Marxism

Fundamentally anchored on the work of Karl Marx, Marxism is a dominant critical theory born in the middle of the 19th century and flourished tremendously throughout the twentieth century. Concerned about historical and cultural issues, Marxism identifies social and economic factors as crucial denominators of relationship in society. Karl Marx saw a capitalist society as basically a class society where the oppression of a class by another is perpetrated. He was an avowed adversary of oppression in whatever form. Thus he joined the proletariat (working class) to advocate for the abolition of class oppression.

The philosophy of Marxism is rooted in what is known as dialectical materialism, which stresses economic determinism (economic survival) as an index of social struggles. The Marxist ideologues believe that all social struggles are economy-based whose resolution stirs conflicts among the different classes inhabiting a social milieu.

Society is divided into two broad classes; the oppressor and the oppressed, who in Marx parlance are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat respectively. Because the former holds the means of production, it becomes dominant and hence oppresses the latter.

Bayo Lawal (1989), summarises the focus of Marxism in the context of human activity “based on the infrastructure which can be broadly divided into (a) forces of production and (b) productive relations”. He goes further to see work as being crucial to human existence and relevance, in the capitalist world; work is grossly misused and abused by the oppressors. He expresses this in the following words:

In the capitalist system, work or labour, is deceitful because, in Marx’s view man likes to be proud of what he creates and in the capitalist society, the fruits of Man’s creative ability are for capitalists. Man therefore, becomes estranged from what he produces. He is also alienated from the person who gets what he creates from him to sell at a price very higher than the cost of production ………. to strengthen and ensure the exploitative connection. Bayo Lawal (1989:126).

What Marxist writers (poets, playwrights and novelists) do is to expose the oppressors’ class and its mechanism of oppression. This is realized as settings, themes, characters and events conflating are discussed thereby creating the avenue for the Marxist critics to demonstrate their craft.
The above is the reason Marxist critics see the history of society as the history of class struggles and also explain the class struggles and antagonism predominant in a capitalist society.

The interest of Marxist literature is to defend the cause of the oppressed. The Marxist critics believe that the achievement of this goal is by evolving an egalitarian society where the ideal is stressed. To achieve this, they explore society and situate sources of oppression. They identify and critique elements of exploitation, alienation and other indices of oppression. They go beyond critiquing to also proffer panacea to the crises engendered by social parity.

For instance, a Marxist critique of Sembene Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood (1962) sees the White colonial owners of the Railway system as the oppressors and the Black indigenous Railway workers as the oppressed. While the members of the ruling class (the colonial masters) employ various draconian methods to oppress the colonized, the oppressed class in the novel employs strike and other revolutionary approaches to assert its protest against the oppressive syndrome.