/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.685451]

What do you think about analysing texts from a marxist perspective?

[op No.685453]

Funny thing is, I think America is one of the most socialist countries around. The means of production and teh means of ruling are in the hands of the same people.

[Anonymous No.685455]

how long it takes until there will be enough text to overthrow the bourgeoisie?

[Anonymous No.685464]

nothing wrong with it in general. doesnt make much sense for many texts, though.

[op No.685477]

>>685455
Never. People are too contented now and have too much to lose to rebel.
>>685464
I know. I've got an exam that will most likely feature it on Thursday. I think I'm OK with it, just wondered what other peoples persectives would be.

[Anonymous No.685479]

>>685451
I find feminist criticism to be generally more entertaining. I'd read something where these two are combined for the greater good but I don't know where to start.

[op No.685486]

>>685479
I hat feminism. I had to do an essay on it, just to make sure I wouldn't have to do it for this fucking exam. The entire feminist canon reeks of fucking butthurt.

[op No.685493]

I also hate typing errors and not being able to delete posts fast enough...

[Anonymous No.685508]

>>685486
Yeah, being oppressed for thousands of years compared to other minorities' bitch of approx. 2-400, then largely ignored in the struggle for equal rights originally, then ridiculed and called whiney bitches after only cursory recognition and half-hearted attempts at equality. How resentful, can you get, you know? Society's like, almost paying them the same, and domestic violence is grounds for divorce now! What more could they possibly want?

[Anonymous No.685510]

>>685455
Keep holding those balls, they might get dusty.

[op No.685521]

>>685508
This is exactly the sort of whining I'm talking about.
Feminism meant something once. Who cares how much longer you were oppressed...you weren't even fucking alive. Women have it so good now it's untrue. Men raped in the divorce courts everyday.
Sit back and shut the fuck up. The decline of standard standard patriarchal and matriarchal roles is the reason for the decline in the worlds moral compass.

[Anonymous No.685522]

>>685451
OP, a Marxist attitude to texts is what? I've never seen insightful litcrit from a Marxist perspective. Philosophical criticism, history, sociology yeah. Marxism is a great drive for many authors when producing. But in analysing a text? It doesn't speak as a methodology for internal textual processes, and analysis with reference to external textual factors is generally difficult to conduct, and nearly impossible to conduct interestingly and credibly.

[Anonymous No.685527]

>>685453
No, Marx said that those who own the means of production (the bourgeoise) were also the ruling class.
America isn't socialist just because it has a welfare state.

[op No.685529]

>>685522
Hang on, it's a seen exam. I'll go get the paper.

[op No.685533]

>>685527
You missed my point entirely...

[Anonymous No.685532]

>>685521
ha... I read this crap before. almost word for word...

... I am not a feminist. I am not even a woman. I don't give a fuck about their shit, tbh. But you smell like butthurt because your mother did not breast-feed you or something...

[Anonymous No.685531]

>>685529
It would help if you could list the major litcrit from a marxist perspective you read this semester, and the texts that is applicable to in your course.

[Anonymous No.685536]

I think it's an easy, effective way to create an enormous amount of "new" scholarship about established topics.

[Anonymous No.685538]

>>685527
america hasnt much of a welfare state either.

[op No.685539]

>>685531
The exam is you pick two extracts and write about them from the theory you think fits best...
I'm going to be using Pyschoanalytical and Marxist.
The extracts are from these books....
D.H Lawrence, Women in Love.
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim.
A poem by Liz Lockhead, What the pool Said On Midsummers Day".
---
cont.

[Anonymous No.685542]

>>685538
Yes, European countries give more welfare to the average citizen.
All these welfare states protect the interests of big businesses, the US especially.

>>685533
What was your point?

[op No.685544]

W.R Greg, Principles of Indian Government, National Review 6
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
Toni Morrison, The Bluest eye
>>685539

[op No.685547]

>>685542
I wasn't talking about welfare.
I was talking about commerce and lawmakers being the same people.
A communist government decides what its people consume, and rules them. In America, the decision on what to produce is made mostly by the same people.

[Anonymous No.685556]

>>685544
How is class and class identity represented in these texts, do class positions produce character and action? How is action defined, as collective or individual action?

Basically, Marxism here would mean an analysis of the text in terms of class, identity, nature of action, and what the political content of the text is in terms of furthering revolution.

This is a crude and formalist marxist approach, because I haven't read any marxist litcrit (as litcrit) that springs to mind with a deeper methodology.

[Anonymous No.685562]

>>685521
Ever heard of glass ceiling?

[op No.685565]

>>685556
Incredibly helpful stuff. I can talk about class all day, and how it forms character and behaviour.
The microcosm/macrocosm stuff I'm fine on.

[Anonymous No.685569]

>>685547
According to Marx in a socialist state the proletariat (the workers) would decide what to produce based on what they thought would be must beneficial for the society, not a small elite working for profit.
In order to entertain the idea that America is socialist we must first have had a proletarian-led revolution culminating in the capturing of the state.
Businesses interfering with lawmakers was commented on Adam Smith before Marx or socialism were born.

[op No.685574]

>>685556
Not sure whether to use the bit about furthering revolution or not...I guess it depends on the author. If it was going to be a text against furthering revolution I'd probably use post-colonial theory instead, which I'm not quite as fond of.

[op No.685578]

>>685569
>not a small elite working for profit.
That maybe the case, but in practise the marxhouse theory doesn't bear it out.

