Marxism (Literary Theory)

Theory: The How's and Why's of Literature

Marxism - Part I

Those of you who are in high school or who have recently begin your intrepid voyage into the murky and dangerous waters of literary studies at university might find it exceedingly odd that I am discussing Marxism in a series on literary theory. After all, isn't Marxism a political theory which is more than 100 years old? Wouldn't it be better suited to a series on political philosophy? Also, you might associate Marxism strongly with socialism, or with the systems of communism that developed from it. This can be particularly hard to understand from an American point of view, since the opposite of communism, as it is taught, is capitalism and democracy. So, you might be wondering, is the next set of articles going to be on capitalist literary theory? After all, fair is fair, and if you are going to spend time on the communist side, you should give equal play to the capitalist side. Also, if you are talking about important literary theories, and presenting this series to a largely American audience, why would you bother with Marxism at all? Certainly you don't expect anyone to believe that this approach is practiced widely in American universities! Communism has fallen, capitalism has won, and anyone as bright as a college professor could not possibly miss that fact, and still work with a theory that simply doesn't work in practice.... Sit with me for a while, and I'll explain how all of this works in the big picture of both historical and contemporary literary theory, both in America and in across the world.

First, it is vital to understand something about Marxism as a political theory, and you are right to classify it as such. Whatever information you have gleaned about Marxism as a political and economic theory will be applicable here, including its opposition to capitalism. However, it is important to note that Marxism is not only concerned with economics and politics narrowly considered. Marxism is a way of looking at the world, a worldview if you like, that encompasses all elements of human being, from the largest scale imaginable to the most specific aspects of culture you can name, including artistic and literary production. I hinted earlier that the Russian Formalists were suppressed and then destroyed (in as far as their literary theoretical school existed) by the Marxist government, and the literary critics who followed the orthodox Marxist approach to literature. This shows the great reach and scope of Marxism, making it in many ways incomparable to capitalism. After all, part of the capitalist model is the idea that things should unfold largely without government interference, meaning that capitalism has nothing, or very little, to say about anything literary or academic. Therefore, Marxism and capitalism are not opposing literary theories, and the latter is not even recognized as a way of looking at texts.

It should also be noted that Marxist literary theory has had a profound influence on literary studies in America (and many other non-Marxist, non-socialist, non-communist nations), and that even during times when anything "red" was considered treasonous, Marxism was a popular approach to analyzing literature. However, you do not need to panic about this. A Marxist approach to literature does not commit its practitioner to supporting the erecting of a communist state in America, not does it mean that the person is plotting a revolution. Marxism sets out terms of production and political power in an elaborate system which lends itself well to examining the structures of many literary texts (especially novels). It certainly contains a critique of capitalism, but many literary works present such a critique too, so one can look at Marxism as useful way of coming to understand some literary texts, rather than as a stab in the back of Lady Liberty and the Red White and Blue.

I have already make certain to clarify that Marxist literary theory and Marxism as it has manifested itself in communist states are not always (or even usually) the same thing, and that people who follow Marxist literary theory are not gunning for a revolution, nor supporting North Korea against South Korea. It is highly unwise to paint the literary picture with a contemporary political brush, since doing so can only lead to confusion, intolerance, and wildly incorrect assumptions. However, while all of this is unquestionably true and important to keep in mind, in order to give you some idea of what Marxist literary theory looks like, it will be imperative to go into some detail with Marx's political and economic theories. These provide the basis for both literary and political Marxism, but it is important to note that many different theories and schools of political thought have arisen from Marx's and Engels's original writings. Chinese communism, Russian communism, and Cuban communism, for example, all claim or claimed to be following Marx, but all read him somewhat differently, and as a result, these governments often disliked and opposed each other. If this is true for separate nations, it is even more so for individuals within various Marxist traditions, and political conflict over how to read and apply Marx has been a hallmark of most communist states. It is perhaps best to look at the various manifestations of Marxism as different species that share a common ancestor; humans and chimps both descended from a common ancestor, and share many similar characteristics, but no one would make the mistake of believing that we are the same as a result, even if various people insisted on calling us by the same name.

As you might have guessed, the founder of Marxism is none other than a man named Marx, Karl Marx that is, a German born early in the 19th century. Although he has the honor of having the theory named after him, he was not alone in his creation of this theory; Friedrich Engels, a friend and countryman, co-founded what would become known as Marxism, and played a role in its dissemination and development even after Marx's death. Speculation abounds as to why the theory bears the name of only one of its founders, but my personal intuition is that Marx's last name combines well with the -ism suffix, while Engels simply doesn't. Engelsism is frankly a mouthful, awkward at best, and any combination of the two names is similarly unwieldy. So, because of the motion of historical forces antedating the theory by centuries (the happenstance of one founder inheriting a name that simply sounded better when combined with the correct suffix), we have Marxism. I am obviously not being entirely serious here, but the point about the influence of history is an important one for what is to come, as it is a central concern of Marxist theory.

Marx and Engels began publishing their shared ideas in shared books and essays around the middle of the 19th century, and these became extraordinarily influential over the course of the next century, perhaps reaching a zenith of influence from about 1910-1960, although this can be extended further in either direction, on the latter end perhaps right up to about and around 1990, when such radical changes in communist Europe were taking place (the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, and so on). Both also published separately, and Marxism is the result of later thinkers' and writers' syntheses of the works of both founders.

No theory springs from the mind completely unique and fullly grown, and it is important to note that Marxism has its roots in the European continental philosophy of Kant and Hegel, with elements of British and American empiricism and economic theory. As was the case with Deconstruction, it is difficult to explain any aspect of Marxism without reference to the other key terms, and so on in an ever widening circle. However, unlike Deconstruction, once we have toured through a few revolutions (and I use this term very intentionally) of this kind, a clearly defined basis for a theory will emerge; Marx and Engels had no desire to refute logic or resist systematization.

