Marxist Criticism

 Marxist Literary Criticism

Marxism is a materialist philosophy that tries to interpret the world based on the concrete, natural world around us and our society. It is opposed to idealist philosophy, which conceptualizes a spiritual world elsewhere that influences and controls the material world. In one sense, it put people's thoughts into reverse gear as it deviated from the philosophies that came before it. Karl Marx has commented on Marxism's revolutionary nature, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." It is true that while other philosophies tried to understand the world, Marxism wanted to change it.

Classical Marxism: Basic Principles

According to Marxism, society progresses through the struggle between opposing forces. It is this struggle between opposing classes that results in social transformation. History progresses through this class struggle. Class struggle originates from the exploitation of one class by another throughout history. During the feudal period, the tension was between the feudal lords and the peasants, and in the Industrial Age, the struggle was between the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) and the industrial working class (the proletariat). Classes have common interests. In a capitalist system, the proletariat always conflicts with the capitalist class. According to Marx, this confrontation will finally replace the system with socialism.

Another important concept used by Marx was the dialectic, which was initially developed by the 18th-century German philosopher Hegel. Hegel was an idealist philosopher who used this term to refer to the emergence of new ideas by confronting opposing ideas. He believed that the world is governed by thought and that material existence expresses immaterial spiritual essence. However, Marx used the same concept to interpret the progress of the material world. According to him, Hegel put the world upside down by giving primacy to ideas, whereas Marx attempted to reverse it. So, Marx's dialectic is known as dialectical materialism. Marx argued that all mental( ideological) systems are products of actual social and economic existence. For example, the legal system reflects the interests of the dominant class in particular historical periods rather than the manifestation of divine reason. Marxist dialectic can be understood as the science of the general and abstract laws of development of nature, society and thoughts. It considers the universe as an integral whole in which things are interdependent rather than a mixture of things isolated from each other. All things contain internal dialectical contradictions, which are the world's primary cause of motion, change and development. Dialectical materialism was an effective tool for Marxists, revealing the secrets behind the social processes and their future development course. One of the fundamental concepts of classical Marxist thought is the concept of base and superstructure, which refers to the relationship between the material means of production and the cultural world of art and ideas. It is a symbolic concept that employs the structure of a building to explain this relationship. The foundation or the base stands for the socio-economic relations and the mode of production, and the superstructure stands for art, law, politics, religion and, above all, ideology. It refers to the idea that culture is governed by historical conditions and the relations of dominance and subordination prevalent in a particular society. Morality, religion, art and philosophy are seen as echoes of real-life processes. In Marx's words, they are "phantoms formed in men's brains." From this point of view, all cultural products are directly related to the economic base in a given society.

Take the case of the novels of Mulk Raj Anand, which address the life of the untouchables, coolies and ordinary workers struggling for their rights and self-esteem. They can be traced back to the class conflict prevalent in Indian society.

Socialist Realism

Socialist RealRealismk was shaped as the official aesthetic principle of the new communist society. It was mainly informed by 19th-century aesthetics and revolutionary politics. Raymond Williams identifies three principles as the founding principles of Socialist realRealismey: Partinost or commitment to the working-class cause of the party, Narodnost of popularity and Klassovost or writer's commitment to the class interests. The idea of Partinost is based on Vladimir Lenin's essay, Party Organisation and Party Literature (1905), reiterating the writer's commitment to the party's aim to liberate the working class from exploitation. Narodnost refers to the popular simplicity of the work of art.

In Paris Manuscripts, Marx refers to the alienation that originates from the separation of the mental and manual in the capitalist society. Earlier, under feudalism, the workers engaged in cottage industries produced various items on their own, and all activities related to the production happened at the same place under the supervision of the same people. However, under capitalism, the workers lost control over their products; they were engaged in producing various parts and were alienated from their work.

Klassovost refers to the writer's commitment to the interests of the working class. It is not related to the explicit allegiance of a writer to a particular class but the writer's inherent ability to portray the social transformation. For example, Balzac, a supporter of the Bourbon dynasty, provides a more penetrating account of French society than all the historians. Though Tolstoy, the Russian novelist, was an aristocrat by birth and had no affiliation to the revolutionary movements in Russia, Lenin called Tolstoy the "mirror of the Russian revolution" as he was successful in revealing the transformation in Russian society that led to the revolution through his novels.

Further developments in Marxist Aesthetics

Marxist criticism flourished outside the official line in various European countries. Russian Formalism emerged as a new perspective informed by Marxism in the 1920s. It was disbanded by the Communist Party as it did not conform to the official theoretical perspective of the party. The prominent members of this group were Victor Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky and Boris Eichenbaum, who published their ideas originally in Russian.

In Germany, the Frankfurt School of Marxist aesthetics was founded in 1923 as a political research institute attached to the University of Frankfurt. Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse were some of the essential figures attached to this school. They tried to combine aspects of Formalism with the theories of Marx and Freud. They produced studies on mass culture and communication for the first time and their role in social reproduction and domination. The Frankfurt School also generated one of the first models of critical cultural studies that analyzes the processes of artistic production and political economy, the politics of cultural texts, and audience reception and use of cultural artefacts.

Bertolt Brecht developed the concept of Epic Theatre, which dismantled the traditional naturalistic theatre and produced a new kind of theatre, altering the functional relations between stage and audience, text and producer, and producer and actor. Bourgeois theatre is based on illusionism. The audience is the passive consumer. The play needs to stimulate them to think constructively. According to Brecht, this is based on the assumption that the world is fixed, given and unchangeable, and art must provide escapist entertainment. Brecht's famous contribution is the alienation effect. The technique alienates the spectators from the performance and prevents them from emotionally identifying with the play. It presents the familiar experience in an unfamiliar light, forcing the audience to question the attitudes considered natural and unchanging. He employed techniques like back projection, song choreography cutting and disrupting the action rather than blending it smoothly.

The French Marxist thinker Louis Althusser further developed the Marxist approach by introducing various concepts, such as overdetermination and ideology.

Overdetermination is an effect that arises from various causes rather than a single factor. This concept undercuts simplistic notions of one-to-one correspondence between base and superstructure. Ideology is another term modified by Althusser. He states, "Ideology is a system of representations endowed with an existence and a historical role at the heart of a given society." It obscures social reality by naturalizing beliefs and promoting values supporting them. Civil society spreads ideology through the law, textbooks, religious rituals, and norms, and people imbibe them even without their knowledge. Ideology is instituted by the state through two apparatuses, Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA) and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA). The RSA includes law courts, prison, police, army, etc, and the ISA includes political parties, schools, media, churches, family, art, etc. Althusser imported structuralism to Marxism. In his view, society is a structural whole that consists of relatively autonomous levels: legal, political and cultural, whose mode of articulation is only determined by the economy.

The founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci, was a politician, political theorist, linguist and philosopher. Known as an original thinker among Marxist scholars, Gramsci introduced the concepts like Hegemony and the Subaltern. Hegemony is the domination of a particular section of 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 was initially used by Gramsci as a collective description for various and exploited groups who lack class consciousness. But now, it is being used to represent all marginalized sections like Dalits, women, minorities, etc.

An influential figure among the New Left was Raymond Williams. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature significantly contribute to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Williams was interested in the relationship between language, literature and society. He coined the critical method, Cultural Materialism, which has four characteristics, Historical context, Theoretical method, Political /commitment and Textual analysis. Cultural materialism gives us different perspectives based on what we suppress or reveal in reading from the past.