Hello, my name is Tom and welcome back to
my channel and another episode of What
the Theory?. Recently, we've been taking a
look both at some very fundamental
approaches to understanding culture such
as semiotics and phenomenology but also
some very broad terms such as modernism
and postmodernism. Generally speaking,
these have been pretty successful videos
(at least for my quite small channel) and
it's been really, really great to hear
your feedback and thoughts and questions
on them. Moving forward, what we're going
to do, however, is look in the gap between
these; so, looking at some approaches to
culture and understanding culture which
both build upon those fundamental blocks
of semiotics and phenomenology but which are
also a little bit smaller and a little
bit more useable for analysis than those
"isms" which tend to describe ways of
societal thinking. And, to start this off,
I really wanted to take a look at
Marxist Literary Theory but with the
idea of using it in attendance to all
kinds of culture rather than just
literature. We're gonna be taking a look
at how the political and economic
thinking of Karl Marx (and not forgetting
his good friend and collaborator
Friedrich Engels) has inspired a way of
looking at and reading cultural texts
which really places them into the
societal context in which they were
created. This is an approach which looks
beyond formal decisions such as
potentially rhyming schemes in poetry or
the particular type of paint that an
artist might use in doing a painting to
look at the relationship between art and
the society around it. Those of you have
watched my Politix video
introducing that other series that I'm
working on will know that this is
something that I am hugely interested in
in my work, and so I'm excited to
be doing this video and to be looking at
some similar approaches in upcoming What
the Theory? videos. As always, any
questions or thoughts or suggestions for
future videos are really, really valuable
so please don't hesitate to do that and,
if you think this kind of thing is cool,
then please do consider subscribing.
However, without further ado, here we go.
So, to understand Marxist Literary
Criticism, it follows that we first need
to have some kind of grounding in the
thoughts and theories of Marx himself.
Karl Marx was a German philosopher,
economist and political thinker who
wrote such works as Das Kapital, A
Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy the Grundrisse and,
perhaps most famously for
casual viewers, the Communist Manifesto.
I've already explained some of Marx's
thinking in my other What the Theory?
video on Social Class so, apologies if
you've watched that one, there may be a
tiny bit of repetition within this video.
However, I'm always really keen not to
assume knowledge in these What the
Theory? videos and, also, we're going to be
taking these ideas in a slightly
different direction because we're going
to be looking specifically how we might
use these theories in the critique of
culture. Marx argued that all societies
throughout history could be viewed as a
struggle between two different groups
with differing amounts of power. The
examples given by Marx and Engels
themselves in the opening section of the
Communist Manifesto are 'Free Man and
Slave; Patrician and Plebeian; Lord and
Serf; Guildmaster and Journeyman; in a
word, oppressor and oppressed'. The
argument here is that, in any given
society, wherever it lies placed in space
and time, there is an imbalance of power;
one group, usually smaller,
tends to hold a lot more power than one
other, much larger, group.
In an industrial society,
argued Marx, this manifests itself as a
division between the bourgeoisie (or the
ruling class) and the proletariat (or the
working class). The former have a much
larger amount of economic capital which,
due to the way that our society is
structured, tends to directly relate to
power. Great. Super. But what does any of
this have to do with literature or
culture more generally? Well,
Marx viewed these power relationships as
the defining principle of any given
society: he called these underlying power
structures the economic base.
Everything else he referred to
as that society's superstructure. Elements
of a superstructure might include the
form of politics that that society's
politics takes, it might include its
religious or spiritual thinking, in might
include its systems of law but, the
thing that we'll be focusing on mostly
today, is its culture. Marx suggested that
each of these superstructural elements
tends to reflect, and in some cases
legitimate, the economic base (or the
power relationships lying beneath that
society). If, at the end of this video I've
potentially piqued your interest and you
want to look further into Marxist
Literary Criticism, I'd certainly suggest
looking at some examples of how politics
and religion can be viewed as reflecting
a society's economic base. Here, however,
mainly for reasons of time, we're going
to focus exclusively upon culture. So, the
consideration of how cultural texts
might be influenced by the economic base
of a society (those underlying power
relationships) is the central activity of
any Marxist critique of literature or
culture more generally. In order to start
thinking about how culture or,
specifically, particular cultural texts
might be influenced by the economic base
of a given society, I'd like to start by
taking a little look at some of the
stories surrounding King Arthur which
were popularized by Geoffrey of Monmouth
in the Middle Ages. These narratives were
born of a society in which power was
overwhelmingly in the hands of Lords who
had a considerable amount of control
over the Serfs who worked their land. The
various tales of King Arthur depict a
chivalrous, benevolent nobility who live
and fight not just for themselves but
for the protection of all. Thus, these
literary (or, perhaps most often at the
time, verbally communicated) works
legitimize the division between Lord and
Serf. And they do so by overwhelmingly
suggesting that Lords use their power
wisely and, rather than masters, are in
fact benevolent protectors of their
Serfs. Thus, in this heavily simplified
example, we can see how the culture of
the Middle Ages, specifically in the cultural texts
surrounding King Arthur, might have
legitimized the economic base of that
time. Through the communication of a
certain ideology. Ideology, again, is a
term introduced by Marx himself as a way
of explaining the narratives and ideas
which serve, through the superstructure,
to legitimate that economic base.
Throughout the religion, law and politics
of the Middle Ages we again find this
similar ideology propagated. This idea
that Lords worked for the serfs in some
way by protecting them and providing for
them when, in reality, the relationship
between lords and serfs was incredibly
inequitable and oppressive. To
fast-forward many hundreds of years, in a
similar way there exists narratives
within our own society which legitimate
that underlying economic base of
neoliberal capitalism. As I previously
discussed in many of my videos, the
economic structure of neoliberal
capitalism essentially revolves around
heavily unregulated trade both between
individuals and, more often, between
global corporations and incredibly low
tax systems.