At the basis of Marxism is a process known as dialectical materialism, which is almost as complex and involving as it sounds, but which can be at least basically understood with some clarification. Beginning with the noun as something that we can anchor ourselves on, we can consider what materialism means in this context. Marxism is a theory/philosophy which supports a materialist view of reality and history. A materialist view essentially comprises a belief that the word as we see it, reality, is entirely constituted by material entities (matter), and that we too are composed of such material, making us capable of interacting with it. This might seem like common sense, in a way, but its implications are far more controversial. First of all, this denies the existence of God and the immortal soul, since these would be considered immaterial or solely spiritual entities. As a result, Marxism does not support religion, viewing it as a false way of seeing reality, and as a way for the ruling group to subject and pacify the people it controls. Further, materialism takes a page from the British empiricists, who believed that the world was available to us only through the senses, and that our very mental structures were dependent on our previous sensory experiences (as we see in John Locke's notion of the human mind as a blank slate upon which experience writes our histories and identities). This also points toward an idea of the individual not as the independent arbiter of his or her own being, but rather another material entity which is subject to the influences of the world in which it exists, and the historic circumstances which led to its creation. Needless to say, this integrates well with many of Darwin's evolutionary ideas, and it is no coincidence that Darwin and Marx were writing and theorizing in the same historical period.

The interaction between individual agents and historical/social reality (as well as between individuals and between various socio-historical factors) is where the dialectical nature of dialectical materialism comes into play. All of the material entities in the world are in a constant dialect (a relationship of mutual influence) with each other and with the social and historical forces that exist and have existed as constituents of reality. According to this view of reality, nothing exists in isolation, and it does one no good to look at an individual entity and attempt to explain it only in terms of itself. Relationships are of paramount important, and each relationship must be cast in terms of mutual causes and effects. Relations are both dynamic (constantly moving and changing their forms) as well as diachronic (developing through time and contingent upon the history of their development). Nothing in the world simply is; everything is always in a process of becoming, through the dynamic dialectic process of negation and synthesis.

The idea of constant becoming and dynamically evolving can be seen (as it is, for example, in biological evolution) as a process with no end or goal; biologists do not believe that nature is somehow guiding its forms of life to particular results. Life forms thrive or die based on their suitability to the environment in which they exist, and those which are best suited to their environment will successfully reproduce, while those that are not will simply die. Some brands of Marxism follow this a-teleological (not concerned with goals or outcomes) outlook, but Marxism is usually associated with the idea of dialectical materialism as a form of progress on the grandest scale. Societies, as they are born, develop, and then rise to greater and greater complexity, moving in a natural way through various stages of development. The first of these is known as feudalism, a state of society especially predominant in the Middle Ages in Europe. As you might remember from a history class or any of a number of great books and movies set in those times, feudal society consisted of strict class divisions based on status and wealth. A very limited number of individuals were granted land by the king of a given area. These large parcels of land were further subdivided by these individuals, and so on, creating a hierarchy with the king as the ultimate owner of all the lands, with a chain of landlords of decreasing rank being in control of decreasing parcels of land. In return for being given this land, the landlords offered their military might to the king, which was a system of mutual benefit that made both the lords and the kingdom more secure from both internal and external threats.

Unfortunately, this left the vast majority of people out of the money, and most of the population toiled without any land of their own. The kingship and the various lordships were passed through and between a highly limited number of families, which constituted these families as the perpetual ruling elite. Once we get past the lowest levels of landowners, we cross a great divide, the huge gulf which separated those who owned the land from those who worked on it. The people at the very bottom of the feudal society were known by many names, but I will refer to them here as peasants (note that none of the terms is at all flattering, and all have taken on negative connotations which adhere even to this day. Try calling someone a peasant and see what sort of reaction you get; I assure you it won't be positive). The peasants most often led miserable lives, because they did all of the work on the land and essentially received nothing for it, while those above them gained all the benefit of their toil.

The peasants were basically uneducated farmers who were allowed to live on a given patch of land on the condition that they paid their lord a large percentage of what they managed to grow. The lord of the land was accountable to the lord above him, and so on, right on up to the king. Each of these lords was a middle-man of sorts, taking a percentage of the peasants' crop and passing the rest on up the line. Peasants could keep what they made beyond their annual and seasonal quotas, but that was all. If they just produced enough, or fell short, the lord got all they produced, and they were left to starve to death. Not meeting a quota was not acceptable, and punishment came from the top down.

As must be evident, feudal society is one of the most unequal and unfair ways of producing and distributing wealth that one can imagine. Wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a tiny majority, while everyone else has no resources and no rights. The decision of a king could change the course of history. The power of a peasant, however, was so limited that they were politically invisible as individuals. As a group, they were the backbone of the kingdom, without which nothing else would have been possible. However, barring unification and revolution (which we will discuss in more length later) the peasant was at the mercy of those from whom he was given permission to live on his land. Needless to say, Marxist theory sees this as a low point of development in the history of human civilization.

You might be surprised to hear that the next stage in the process of historical and social evolution is capitalism, which is followed by socialism, and finally communism as the final state toward which the historical dialectic is aiming. The goal of the Marxist is thus to help the world (and it was certainly conceived on a global scale) to move through the necessary stages through to the ultimate and desirable end point, the communist state. Here, the inequalities that existed in the previous stages would finally be eliminated, and people would benefit equally, without anyone profiting from the work of another while the person who actually does the work suffers and receives little or nothing. With economic equality would come political and social equality, and, in short, the earth would be a fine place to live for all, united in our common humanity and the pursuit of our mutual good.

