This lecture includes all marxism in literature

1. What Is
Marxism?
DR. ALAM ZEB

6.  Marxism is a social, political, and economic philosophy
named after the 19th-century German philosopher and
economist Karl Marx. His work examines the historical
effects of capitalism on labor, productivity, and
economic development, and argues that a worker
revolution is needed to replace capitalism.

7.  Marxism posits that the struggle between social
classes—specifically between the bourgeoisie, or
capitalists, and the proletariat, or workers—defines
economic relations in a capitalist economy and will
lead inevitably to a communist revolution.

8.  Marxism is both a social and political theory, and
encompasses Marxist class conflict
theory and Marxian economics. Marxism was first
publicly formulated in 1848 in the pamphlet The
Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, which lays out the theory of class struggle and
revolution.
 Marxian economics focuses on criticism of capitalism,
detailed by Marx in his book Das Kapital, published in
1867.23

9.  Generally, Marxism argues that capitalism as a form of
economic and social reproduction is inherently flawed
and will ultimately fail.

10.  Capitalism is defined as a mode of production in which
business owners (the capitalists) own all of the means
of production (the factory, the tools and machinery, the
raw materials, the final product, and the profits earned
from their sale). Workers (labor) are hired for wages
and have no ownership stake and no share in the
profits.

11.  Moreover, the wages paid to workers are lower than
the economic value that their work creates for the
capitalist. This is the source of capitalists' profits and it
is at the root of the inherent class struggle between
labor and capital.

12. Marxian Economics
 Like other classical economists, Karl Marx believed in
a labor theory of value (LTV) to explain relative
differences in market prices. This theory stated that the
value of a product can be measured objectively by the
average number of hours of labor required to produce
it. In other words, if a table takes twice as long to make
as a chair, then the table should be considered twice
as valuable. What Marx added to this theory was the
conclusion that this labor value represented the
exploitation of workers.

13.  Marx claimed that there are two major flaws in
capitalism that lead to the exploitation of workers by
employers: the chaotic nature of free market
competition and the extraction of surplus labor.

14.  Marx predicted that capitalism would eventually
destroy itself as more people become relegated to
working-class status, inequality rises, and competition
drives corporate profits to zero. This would lead, he
surmised, to a revolution after which production would
be turned over to the working class as a whole.

15. Class Conflict and the
Demise of Capitalism
 Marx’s class theory portrays capitalism as one step in
a historical progression of economic systems that
follow one another in a natural sequence. They are
driven, he posited, by vast impersonal forces of history
that play out through the behavior and conflict among
social classes. According to Marx, every society is
divided into social classes, whose members have
more in common with one another than with members
of other social classes.

16.  The following are some key elements of Marx’s
theories of how class conflict would play out in a
capitalist system:
 1. Capitalist society is made up of two classes:
the bourgeoisie, or business owners, who control
the means of production, and the proletariat, or
workers, whose labor transforms raw commodities into
goods that have market value.

17.  2. Ordinary laborers, who do not own the means of
production, such as factories, buildings, and materials,
have little power in the capitalist economic system.
Workers are also readily replaceable in periods of high
unemployment, further devaluing their perceived
worth.

18.  3. To maximize profits, business owners have to get
the most possible work out of their laborers while
paying them the lowest possible wages. This creates
an imbalance between owners and laborers, whose
work is exploited by the owners for their own gain.

19.  4. Since workers have little personal stake in the
process of production, Marx believed they would
become alienated from their work, and even from their
own humanity, and turn resentful toward business
owners.

20.  5. The bourgeoisie are able to leverage social
institutions, including government, media, academia,
organized religion, and the banking and financial
systems, as tools and weapons against the proletariat
with the goal of maintaining their positions of power
and privilege.

21.  6. Ultimately, the inherent inequalities and exploitative
economic relations between these two classes will
lead to a revolution in which the working class rebels
against the bourgeoisie, takes control of the means of
production, and abolishes capitalism.

22.  Thus, Marx thought that the capitalist system
contained the seeds of its own destruction. The
alienation and exploitation of the proletariat that are
fundamental to capitalist relations would inevitably
drive the working class to rebel against the bourgeoisie
and seize control of the means of production.

23.  Living in a capitalist society, however, the individual is
not truly free. He is an alienated being; he is not at
home in his world. The idea of alienation, which Marx
takes from Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach, plays a
fundamental role in the whole of his written work,
starting with the writings of his youth and continuing
through Das Kapital. In the Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts the alienation of labour is seen to spring
from the fact that the more the worker produces the
less he has to consume, and the more values he
creates the more he devalues himself, because his
product and his labour are estranged from him.

24.  The life of the worker depends on things that he has
created but that are not his, so that, instead of finding
his rightful existence through his labour, he loses it in
this world of things that are external to him: no work,
no pay. Under these conditions, labour denies the
fullness of concrete humanity.

25.  According to Marxism, society progresses through the
struggle between opposing forces. It is this struggle
between opposing classes that result in social
transformation. History progresses through this class
struggle. Class struggle originates out of the
exploitation of one class by another throughout history.

26.  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 is always in conflict
with the capitalist class. This confrontation, according
to Marx, will finally result in replacing the system by
socialism

27.  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. It is true that they can be traced back to the
class conflict prevalent in the Indian society

28.  Marxism and literature are connected in different ways.
For example, we can do a Marxist analysis of a text
that predates marxism.

29. Romeo and Juliet (1597)
by William
Shakespeare (1564–1616)
 The social background behind the love story in Romeo
and Juliet is more broadly developed than in any other
Shakespeare play. Romeo and Juliet are caught in the
crossfire of a hereditary family feud between the
Montagues and Capulets that dates back to feudal
times. It is noteworthy that both families belong to a
bourgeois social class with long-standing wealth.
Shakespeare also introduces elements in the plot that
highlight the class associations and conflicts of the
main characters.

30.  The lovers' struggle symbolises the conflict between
the rising bourgeois values against feudalism during
the transition from the middle ages
towards Renaissance. This struggle is also palpable in
the language Shakespeare uses in the play.

31. Animal Farm (1945)
by George Orwell (1903–
1950)
 Now a classic, Orwell's novel is an allegory for the
Russian revolution and the rise of Joseph Stalin
(1878–1953) in Russia. It presents a critique of
socialism and ideas of Marxism by including
satirical plot threads on several core tenets of
Marxism, such as class struggle. Orwell uses animals
with human traits as characters in this story about
animals on a farm who plot a rebellion against the
human farmer for liberty and equality.