[op No.685586]

>>685562
I've read feminist texts where they blame men for every evil in the world. They are worse than---whoops nearly godwined myself then.
I'm not sure about the glass ceiling.
the statistics take all women's wages and make a mean.
Maybe a lot more women are working lower skill jobs?

[op No.685593]

>>685578
I am an idiot...that's not what marxhouse is about at all, pic related.

[Anonymous No.685594]

>>685574
Honestly, those texts don't really talk about furthering revolution though. Is Lawrence mystifying the working class position in history? If so, why? What meaning does personal expression have as a replacement for historical action?

[Anonymous No.685591]

hitler is nowadays thought of as evil but there are a plenty of things he done right. destroying university marxist semantics was one of them

[op No.685598]

>>685594
The extract from "Women in Love" is the part that starts where Gerald....hang on, I'll take a picture.

[Anonymous No.685604]

>>685593
Brilliant housie there! now it is best time to read some actual Marx, you twits. The superstructure is legal and political and not magical in ways that make sociology students fuck out of pure protest.

[op No.685606]

>>685598

[Anonymous No.685610]

>>685604
Are you suggesting the family isn't political, because I have an Engel's text for you...

[op No.685615]

>>685606
So I can do some stuff about means of production, how Gerald is held in esteem because of his power, blah blah.

[Anonymous No.685622]

>>685606
Great piece. This is a direct analysis of the Taylorist-Fordist system of industrial control. What _meaning_ does it have for the text that Lawrence is describing this as a dehumanising process which the workers are passive victims of? Why isn't the passage turned on its head, "As a result of the butty-system and leisure in work of the miners, Gerald decided he had to break their power?" Why are *they* the object of the operation of the masculine capitalist? Why are they denied their own collective history and character in the text as agents of destiny, except, as a woman submitting to her rightful husband, "souls[...]satisfied. It was what they wanted."

It sounds like a *rape* description.

[Anonymous No.685625]

>>685622
Also, I was turned on by the rape.

[op No.685634]

>>685622
Excellent stuff, many thanks. How about if I work in something about belonging to an employer in those days was like a macrocosm of a communist society, as you depend on the benevolence of your boss (the party) for your lot?

[op No.685635]

>>685634
MICROCOSM.
Damnit.

[op No.685637]

>>685625
Hey everyone loves rape. Well at least 50% of the people.

[Anonymous No.685649]

>>685634
Probably not a good idea. You're conflating Marx's idea of communism, with the actually existing horror under Lenin-Stalin. Its anachronistic when dealing with a text from 1920, ie, you're reading new material into the text.

[Anonymous No.685655]

>>685569
In the Marxist sense, socialism means social ownership of the means of production and distribution of products based on the work of the individual.

However, Marx's definition of socialism is hardly the only one and saying that the USA is not socialist in a Marxist sense does not mean that it is not socialist.

That said, North America does not fit the definition of socialism as laid out by any theoretician and what >>685453 is talking about would more accurately be called Fascism.

[Anonymous No.685675]

>>685649
Are you sure? I guess you didn't see the end of that (pic). I thought the rest of the extract was basically a description of the communist ideal.

[Anonymous No.685684]

>>685610
stuff it right up your arse! I'm eastern european. MEL aren't thought of as fancy here you twit.

The superstructure is the LEGAL and POLITICAL, at one place there is speech of "peculiar feelings, illusions, ways of thought and word-views. the whole class creates and formulates it all on the base of it's material conditions and it's own social relations."
But family is another Topic entirely. Engels, being the workingwoman's rapist he was attacked marriage as a form of slavery claiming that if marriage was to be based on love it was to end with love as well.
Modern stink-students use it as an excuse to have more sex because there are aplenty of women in the stinking-hairdo studies collecting the social capital to marry an engineer like myself.

[op No.685685]

>>685675
well...maybe not the ideal...

[Anonymous No.685694]

>>685685
So the thing for a Marxist reading is, why do the workers feel that their enslavement to capitalism is something close to their mechanic ideal? Is the ideal of the workers merely capitalism with the boss replaced by pure mechanism? Are they limited by their work to thinking this, and not thinking of emancipation?

[Anonymous No.685705]

>>685684
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm

Looks to me like he's extrapolating the development of family as a "superstructure" from the material basis of social production to me, it is a political and legal institution.

[op No.685731]

>>685694
I'm starting to wonder whether it really is the workers point of view or Gerald's.

[Anonymous No.685742]

>>685731
*EXCELLENT*. Gerald has an *ideology* that he is fulfilling history, and *projects* this onto the workers as the object of his production process. The idea of progress is an ideological mystification used by Gerald to mask his own self interest in material benefit and capitalist development.

[op No.685756]

>>685742
Ah, I think I can get my teeth into that. Exploitation of the workers while telling them their "souls are satisfied". What all capitalist pigdogs really believe.

[op No.685764]

I must say, this thread has been incredibly helpful. Thanks to everyone who has posted in it.

[Anonymous No.685782]

>>685764
Good luck on your exams. If we must have "homework" threads, this is the better kind where OP asks for advice on their own ideas and contributes meaningfully.

[op No.685803]

>>685782
Thanks, I'm glad you thought I had some

[op No.685810]

>>685782
Thanks, I'm glad you thought I had some ideas that were relevant.
I know homework threads are frowned upon, I didn't really mean to start one, just discuss Marxism. I wasn't going to ask for anyone to do the work for me.