If you think this sounds somewhat utopian, you are not alone, and various streams of Marxist thought see the reality of the ideal end-point as a noble goal which society should always strive for but which may be impossible to reach (especially in light of the idea that everything is always in a state of becoming, and is unfixed). Regardless of the varying beliefs within Marxism as to the achievability of their stated goals, there is a definite belief that capitalism (which was the dominant system of production in Europe and North America at the time Marx and Engels were writing) is a temporary and transitory state of affairs that, like feudalism, must give way to a more equitable economic and social system. Basically, for Marxists, capitalism is at least seen as being undesirable, and usually seen as being downright evil.

I can hear many of you objecting that this view of capitalism is entirely unjustifiable, and that capitalism is completely unlike feudalism. After all, in capitalist societies democracy is the dominant form of government, and all people, regardless of their status and wealth, have the opportunity to elect their governments. Furthermore, the rulers are not hereditary monarchs, but regular citizens, and any citizen can achieve any position in society. People who do not rule still own their own land, and people can choose what they want to do and where they want to work; no one is forced into labor, and there is no sinister lord forcing you to produce to make him fat and rich. As if this were not enough to make the differences between feudalism and capitalism perfectly clear, there is the further difference that everyone is treated equally under the law in capitalist societies, and no one, regardless of his or her position, is seen as better or worse than anyone else when it comes to justice. People are judged by what they do, not by who they are.

Of course, all of these statements about capitalist nations are based on contemporary life in Western democracies; they simply were not true at the time Marx and Engels were writing. The comparison of the factory worker in England during the Industrial Revolution, for example, to the peasant of feudal, medieval Europe, is not as far off as you might think. Individuals lived in squalor and slaved all day for, perhaps, enough money to afford them a bare existence, and perhaps enough liquor to make their constant drudgery bearable. Shop and factory owners determined the fates of their workers, and unless you wanted to starve to death, you would do as you were told. Some early capitalist cultures paid lip service to democratic and social equality, but no one was fooled into believing that the poor factory worker would be treated the same as a gentleman in the court of law. The word of the gentleman was enough to trump the word of the worker, and so while the workers were not absolute slaves like feudal peasants, they weren't so far removed from them as one might like to believe.

In fact, even if we look at capitalism as it manifests itself in contemporary society, we can make a Marxist argument comparing it to feudalism in a stronger way than one might expect possible. The concentration of wealth, for example, and the ability of the wealthy and powerful to evade the law are points that we have all heard time and again as critiques of the economic and political system in which we live. I won't go into great detail here as you likely know these arguments well weather you agree with them or not. Suffice it to say, Marxist theory is certainly not at a loss when it comes to justifying their condemnation of capitalism, even in its present form.

In fact, much of Marxist theory, in any of the forms it has taken, emerges as a harsh critique of capitalism, both as capitalism manifests itself in reality, and as it is conceived ideologically (an important term in the Marxist context I will talk more about further along). Marxism is defined, at its very roots, as an economic theory first and foremost. It is not limited to economics, however; it sees the economic structure of a society as the roots from which everything else emerges, and as a result, it is impossible to talk about another aspect of a given society without reference to the economic base which underlies it. All of the more abstract entities which exist within a culture, such as government, rest of the society's economic base, and cannot be considered in isolation from it.

Basically, the content of this and the previous articles in this series has been devoted to setting up a general framework of Marxism broadly conceived. Marxism is an economic and political theory as well as a philosophy and a coherent worldview which see civilizations as progressing from the stage of low development and equality (feudalism) through a series of steps leading to the final and most desirable communist state. It sees capitalism as a stage only just beyond feudalism, and much Marxist thought even up to the present day is based on a critique of capitalism. For Marxists, society is contingent upon both history and materiality, none of which can be considered without reference to the others. Relation and mutual influence is the key to understanding reality, and to consider anything in isolation is to miscomprehend it. With these general ideas firmly in place, it is now time to begin looking at the specific terms and concepts Marxism is best known for.

The base of the Marxist idea of society is composed of what they call the means of production. The means of production consists of all the elements necessary for anyone in a society to be able to produce anything at all. The means of production can be divided into two further categories, those being the means of labor, and the subject of labor. Most simply put, we can start with the most basic stuff at the bottom of any economic system, which is the subject of labor. The subject of labor is the raw materials available within a given social context. Water, for example, is a subject of labor in all societies, and any other natural resources or raw materials fit into this category as well, including timber, coal, wheat, and even the wind in some cases. These are known collectively as the subject of labor because these are the things which are subject to the labor that gets performed. When I mine, for example, the thing I am mining is subject to my action. You might now be thinking that the term object of labor makes more sense in this context, both grammatically speaking and otherwise, and I am inclined to agree with you. However, we didn't create the theory and its terms, so we are going to have to let things stand as they are.

The second constituent of the means of production is known as the means of labor, and this time the term sounds a lot more like it intuitively should. The means of labor includes such things as the technologies that we employ to do the work we do. The means of labor can be viewed both more directly, as in the machine or tool I use to do my work (the printing press for making pamphlets, the shovel I use to dig coal), as well as more abstractly, as in the infrastructure I need in order to get to work in the first place, and to transport what I produce to other places (the roads I travel to work, and the power lines which connect my factory to the grid). Basically, the means of labor are the things, both specific and abstract, which are needed to perform work on the subjects of labor. All of these things taken together form the means of production, and this is at the base of every society, influencing everything else. All of this, of course, is completely useless without a final element, which Marx referred to as labor power. As you might have suspected, labor power is the actual work that people apply to the means of labor to produce something from the subject of labor.

