary works as reflections of the social and economic institutions from which they originate. According to Marxists, even literature itself is a social institution and has a specific ideological function, based on the background and ideology of the author.Marxism attempts to reveal the ways in which our socioeconomic system is the ultimate source of our experience.
The English literary critic and cultural theorist, Terry Eagleton, defines Marxist criticism this way: Marxist criticism is not merely a 'sociology of literature', concerned with how novels get published and whether they mention the working class. Its aim is to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a 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.
The simplest goals of Marxist literary criticism can include an assessment of the political 'tendency' of a literary work, determining whether its social content or its literary form are 'progressive'. It also includes analyzing the class constructs demonstrated in the literature.



B. Proponent Of Marxism Criticism
1. Karl Marx—Co-founder of Marxism
Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818, Trier, then part of Prussian Rhineland—March 14, 1883, London) was an immensely influential German philosopher, political economist, and socialist revolutionary. Marx addressed a wide variety of issues, including alienation and exploitation of the worker, the capitalist mode of production, and historical materialism. He is most famous, however, for his analysis of history in terms of class struggles, as summed up in the opening line of the introduction to the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." The influence of his ideas, already popular during his life, was greatly broadened by the victory of the Russian Bolsheviks in the October Revolution of 1917. Indeed, there are few parts of the world that were not significantly affected by Marxist ideas in the course of the twentieth century.


