Marxist Analysis of Of Mice and Men: Key Concepts and Questions - Prof. Alonso Recarte, Ejercicios de Literatura inglesa

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Of Mice and Men

MARXISM

WARM-UP:

• (^) Define Marxism
• (^) What sort of questions should the Marxist

theorist ask the text?

• (^) What do you think are the keywords of

Marxism?

Defining Marxism

• (^) Notion that whoever owns the means of production in a society controls society itself.
• (^) Forces of production shape a society  in owning the means of production, one dictates what society is.
• (^) Society is basically divided into two groups: the BOURGEOISIE and the PROLETARIAT.
• (^) In a capitalist society, there will always be a class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Some well-known quotes by Marx

• (^) “The bourgeoisie […] has centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.” (Qtd. Habib 2005, 528)
• (^) “In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed; a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity .” (Marx and Engels 2005/1848, 49)

Inferring theory and key words:

• (^) What kind of social commentary does Of Mice

and Men make about the situation in America?

• (^) How do the characters in Of Mice and Men

represent different social classes in accordance

to Marxism?

• (^) How do certain characters express their power?
• (^) What does the ‘dream of the farm’ represent in

accordance to a Marxist framework? Do other

characters have other ‘dreams’?

Keywords of Marxism (1)

• (^) Alienation = capitalist process whereby the worker feels detached, ‘foreign’ to the products of his/her labor. Results from selling one’s labor-power for a wage, as if it were a property.
• (^) Commodity = “an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind” and is then exchanged for something else.
• (^) Use-value VS Exchange-value = usefulness of a commodity VS worth of the commodity in the market, where it is compared - use-value: related to the physical properties of the commodity; material uses that fulfill human needs - exchange-value: capitalist deformation of use-value through the mediation of market money (which itself commercializes with labor power – the more labor it takes to produce a product, the greater its exchange-value)

• (^) Infrastructure = base: the economic structure of society, based on capitalist ‘forces’ and ‘relations’ of production
• (^) Superstructure: certain forms of law and politics, a certain kind of state determined by the infrastructure, whose essential function is to legitimate the power of the social class which owns the means of economic production. It also consists of certain ‘definite forms of social consciousness’ (political, religious, ethical, aesthetic, etc.)  that is, IDEOLOGY CLOSE READING – CHAPTER 1 EXCERPT

Marxist understanding of IDEOLOGY:

• (^) Should not be conceived as a set of doctrines
• (^) it signifies the way men live out their roles in class society
• (^) it signifies the values, ideas and images which tie men to their social functions and so prevent them from a true knowledge of society as a whole
• (^) in a way, it shows a man making sense of his experience in ways that prohibit a true understanding of his society, ways that are consequently false  (American Dream?)

FORM AND CONTENT (2): PIERRE MACHEREY

• (^) Concept of ‘DECENTERED’ FORM
• (^) a work is tied to ideology not so much by what it says as by what it does not say. It is in the significant silences of a text, in its gaps and absences, that the presence of ideology can be most positively felt.
• (^) the author finds himself forced to reveal the limits of ideology within which he writes.  the writer produces gaps and silences, what it is unable to articulate
• (^) The critic’s task is not to fill the work in  it is to seek the principle of the conflict and its meanings, and to show how this conflict is produced by the work’s relation to ideology. He is to make the silences ‘speak’.

FURTHER READING:

• (^) Eagleton, Terry. 2002 (1976). Marxism and

Literary Criticism. London and New York:

Routledge.

• (^) Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 2005 (1848).

The Communist Manifesto. Ed. Phil Gasper.

Translation first published in 1888. Chicago:

Haymarket Books.