An example here might help to crystallize and relate all of these terms more clearly. Gus is a miner, and he works at the local coalmine. He catches a bus (a means of labor) to work and travels on the highway (a means of labor). Once he arrives on the site, he travels down a long, deep mineshaft on a small railcar (both mineshaft and railcar being means of labor) until he reaches his final destination. He picks up his pick (yet another means of labor) and swings it (providing the necessary labor power) at the coal face (the subject of labor) in front of him. His friend Ted stands nearby with a shovel (a means of labor), and shovels (more labor power) the coal (still the subject of labor) into a railcar (a means a labor) to be taken to the surface (by more labor power) via a system of rails (a means of labor) running to the surface.

Gus, Ted, and everyone and everything else at the mine and connecting the mine to the rest of the world are all intricately related, and the mine simply couldn't function without all of the means of production we have been discussing, and many, many more to boot. Thinking about the Marxist insistence on examining everything in relation to other things, we can see it makes perfect sense with regard to the coal mine. After all, how could we make any kind of an evaluation of the railcar we just discussed if we didn't consider its relation to the mine in which it works? We could perhaps say something of how the railcar might move, and we may notice that it would be useful for transporting people or things from one place to another, but we would be stymied when we saw the thing entering a deep dark pit. The railcar, its tracks, the pick and the shovel do not tell us anything on their own. Taken together, however, they comprise the means of production which is the coal mine.

Notice that Marxism does not refer to people as means of production, either as subjects of labor or as means of labor; this is no accident, and the separation of people from things is a vital Marxist premise. The phrase "human resources" for example, would be completely repugnant to Marx and Engels, for it implies that human beings are being reduced to mere instruments or raw materials, which takes away from them all agency and dignity, making them seem as if they are only as valuable as the coal they mine and the picks they use to mine it. This runs contrary to all that Marxism stands for, and I will be getting into this in far more detail a little later. Suffice it to say for now that human instrumentality is anathema to Marxist thought, and it is one of the strongest and most vehement criticisms they level at capitalist societies.

With the base of society determined to be the means of production, Marxism goes on to relate (but certainly not equate) everything else to this ultimate base. This is where the well known class distinctions within Marxism come to the fore. People certainly should not be reducible to things according to Marxism, but in a capitalist society, this is precisely what happens. People are divided into classes which are determined by their relation to the means of production. One group of people own or control the means of production as well as access to the means of production. Bill Gates, to use a contemporary example, owns his company, Microsoft. He owns the land his buildings are on, the buildings themselves, the machinery used to make his computers, and the rest. Needless to say, Bill Gates stands in a superior relation to the means of production than, for example, the janitor who sweeps the floor in one of his buildings. This is the essential division of capitalist society, and Marxists see this as analogous to the situation evident under a feudal system. The comparison is obviously not fully applicable, and any Marxist will admit this; after all, they differentiate between feudal and capitalist societies for a reason. There is no obvious king at the top of the pyramid of a capitalist society, for while there is a president (in the American context) who holds primary political power, he does not own all the lands and collect the profits from them (and although one could argue that the collection of taxes is analogous, the president can't legally keep all of this money).

The comparison between capitalist and feudal societies may seem somewhat severe, but the parallels are there, depending on how broadly you want to conceive of things. Bill Gates is the capitalist, the person who owns everything and calls the shots. He is a lot like the king in a feudal system, standing at the top of the organization (but not the nation as a whole). Like that king, he says what happens on his land, and he only invites the people he wants to work there for him. These people work for him, according to the standards he has set up, and if they fail to meet his expectations, they are cast off his land, much like the peasants of the feudal system. Further, there is a hierarchy of command, where Gates apportions his lands to lords (we call them managers) of varying ranks all the way down the line. Each acts as a middle-man, and all these manager-lords take a cut of what the peasants (the lowest ranked office workers and programmers) produce, with Gates at the top collecting a portion of every worker's yield. Within this (vast) network, Bill Gates is supreme overlord, and while he is subject to political authorities outside his jurisdiction (as several antitrust suits at least point to), so long as he remains within those bounds, he reaps the rewards of all the work that takes place in his domain.

It is obvious that there are at least two classes in place in the little capitalist scenario I just outlined; the people (or perhaps person) who own and control the means of production as well as access to the means of production, and the people who supply the labor power to the means of production, but who do not own or control it. The class of owners is known as the capitalists, but also by the title bourgeoisie. Bill Gates would certainly fall under this category, since he is indisputably at the top of the hierarchy I just outlined. The managers at the top of the pecking order closest to Gates would fall into this category as well, as would several other levels of managers in this scheme. In fact, if we take the idea of the bourgeoisie most simply, all of the managers who have people working under them would be lumped into that category, although Marxist theory does make some finer distinctions. The people at the top of the pecking order can be seen as the wealthy bourgeoisie, who have amassed a great amount of capital, and who do not need to supply any labor power to make their living. They arrange things, perhaps, and give commands, but they do not need to touch the subject of labor nor any of the means of labor. The petty bourgeoisie, on the other hand, are in a more tenuous position, which might be represented using the Microsoft model if we turn our attention to the lowest level managers. These managers do have people working under them, so they are for the most part separated from the means of production by a wall of individuals. However, it is often the case that such low-level managers have to step in and help their workers from time to time, applying some labor power to a means of labor working on the subject of labor. They occupy a middle position, and thus do not comfortably reside within the bifurcated class system.

At the very bottom of the pyramid, pecking order, or whatever other metaphor of hierarchy you would like to use, are the people who do not own the means of production nor control access to it. These people, epitomized by the office drones in the Microsoft scenario I have been outlining, are known as the proletariat. The proletariat are those like the computer programmer in our most recent example, and the miner in the one before that. These people have direct contact with the means of labor, and through their labor power use these means to add value to the subject of labor, whatever that is in each specific case. Basically, the proletariat do the work, and the bourgeoisie get rich, which reveals the inherent inequality and injustice of the capitalist system, as far as Marxists are concerned.