2. Friedrich Engels was the co-founder and a proponent of Marxism.
Friedrich Engels (November 28, 1820, Wuppertal–August 5, 1895, London) was a nineteenth century German political philosopher who developed communist theory alongside Marx. The two first met in person in September 1844. They discovered that they had similar views on philosophy and on capitalism and decided to work together, producing a number of works including Die heilige Familie (The Holy Family). After the French authorities deported Marx from France in January 1845, Engels and Marx decided to move to Belgium, which then permitted greater freedom of expression than some other countries in Europe. Engels and Marx returned to Brussels in January 1846, where they set up the Communist Correspondence Committee.
In 1847, Engels and Marx began writing a pamphlet together, based on Engels' The Principles of Communism. They completed the 12,000-word pamphlet in six weeks, writing it in such a manner as to make communism understandable to a wide audience, and published it as The Communist Manifesto in February 1848. In March, Belgium expelled both Engels and Marx. They moved to Cologne, where they began to publish a radical newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. By 1849, both Engels and Marx had to leave Germany and moved to London. The Prussian authorities applied pressure on the British government to expel the two men, but Prime Minister Lord John Russell refused. With only the money that Engels could raise, the Marx family lived in extreme poverty.
3. Georg Lukács
Georg Lukács (April 13, 1885–June 4, 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic in the tradition of Western Marxism. His main work History and Class Consciousness (written between 1919 and 1922 and first published in 1923), initiated the current of thought that came to be known as Western Marxism. The book is notable for contributing to debates concerning Marxism and its relation to sociology, politics and philosophy, and for reconstructing Marx's theory of alienation before many of the works of the Young Marx had been published. Lukács's work elaborates and expands upon Marxist theories such as ideology, false consciousness, reification, and class consciousness.
4. Karl Korsch
Karl Korsch (August 15, 1886-October 21, 1961) was born in Tostedt, near Hamburg, to the family of a middle-ranking bank official. In his later work, he rejected orthodox (classical) Marxism as historically outmoded, wanting to adapt Marxism to a new historical situation. He wrote in his Ten Theses (1950) that "the first step in re-establishing a revolutionary theory and practice consists in breaking with that Marxism which claims to monopolize revolutionary initiative as well as theoretical and practical direction" and that "today, all attempts to re-establish the Marxist doctrine as a whole in its original function as a theory of the working classes social revolution are reactionary utopias.
Korsch was especially concerned that Marxist theory was losing its precision and validity—in the words of the day, becoming "vulgarized"—within the upper echelons of the various socialist organizations. His masterwork, Marxism and Philosophy is an attempt to re-establish the historic character of Marxism as the heir to Hegel.
5. Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci (January 22, 1891-April 27, 1937) was an Italian writer, politician and political theorist. He was a founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy. Gramsci can be seen as one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century, and in particular a key thinker in the development of Western Marxism. He wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3000 pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment. These writings, known as the Prison Notebooks, contain Gramsci's tracing of Italian history and nationalism, as well as some ideas in Marxist theory, critical theory and educational theory associated with his name, such as: Cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining the state in a capitalist society. The need for popular workers' education to encourage development of intellectuals from the working class. The distinction between political society (the police, the army, legal system, etc.) which dominates directly and coercively, and civil society (the family, the education system, trade unions, etc.) where leadership is constituted through ideology or by means of consent. "Absolute historicism." The critique of economic determinism. The critique of philosophical materialism.
6. Louis Althusser
Louis Althusser (October 16, 1918-October 23, 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. His arguments were a response to multiple threats to the ideological foundations of orthodox Communism. These included both the influence of empiricism which was beginning to influence Marxist sociology and economics, and growing interest in humanistic and democratic socialist orientations which were beginning to cause division in the European Communist Parties. Althusser is commonly referred to as a Structural Marxist, although his relationship to other schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation.
His essay Marxism and Humanism is a strong statement of anti-humanism in Marxist theory, condemning ideas like "human potential" and "species-being," which are often put forth by Marxists, as outgrowths of a bourgeois ideology of "humanity." His essay Contradiction and Overdetermination borrows the concept of overdetermination from psychoanalysis, in order to replace the idea of "contradiction" with a more complex model of multiple causality in political situations (an idea closely related to Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony).
Althusser is also widely known as a theorist of ideology, and his best-known essay is Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation.The essay establishes the concept of ideology, also based on Gramsci's theory of hegemony. Whereas hegemony is ultimately determined entirely by political forces, ideology draws on Freud's and Lacan's concepts of the unconscious and mirror-phase respectively, and describes the structures and systems that allow us to meaningfully have a concept of the self.
7. Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse (July 19,1898-July 29,1979) was a prominent German-American philosopher and sociologist of Jewish descent, and a member of the Frankfurt School. Marcuse's critiques of capitalist society (especially his 1955 synthesis of Marx and Freud, Eros and Civilization, and his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man) resonated with the concerns of the leftist student movement in the 1960s. Because of his willingness to speak at student protests, Marcuse soon became known as "the father of the New Left," a term he disliked and rejected.
8. E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, and Eric Hobsbawm
British Marxism deviated sharply from French (especially Althusserian) Marxism and, like the Frankfurt School, developed an attention to cultural experience and an emphasis on human agency while growing increasingly distant from determinist views of materialism. A circle of historians inside the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) formed the Communist Party Historians Group in 1946. They shared a common interest in "history from below" and class structure in early capitalist society. Important members of the group included E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, and Raphael Samuel.
While some members of the group (most notably E.P. Thompson) left the CPGB after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the common points of British Marxist historiography continued in their works. They placed a great emphasis on the subjective determination of history. E.P. Thompson famously engaged Althusser in The Poverty of Theory, arguing that Althusser's theory overdetermined history, and left no space for historical revolt by the oppressed.



C. Methods Of Marxist Criticism
Marxist see works as either progressive or non-progressive. Here’s the basic difference between the two types of works.
Non-Progressive Text Progressive text
Shows ideologies positively or shows ideologies as something acceptable or natural. Shows ideologies negatively or shows ideologies as creations of capitalist or other class system.
Hides social reality / contradictions Reveals social reality / contradictions
Naturalizes exploitation or other social contradictions. Questions exploitation or other social contradictions.
Gives false solution, often individualistic or imaginary in nature like escapism. Gives a more realistic solution, often social in nature.

