ABSTRACT
Most of us realize that a country’s socioeconomic system determines who has the most power in that country. For example, in medieval Europe’s feudal system, the most power belonged to those who controlled the most land, and a powerful class system developed that kept the descendants of those landowning families in power. In the capitalist systems operating in most Western nations today, the most power belongs to those who control the most money-the word capital means money-and that control may or may not change hands at any given time. For Marxist theory, however, the socioeconomic system in which we live
does much more than determine who has the most power. It also determines, among other things, how we are educated, and it influences our religious beliefs, which together control to a great degree how we perceive ourselves and our world. For if a socioeconomic system is to survive, the people who live within it must be convinced that it is the right system. For a rigid class system to survive, then, its people must be convinced of the natural superiority of those born into the upper class. Analogously, for American capitalism’s American Dream to survive, Americans must be convinced of the natural superiority of those who manage to rise from the bottom to the top of the financial heap. And it is our education and our religious beliefs that do much of the convincing by determining how we perceive ourselves and our world. Let me develop this point further. To understand the kind of influence a
socioeconomic system exerts over its members, let’s take a minute to look a bit more closely at the ways in which those of us born and bred in the United States have been influenced by ours. To succeed in the US, we must compete against other Americans for financial prosperity. So we must believe in the virtues of both competition and financial prosperity. Now consider that the American educational system teaches us, from the earliest grades, to compete, each of us alone against the rest of the class, for prizes in spelling bees, essay contests, talent contests, and the like. Consider, too, that Puritan culture in colonial North America, from which much of our national culture developed, included
the belief that certain individuals are “elected” before birth to be among God’s chosen and that the signs of one’s “election” included financial prosperity. Thus, in the United States, financial success became associated with moral virtue. This belief persists today in the American Dream, which celebrates as a virtue the individual’s rise to the highest plateau of financial achievement of which he or she is capable. In other words, both America’s educational philosophy and religious history foster the spirit of individual competition and the desire for financial prosperity that are the basis of its capitalist socioeconomic system. This is just one example of the ways in which a nation’s socioeconomic system influences how its members perceive themselves and their world. Marxism, therefore, is concerned with how the socioeconomic system in which we live shapes our personal identity. The goal of Marxism is to achieve a worldwide classless society by exposing
the oppressive ideologies (belief systems) that keep the nations of this planet bound within socioeconomic systems in which a relatively small number of people are extremely wealthy while most people are struggling, or even failing to get by. For example, while the top executive officers of international corporations often have personal financial holdings in the hundred millions, the vast majority of people on this planet are lucky if they can feed, clothe, and shelter themselves and their children, let alone afford such “luxuries” as adequate healthcare and educational opportunities. And too many families-even in such a prosperous country as the United States-are unable to do that. So we can start to use Marxist theory to understand literature by asking the following two questions about any literary work we want to interpret. (1) What oppressive socioeconomic ideologies influence the characters’ behavior? (2) Does the literary work combat those ideologies by clearly illustrating the damage they do? If the literary text does not combat those ideologies, then, for Marxist theory, that text is considered part of the problem-because it blinds us to the problem-rather than part of the solution. The most common oppressive socioeconomic ideologies are defined in the “Basic concepts” section that follows. Although it’s important that you read through this list of concepts, don’t be too concerned if you don’t feel you thoroughly understand every one. You’ll begin to understand these concepts much better when we use them, later on in this chapter, to help us interpret the literary texts that appear at the end of this book. And you’ll see that these fundamental Marxist concepts can help us understand other works of literature, as well. Remember, too, that I’m offering you my own literary analyses in the
interpretation exercises provided later in this chapter. You might use the same Marxist concepts I use but come up with different interpretations of your own. If you disagree with any of the analyses I offer in these exercises, don’t be afraid to look in the literary work in question for evidence that will support your viewpoint. A literary work can often support a number of different interpretations, even when readers are using concepts from the same theory.