At this point, you might have several objections in your head that you are dying to see addressed; allow me to take a moment to bring up some of them. First, I can hear you thinking, although there is an apparent inequality here, there is no injustice behind it, and indeed, the inequality we see is only apparent. Bill Gates might sit at the top of the pile now, but he had to work hard in the beginning. He was a savvy businessman with an original idea, and he piloted it to the great success he enjoys now. In short, his hard work paid off, and he is where he is because of his determination; he provided plenty of this "labor power" the Marxists keep talking about in order to be where he is today.

A further objection, I can again here you thinking eloquently, exists when we examine the other side of the equation. Yes, the office drone and the coal miner are not in as good a position as Bill Gates, but there are reasons for that which have nothing to do with injustice. They have the same opportunities to succeed as he did, and if they work just as hard and are just as savvy as Gates was, they have the chance at hitting it as rich as he did. So, while people are undoubtedly in different positions within society, it is based on their willingness to work hard, and the talents and abilities they have, not on a systemic failure to give them the same opportunities. If Bill Gates can do it from such a modest beginning, anyone can do it.

Having taken myself totally out of this debate, I will now allow the Marxist to respond, who has been eagerly awaiting her chance to refute the capitalist justifications of their system. You see, she begins, while your idea of justice and equal opportunity is theoretically fair to all, it ignores a vital aspect of existence that forms the foundation of Marxist thought and theory; history and material reality. You see, while there might not be an active law or physical force directed by someone against another person which is keeping her from various opportunities, there is the simple fact of material and historical contingency which determines a person's options. You capitalists somehow think the individual is floating above material and historical reality, unaffected by its progress and its conditions. However, this is merely an illusion you foster to justify the system of abuse and subjugation which defines your society.

What does it even mean when you say people are "free" to achieve whatever life outcome they choose? What it really means is that there is (in theory, at least) no one actively stopping them from pursuing various courses of action. However, this ignores the reality of the situation, wherein historical and material circumstances make it impossible for a given individual to benefit from her work the same way another might. Bill Gates might not have been a billionaire to begin life, but he was born into a situation that made his becoming a billionaire possible. He was loved and cared for by his parents, got a solid education, and fostered a great idea into something extraordinary. Think, however, about how things would have gone if Bill had been abandoned as a child and raised in an orphanage. He would have been a different person, perhaps even one who would not have had the capacities to do what he is doing now, much less the opportunities.

Further, she continues, besides the historical contingency of being born in a given time and a given place to given parents, over which you obviously have no control, there is a host, a hoard of contingencies that permeate even our adult lives which you insist on imbuing with some kind of magical super self-determination. If Bill Gates had decided to attend a different university, would he have met Steve Jobs? This meeting was entirely fortuitous, but the rest of both of the men's lives was forever altered by it. The agency of each of us is important, but we must be aware of the historical material circumstances within which our agency must operate. In light of the undeniable presence of this historical contingency which cannot be ignored, it is best to create a society wherein the imbalances are limited or eliminated. It is the only moral way of being in the world.

It is undoubtedly true that this back and forth could go on all day, and even all year, probably for the next 50 years, without interruptions and without resolution. For those of you who might find this hard to believe, consider that these same arguments have been present from the beginning of Marxism more than 150 years ago, and in the intervening time, they still separate capitalist from socialist or communist doctrine very tellingly. With the fall of Soviet Russia, and with Western democracies providing more traditionally socialist services and functions to their citizens, there is no doubt that both sides are more willing to consider the viewpoint of the other in many cases. Even China's government, ruling with a white-knuckled grip on its communist powers, has been gradually opening up its markets to non-communist, non-socialist nations.

Moving back to more directly examine our topic, we can see two distinct classes emerging, the proletariat, and the bourgeoisie. Marx, as we mentioned, also made a finer distinction between the petty bourgeoisie and the wealthy bourgeoisie, but he surmised that the petty bourgeoisie would be subsumed by the proletariat (or rather, pushed into that role by the wealthy bourgeoisie), and this is something we can see today with the largest companies driving the smaller ones out of business. The local grocery store owned by Gus and Ted (who in this role would be petty bourgeoisie, since they employ a few people, but also work themselves), making just enough to support them, their families, and pay their bills, is difficult to maintain in the face of competition from supermarkets. So, their business fails, and they go off to work in the mines, now certainly members of the proletariat.

Theory: The How's and Why's of Literature

Marxism - Part II

The divisions between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are enormous, and they are predicated first and foremost on the basis of financial and economic differences. The bourgeoisie control the means of production, while the proletariat have no control over these means. It should also be noted that, in a capitalist structure, the rich grow richer, and the poor get poorer, as economic forces force this gap even further open. The problem the Marxists see, as we can glean from the supermarket example, is that the individuals who are in control of the means of production can operate in such a way as to make sure they and only they continue to have such access. My goal as a capitalist is to accrue as much capital as I possibly can. The best way to do that is to expand my business or enterprise as broadly as possible. I benefit most from selling my products at the highest prices I can get, and from keeping my expenses to a minimum. One of my primary expenses is often labor power (the work people do), since I have to pay my workers. The less I have to pay them, the more money I am going to make. This is a common complaint even today among various union members. If a company can save money by going to Mexico or China where labor is cheaper than it is in America, that is precisely what the company will do. People are often treated as means instead of ends, and this is a problem the Marxists detest.

When we think about how things get done, and where profit or value even enters the system, we have to look at the workers, or the proletariat. Looking at the coal mine example we used earlier, we can see that the coal itself is not worth anything to anyone sitting there in the ground perhaps even miles under the ocean floor. Sure, there could be value here, or one might say that there is potential value, but this potential will never be realized unless labor power, the work of people, if brought to bear on it. When people start digging holes to get to the coal, breaking it into manageable, portable pieces, and transporting it to the surface, it suddenly becomes very valuable. What has given it this extra, surplus value that it did not possess before? If you said labor power, you are exactly right. Again, although John Locke is often hailed as a thinker who paved the way for capitalist democracies, the idea of things gaining value through human labor that we see here comes from Locke, and he even took this a step further. He claimed that when a person works the land, and makes it yield a bounty, the land and the bounty belong to the person who put the work in to make it so. If you think this sounds a lot like a Marxist ideal, you are completely right, and many Marxists have cited Locke in this context.