1. Literature As Ideology (Practitioners: Caudwell and most Marxist Critics)
Choose this method if you think that the text or the gendre you are dealing with is an ideological tool of capitalism or other class-based socio-economic system.
Example: a) TV series Sex and the City shows consumerism positively, therefore reinforces capitalism. b) romantic poetry focuses on nature and dismiss social reality, therefore it also support the exploitative economic system. Please refer to the chart above (non-progressive part) to see the characteristics of the literary texts that are ideological.
2. Reflection theory (Practitioners: Lukacs)
Choose this if you are dealing with realist texts (works that depict social relaity realistically). focus pn how the content of a text reflect the conflict or contradiction in capitalist or any class society.
Example: a) The Great Expectations reveals the negative effect of classist ideology. b) Upton Sinclair's The Jungle exposes the bad condition of workers of meat industry. It is manipulated by the industry, and the workers' struggle for better condition. c) Many literary texts and films show how money and materialistic way of life corrupt people).
3. Negative knowledge (Practitioners: Adorno)
Choose this if you are reading modernist texts (experiment work). Focus on the power of its techniques or devices like symbol, or plot structure to ciiticize capitalism. in other words, we see how the technique s or the form gives us negative knowledge of capi talism. This means that the social or Marxist issues are reflected indirectly or symbolically through the form (not only directly from the content of the story like that of the method above).
Example: a) Kafka's Metamorphosis reflects the alienation and the misfortunate position of a sociala working person in class society through the symbol of cockroach. b) The interior monologue point of view used in James Joyce's works expresses the fact that individuals in capitalist society are alienated. c) Thet flat' plot structure in Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl" reflects the condition of poor people in capitalist society - static and living a monotonous life.
3. Negative knowledge (Practitioners: Adorno)
Choose this to works that neither belong the categories above (although it is also possible, as Jameson suggests, to apply it to almost any genres). Fairy tales, fantasy, children's liturature, science-fiction, popular literature, even Hollywood films are often discussed in this method. Here basically you look for symbolic representation of repressed utopian desire (a desire for better society, a desire to transcend class society)- in the text.
Example:a) "The lost boys" in James Barrie's Peter and Wendy represent a utopian society- a group of people that work together with no exploitation. b) Chuck Palahniuk's popular novel Fight Club does three things: 1) It gives a utopian refuge from capitalist society in the form of fight club where everyone is equal and does things that she/he loves to do. 2) Through the motif of destruction, it shows that a person should destroy his/her alienated and consumeristic "old" self to become a new and free indivual, 3) It also symbolically challenges reification through the conflict between the narrator and Durden, the "product" of his imagination).

D. Literary Work
The Rocking-Horse Winner - D.H. Lawrence

Marx in these passages explains that, in his view, money acts as an all powerful God [is omnipotent] in capitalist society.It changes how a person is perceived.It gives an individual godlike powers and transforms a deficient person into one other's revere and admire.The deficient person can use money to pretend to become whatever he or she wants to be or to get what he or she otherwise wouldn't be able to have—like a beautiful spouse.Money is all-important in capitalist society.
We can easily see how Paul's mother has a capitalist's view of money.She is a member of the bourgeoisie, the class Marx believed lived to suck all the money out of the rest of society.The bourgeoisie, who he thought produced nothing of any value, exploited the laboring or working classes, paying them next to nothing for their work and extracting the difference between the cost of their labor and the price of the goods they produced to finance lavish lifestyles.The rich lived high, he thought, on the backs of the poor.
Paul's mother is obsessed with money.It is more important to her than her own children.As the text says, she is incapable of loving her children.However, she does love money.Clearly, too, it fills a gap for her between her perceived inadequacy—she never feels she is good enough—and the powerful self she would like to be.Money, Marx would say, warps her relationships with other people.
If Hester is the bourgeoisie, Paul, her own son, is the exploited proletariat, worked to death to supply her with luxuries.Like most bourgeoisie, Paul's mother has no idea of the cruel conditions that fund her life: she doesn't know that her little boy is rocking himself past the point of exhaustion to supply her wants.
The story can also be seen as illustrating another point of Marx's: "capitalism is destined to fail because it eventually becomes like a cancer in its insatiable greed to own everything."It eventually get too greedy and kills the goose that lays its golden eggs.The same happens to Hester: Paul, her golden goose, kills himself with overwork because his mother's desire for money can never be satisfied.
 
Conclusion

Marxist critics analyze covert or latent content of literature taking into account the author’s class, prevailing socio-economic conditions at the time it was ‘produced’, its ‘consumers’ and the politics hidden or manifest in the work. Marxist criticism seems to conflict in its basic assumptions with those of Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, and has traditionally been opposed to psychoanalytical isolation of individuals from social structures.
 
REFERENCES

T Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, Berkeley, U of California P, 1976
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Marxism#cite_note-11
https://ipfsio/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/Marxist_literary_criticism.html#cite_ref-1