The fallout of this is
that redistributive systems, such as
education and healthcare, tend to be
heavily underfunded. This economic
structure is legitimized by an ideology
which tells us of the well-meaning,
innovative entrepreneur (and thus the
greatness of individualism) who goes on
to make the technologies and the
industries which will forge the future
and serve for economic growth. At the
same time, we're often told that
governments and states are bad things
and that any regulation from those will
lead to inefficiency and bloat. Such an
ideology appears very bluntly in Captain
America: Civil War, the very dramatic
tension of which places that
personification of brave, individual
America, Captain America, against the
dangers of government interference. And,
here, we find a slightly more
contemporary example of how the
ideologies which support the economic
base manage to work their way into
cultural texts. However, I often find it's
in the understanding of ideology where
some people get a little bit lost in
understanding Marxist Literary Criticism
and Marxist approaches to understanding
culture. Because, when we use the word
ideology, colloquially we tends to mean
someone pushing an idea upon us with a
very absolute intent to convince us.
And, often what happens is people transpose
this more casual view of ideology into
their understanding of Marxist Literary
Criticism and therefore tend to think
that the Marxist approach to culture is
to view all culture as some kind of
capitalist propaganda. And, indeed, some
very early Marxist literary theorists
did take this view; they took the idea
that, because all culture is produced
within a capitalist system, it therefore
must in some way end up being pro-capitalist.
Yet this clearly isn't the
case. Not even a blockbuster film such
as Captain America: Civil War can be
accused of such blatant propagandizing
and, clearly, there are many, many films
and books etc that take a very critical
approach to their understanding of the
world around us. What we're simply
interested in when taking a Marxist
approach to culture, then, is the ways in
which a specific cultural texts takes
ideas from the world around us, and
presents them back to us. We're
interested in the relationship between
the cultural texts and the economic base.
As always, I find the best way of
explaining many of these theories is
through using an example. So, I'd like to
wrap up with a piece of culture which I
hope to most people would have seen or
read, and that is Harry Potter.
Particularly, I wanted to choose Harry
Potter because I think it's a cultural
text which no one can really accuse of
being in any way indoctrinary.
Although, in later books and films, there
are many allusions to the War on Terror
in the response to Voldemort
coming back, in the early
books they come across as fairly politically
disengaged. Despite this, we can still
undertake a Marxist reading of Harry
Potter in order to interrogate how that
particular cultural text reflects the
economic base of early 1990s
neoliberalism. So, we might begin very
obliquely with the Dursleys. Harry's
uncle, aunt and cousin who take him in
after the death of his parents. Living in
the middle-class, suburban Privet Drive,
they are not a ridiculously wealthy
family yet they are comfortably well-off.
The Dursleys are portrayed as
destructively self-interested
particularly in their hatred for Harry.
Rowling was writing Harry Potter in the
early 1990s. Both Margaret Thatcher and
Ronald Reagan, by this point, had left
office, yet their legacies were being
upheld by John Major and George Bush the
elder. The ideology pushed by both was
one which sought to galvanize these
middle-class voters in such suburbs
through arguing that individualism was
productive for society and that the
greed of such groups was good for
society at large because it leads to
entrepreneurship and innovation. The
Dursleys typify this view of society:
they despise the fact they have to look
after Harry who, ultimately, they see as
not their responsibility and a drain on
their resources. The plot proper kicks in,
however, when Harry leaves for Hogwarts.
In doing so, he becomes part of an
exclusive community which most
prominently, I think, has access to a
certain kind of knowledge (magic) that the
Dursleys and their like do not. And, in
this, I think we can suggest there is the
presence of an opposing ideology
that existed at that time and exists to
this day; that is, a certain prejudice
towards vast swathes of society who they
consider, through their disagreement with
them, to be many times less clever than
themselves. Throughout the books and
films, the muggles are portrayed as being
fairly simple in contrast to the Wizarding World. In
fact, they can't even be trusted to know
that the Wizarding World exists,
something we've never particularly given
a reason for to my knowledge. Thus, even
in trying to critique early 1990s
individualism and neoliberalism, Harry
Potter supports a slightly different ideology,
namely a sort of intellectual elitism. In
this, we can see how a Marxist Literary
Criticism approach to understanding
culture can allow us to explore the
relationship between that economic base
and a particular piece of culture. It
allows us to look beyond the ideas of
semiotics or phenomenology,
which very much looked at how a cultural
text makes meaning, to look at what the
meanings it's communicating are and how
those relate to the world around them.
Marxist Literary Criticism allows us to
acknowledge the existence of ideology
within a cultural text, whether it's
placed there intentionally or not, and, by
extension, allows us to posit what that
cultural text might say about the
society that produced it. As I began this
video by saying, Marx saw much of a
society's superstructure as a
reflection of that underlying economic
base. When we undertake a Marxist
Literary Criticism approach to a piece
of culture, then, we're fundamentally
viewing a piece of culture as a piece of
evidence about the society that produced
it, and we're taking apart that piece of
evidence to explore what the power
relationships in a given society might have been.
Thank you very much for
watching this video. If I've piqued your
interest here at all then I would
suggest perhaps checking out Terry Eagleton's
Marxist Literary Criticism (I believe
it's called) which is very short and
engaging introduction to the topic. Or, if
you want some slightly more complex
reading (but only very slightly more), I'd
suggest Raymond Williams's Marxism and
Literature. Thank you so much for
watching. If you have any thoughts, questions or
suggestions for future videos than do
place those down in the comments
below. Other than that, I will see you
next time I manage to find some time to
put a video together. Thank you very much
for watching and have a great week!