The problem Marxists have with the bourgeoisie is that they see them as exploiting the proletariat. Exploitation has a definite meaning with regard to Marxist thought, and it is not simply a matter of judging if someone is being unwillingly taken advantage of. In the capitalist system, the bourgeoisie control the means of production, while the proletariat has to apply their labor power to achieve anything. The injustice here lies in the fact that labor power is the thing that makes the subjects of labor (the raw materials) worth more than they are in their natural state. In the previous example of coal, for instance, the coal is worthless unless people apply their labor power to bringing it to the surface and delivering it to those who want it. Exploitation occurs when these people receive less value from their work than they should.

Many objections might be on your mind here. After all, who is to determine how much a person's work is worth? If the coal miner gets $20 an hour for her labor, isn't this a fair trade for that work? It is a good wage, and is certainly more than many people receive for doing jobs that are equally taxing and difficult. The Marxist equation, however, eliminates the need for one to calculate the value of work precisely. They are not complaining that people aren't receiving some dollar figure above what they are actually making. Their objection comes from that fact that, whatever dollar number they make for their earnings, they are missing out on a lot of the value that their work is generating. No matter what industry or business you are taking about, the workers only receive a fraction of the value that they add to the subject of labor. If this were not the case, the business owners would not be able to make such a fantastic profit from their work.

Say I am a miner, and I create 5 units of value (the measuring stick is completely unimportant). My colleagues, all 99 of them, create 5 units of value each as well. This creates a total of 500 units of value which out labor has made. Each of us will be paid, but none of us is paid for the full five units of value we have created. Our employer, who owns the mine and everything in it, takes the coal we have mined and sells it, collecting the 500 units of value that we have put into it. He turns around and pays us for our work, but does not give us each the five units of value we have contributed. Perhaps he gives us each one unit of this value. The rest he keeps for himself, and in so doing, makes a profit. It is obvious that he performs some function here, and does some work, but it is certainly not equal to the 400 units of value that he makes from our combined efforts in the mine. By paying us less than our work is worth, he makes a profit. This is exploitation. Regardless of whether we do the work willingly or not, this is the injustice that Marxists see in the capitalist system. In fact, this exploitation is a defining feature of capitalism. All businesses in the capitalist system (save for those labeled non-profit, which are actually following a socialist model in the midst of a capitalist world) have profit as the key goal; the very term capitalist is derived from the excess capital that people amass through exploitation. Excess capital can only accrue if I am paying people less than the value they are creating, and so any business which makes a profit is exploiting its workers, according to Marxist thought.

The need for business owners (the bourgeoisie) to create capital on the backs of their workers (the proletariat) creates an oppositional situation, and there is an evident conflict between the two groups. The more work the owner can get from the workers, the more capital he will accrue, because he only gives the workers a small fraction of the value they have created. So, it is in his interest to get as much work from them as he can, and to give them as little of the value they have created as possible. The workers, on the other hand, know they are only going to be paid a set amount for the work they do, measured usually in hours rather than by any objective standard of value created. So, they would always like to be doing less work during the times they are working, since they will see no benefit if they work harder. Of course, the owners know this, and so set up the minimum standards for work output that guide the creation of quotas. The workers want to keep their jobs, so they will work as hard as they need to meet the minimum standards. Because the owners know the workers will work to the minimum, and because they want to make as much profit as possible, they continually set the quotas higher, so that they are sure to be extracting the maximum amount of work possible out of the workers. In this way, the capitalist ensures that profit is maximized, and the workers are powerless. They will do the work they are assigned to the high level required, and if they are unable (not just unwilling) they will be fired. Good intentions do not create labor value. So, the system punishes the unwilling and the unable equally.

You might argue at this point that the workers could simply refuse to work, but this is not such a straightforward solution as you might believe. After all, the owner controls the means of production, and so the workers can either work for him under his conditions, or find another employer who will do exactly the same thing. The choice, then, is between various levels and kinds of exploitation, not between being exploited and not being exploited. Because the capitalists (the owners, the bourgeoisie) have control over the means of production, and can invite whomever they like to come and work for them, the workers (the proletariat) must opt for some version of the capitalist system of exploitation outlined above. The capitalists design the system to benefit themselves, and this design means that the proletariat must either follow along, or starve to death. Needless to say, this creates a great tension between the groups; the proletariat sees the bourgeoisie living a wealthy life, doing little work but being rewarded out of all proportion. The workers feel like they are being controlled by the owners, and feel like they have themselves become no more than part of the means of production. The employer, for example, might have paid $40, 000 for a truck that hauls coal, and might buy a similar truck each year. The worker, who makes this same amount each year, is very much like this truck; he is a tool used to make profit and move coal. The needs of the truck are not a part of the profit equation, and the needs of the worker are similarly not important to the bottom line of the owners.

The divide between the work done by the proletariat and the compensation they receive for it results in an unfortunate effect, something Marxism refers to as alienation. We use this word in everyday English to indicate a feeling of being set apart from others, and from the interactions of people going on around us. The Marxist use of the term is comparable, but is defined more specifically as a predictable and inevitable reaction to capitalist exploitation. When human beings embark on a given project, they feel a connection to it; a large part of our identity revolves around both our occupation, and the energy we put into achieving it. The coal miners from the previous examples, for instance, would likely introduce themselves in a manner similar to that which follows: "Hi, my name is Ted. I am a coal miner from West Virginia. I have a beautiful wife and three adorable kids." Our names, occupations, locations, and personal relations are incredibly powerful forces when it comes to shaping our identity. In the capitalist system, names, locations, and relations are left out of the picture entirely, and only occupation matters. This alone is not conducive to making a person feel whole.

One could argue here that a person can foster these personal aspects of oneself in other ways, outside the place of work, and I think this is a valid point. However, even looking only at the working situation in which an individual operates, there is a strong disconnect between human value and human production that underlies capitalism. If I am living out in the forest in my log cabin with my family, I am compensated directly and appropriately for the work of my hands and mind. It takes an enormous amount of work to chop trees and build a suitable dwelling, but I can be sure that the more work I put in, the better the dwelling will be. Whatever work I put into it, I will receive the benefit; I will be protected better from the elements, I and my family will be safer from wild animals, and I will be less likely to have to build the thing again from scratch. The same applies for the farming I do, and every other aspect of my life.

In this situation, there is a direct connection between my physical and creative activities and my life situation. I reap the value from what I do, to the maximum proportion. Many of you have likely felt a great satisfaction after doing a hard day's work, when you can relax, and witness with pleasure the fruits of your labors. You feel like a part of the thing you have made, and in an important way, you are. By infusing it with your labor, which is a part of your self, you have made the thing yours, and you can be proud of it. You can enjoy it fully, and thus gain the full value you put into it.

Compare this, then, to what happens within a capitalist labor structure. First, almost all tasks are divided into tiny pieces, as this makes the process more efficient. It would be much more time consuming if the same person who broke the coal into portable pieces also shoveled it, transported it, and then sold it to the eventual buyers. It is more effective from the standpoint of profit to train each person to do a particular, very specific task. I pick the coal, you shovel it, he transports it, and so on. This is a highly specialized version of the division of labor, and it sets up the workers involved on a conceptual assembly line.

The assembly line approach to production automatically reduces the people involved to their functions as a part of the larger system. Using the coal example again, imagine you are the person in charge of shoveling the coal. You stand there all day, slightly stooped, and just shovel. That is it. You know what you are supposed to do, how quickly you need to go, and where you have to put the coal you have picked up. You don't need to know anything else about the process. You could be a model employee for the coal company, and have no idea what coal might even be used for. It would even be possible to do your job without even knowing what it is you are shoveling. Even if you do know that what you are shoveling is called coal, and that it burns well, making it an important source of fuel, you might still be totally in the dark about where it goes after you shovel it, how it is sold and transported, and the rest. However, even if you happen to know the entire process, from start to finish, the fact remains that all you need to know how do to, all you need to do, is physically move the coal at your feet into the container a couple of feet away. That is your job, and although you may refer to yourself as a coal miner, you are in reality a human shovel, an extension of the tool you use, and a simple, expendable cog in the machine of which you are a part. Perhaps if you were involved in the process from start to finish, you would have the satisfaction of knowing that the work you do warms homes and provides power to your entire town. However, because you are a tiny piece of a huge system, it is hard to connect the labor you have done (which is considerable, as anyone who has ever shoveled coal will rightly claim) with the good that it is doing for others.

This is one way that alienation emerges in the capitalist system of production. There is a disconnection that rises up between the work done and the value that it provides. People are creatures that want their actions to have meaning, to have good results that they can be proud of. However, when the work I do is reduced to an abstraction, I loose the connection I have to the labor of my own hands and mind. This makes it difficult for me to see my work as valuable, and this makes me feel disconnected and unimportant. At the end of the day, all the hard work I have done, pouring myself into the task at hand, has resulted in nothing more than a pile of coal being moved from one place to another nearby place. This is not something I can easily pin a positive identity on.

Perhaps, however, in the modern world system, it is naïve to think that the extreme division of labor could be avoided. In order to meet the needs of a burgeoning population, it is perhaps necessary to create systems that maximize efficiency to the highest possible level. It is difficult, after all, to heat a city without such models as the mine I have been discussing. And perhaps people could feel less alienated if they were also given a more direct connection to the system of which they are a part. If workers were updated about the results of their labor, rewarded for their contributions, and invited to partake in the decision making process of the system as a whole, perhaps alienation effects could be reduced or eliminated. Unfortunately, even if all of this were true, and took place, alienation arises through another channel, this one endemic to capitalist methods of production.

The problem of the extreme division of labor present on the human assembly line is further compounded by the fact that workers do not receive the full value of the work they do. The most satisfying situation for working is one in which I am intimately connected to the work that I am doing, and am a valuable part of the process from start to finish. Also, ideally I am directly benefited by what I have produced, which is the case in the example of the wilderness-dwelling family I spoke of earlier. I clear the ground, plow the earth, sow the seeds, and collect the harvest, thereby receiving the full value of what I have done in the form of food. This obviously benefits me directly, and I am intimately involved in the process from start to finish. As we have mentioned, however, this is not always possible in contemporary society, and some form of the division of labor is perhaps unavoidable.

However, there is nothing inherent in the division of labor which makes it so that I cannot receive the full benefit, the full value, of what I do. It is obvious that I cannot receive the value of my work directly in most labor situations; after all, what would I do with all of the coal I shoveled, even if I could take it all home with me? Sure, I might burn some of it to heat my home, but I would have to trade the rest for things that I needed (like food). This is where monetary exchange becomes most useful; I can exchange my coal for money, and use this to buy other things. Of course, I am not in the best position to be carrying coal around and selling it (since I have no control over the means of production), so this is simply impractical. As a result, I agree to put my value into the coal in a focused way (shoveling it), and agree to be paid for the work I do. The problem here, as we have discussed already, is that I am only given a small fraction of the value I put in.

When I do a great deal of work, create a lot of value, and then get compensated only for a small fraction of that value, alienation once again rears its ugly head. Not only am I disconnected from the direct value of what I am doing (I would not be able to make good use of the coal itself), but I am even denied the currency equivalent of the work I do. I get paid for part of the value of what I do, and my employer keeps whatever surplus remains in the form of profits. In taking the reward for most of my work, he robs me of the value I deserve, which completely destroys my connection to what I am doing. Even considered from the broadest possible angle - x work = x value - I am denied any sense of connection, because this sense of my work's relation to its value is utterly defied, and is actually expressed in a capitalist system as x work = (1/10) x value, or a similarly unbalanced ratio. It is the divide between the value I create and the value I receive that alienates me from my own labor. Since my work is such an important part of me, I feel unvalued and unvaluable. The value of my labor returns to me in a highly reduced form, and I, as a result, see myself as less valuable.

The result of the multiple forces of alienation is that workers feel severed from the work of their hands and minds, and also from a very important aspect of their own humanity. As a result, their humanity is reduced, and they find themselves dwarfed by the megaliths they have had some abstract hand in creating. Rather than standing in the role of creators over the things created, the creations stand over their creators, in more than one way. First, the creations are often so large, and exist on such a grand scale, that the individuals who have helped to make them come into being seem tiny beside it. Anyone who has worked to construct a huge building or machine knows this feeling intimately.

Further, the work not only stands over the people in a literal, physical way, by virtue of being larger (by several orders of magnitude in some cases), but it also stands over the people in a more abstract way, with regard to importance. The goal of a given company, after all, is not to make its workers happy (though this can be a good and useful side aim, which some companies do take into consideration). The company exists with a single end in mind, which is to make profits. The way this is accomplished is through the creation of something, and this something is the product. The product, since it is the vehicle for profits, and since profits rest on its shoulders, is the most important thing in the company. This kind of mentality is visible everywhere, especially between rival companies who are competing in the same market for the same customers. The idea, being, and image of a bottle of Coke stands at the center of the company which carries the same name, and the product is considered paramount. It would be tantamount to blasphemy to believe that the product was worse than Pepsi, and if a worker had the audacity to bring a can of Pepsi to work, or to suggest that management put a Pepsi machine in the cafeteria, that employee would likely find him or her self looking for work somewhere else, or at least on the wrong end of a warning to the same effect. In this example, it is clear that the product stands above the workers; after all, no one would suggest that the product be changed or inconvenienced to accommodate the worker. Better to fire an individual, or several, or thousands, than to allow the product to suffer an indignity. Clearly, from an ethical, human, standpoint, things have been reversed.

Because of the alienation and reversal of dignity-attribution that takes place under capitalism, Marxist theory does not call the things produced in this system "products," because this conveys a sense of coming into being through human labor that is simply not appropriate to what happens. The things that are made in capitalist systems stand before all else, and they have so much importance that the conditions of their creation (which in reality does rely on human labor) are forgotten, and they seem to stand by themselves, not the result of a historical process involving human labor, but as self-created, self-important entities that defy cause and effect, and eschew all humanity and human involvement. Thus, they refer to the results of capitalist production not as products, but as commodities, a term which represents the things that are made in their final state, without reference to their history and the process by which they are produced. Commodities stand alone, vitally important, and ignore the labor used to create them. This reinforces the alienation of the workers, and strips them of the last vestiges of their human value.

In the system of capitalist production, as the Marxist sees it, there is a hierarchy of being which twists all that is good. The bourgeoisie stand at the top, and this group controls the means of production. Next, the commodity is most valuable, since it is the thing that makes the profits the capitalists place at the center of all value (since these profits benefit the bourgeoisie, of course). Finally, we have the workers, or the proletariat, a group which is marginalized and whose value is minimal. This group is only valuable in as far as it can be used to create profits, whether it is on the side of production (working in a factory) or on the side of consumption (buying the bottle of Coke once it is produced). It is more than evident that this hierarchy of being, this system of values, is created and maintained by the bourgeoisie; all of the values radiate from them, and are seen from their point of view. This is certainly not right, or moral in any way, but the proletariat can do little to keep the view of the capitalists from becoming the dominant views of society as a whole because the bourgeoisie own and control the means of production. When you need to integrate yourself into a larger machine in order to live, there is little you can do to combat the system that will not also destroy you.

The bourgeoisie realizes that it is in the position of power, and it further realizes that it is in the vast minority, as far as numbers and population are considered. Therefore, they must be careful to ensure that the proletariat does not notice this fact in a way that would cause them to work together to defy the capitalists. One way to achieve this would be through the use of force, but this is very costly, and would result in an incredible amount of resistance which would limit profit and tax valuable resources. A superior way of ensuring control is to make the workers believe that the system in which they are operating is a good one, and that their lot is not only bearable, but even desirable, or at least inevitable.

A traditional way of making this kind of mentality stick, according to Marxist thought, is to introduce and uphold a given model of religious worship. The benefits of this institutional structure are enormous from a capitalist point of view, and the rewards are potentially tremendous. First, the idea of a hierarchy is set up not merely in earthy terms, but in divine, universal terms, making such divisions seem completely natural and ordained by the greatest powers imaginable. At the top of the pyramid is God, who is the owner and creator of all, the source of all good. Next come the angels and the other good spiritual beings, who follow his commands and are blessed as a result. Then come the humans, a mixed lot, certainly not divine, but valued in as far as they follow the will of God. Finally, we have the demons, and Satan himself, who were once in a good position but who lost it all when they refused to obey the dictates of the ruler of the universe. Needless to say, this is easily paralleled with the situation of earthly production and obedience, wherein the owner of the company stands in a similar relation to his managers and employees as God does to his angels and humanity respectively. Following the commander, whether God or the owner, will result in good.