5.6 Class struggle

Origins of Class Struggle

Class struggle refers to the ongoing conflict between socioeconomic classes over resources, power, and control of labor. In Marxist literary theory, it's the lens through which critics examine how economic inequality shapes characters, narratives, and the ideologies embedded in texts.

The concept didn't originate with Marx, but he made it the centerpiece of his theory of history. For literary critics, class struggle matters because virtually every text encodes assumptions about wealth, labor, and social hierarchy, whether the author intended it or not.

Class Struggle in Marxist Theory

Marx and Engels famously declared in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." In this framework, class conflict isn't just one social problem among many; it's the engine that drives historical change. Each era's dominant class controls the economy, and the subordinate class eventually organizes to challenge that control.

Bourgeoisie vs. Proletariat

Marxist theory identifies two primary classes in capitalist society:

• Bourgeoisie: the class that owns the means of production (factories, land, capital). They profit not just from selling goods, but from the difference between what workers produce and what workers are paid.
• Proletariat: wage laborers who own no productive property and must sell their labor to survive.

The relationship between these classes is inherently antagonistic. The bourgeoisie extracts surplus value from the proletariat's labor, meaning workers produce more value than they receive in wages. Marx argued this exploitation would eventually push the proletariat toward revolution and the creation of a classless society.

Means of Production

The means of production are the physical resources needed to produce goods: factories, machinery, land, raw materials. Whoever controls these controls the economy.

In capitalism, the bourgeoisie privately owns the means of production, which gives them power over both the production process and the distribution of wealth. The proletariat, lacking ownership, has no choice but to work for wages. This structural dependency is what makes exploitation possible; it's not about individual greed but about how the system itself is organized.

Alienation of Labor

Alienation describes the estrangement workers experience under capitalism. Marx identified several dimensions of this:

• Workers are separated from the products of their labor (they make things they don't own)
• Workers have no control over the process of production (they don't decide what to make or how)
• Workers become alienated from their own creative potential, reduced to performing repetitive tasks
• Workers are alienated from each other, as competition replaces solidarity

In literature, alienation often appears as characters who feel powerless, disconnected, or dehumanized by their working conditions.

Class Consciousness

Class consciousness is the awareness of your own position within the class structure and the recognition that your interests align with others in the same class. For Marx, this awareness is what transforms the proletariat from a scattered group of workers into a political force capable of collective action.

False Consciousness

False consciousness occurs when members of the subordinate class internalize the dominant class's ideology and accept their own exploitation as natural, deserved, or inevitable. Think of a worker who opposes labor unions because they believe anyone can get rich through hard work alone.

The bourgeoisie maintains false consciousness through what Althusser later called ideological state apparatuses: religion, education, media, and legal systems that normalize existing power relations. A key task of Marxist literary criticism is identifying how texts either reinforce or expose false consciousness.

Revolutionary Potential

Marx argued the proletariat is uniquely positioned to lead revolution because they directly experience capitalism's contradictions. Two conditions are necessary for this:

1. Class consciousness: workers must recognize their shared exploitation
2. Organization: workers must unite collectively, whether through unions, parties, or movements

The ultimate goal in classical Marxism is abolishing class society altogether. In literary analysis, critics look for how texts depict (or suppress) this revolutionary potential.

Class Struggle in Literature

Literature doesn't just reflect class struggle passively. It actively participates in it by shaping how readers understand class, by giving voice to marginalized perspectives, or by reinforcing dominant ideologies. Marxist critics read texts as cultural products shaped by the economic conditions of their time.

Representation of Class Conflict

Many canonical works dramatize tensions between classes:

• Dickens' Hard Times pits industrial workers against factory owners in Coketown, exposing how utilitarian philosophy serves bourgeois interests
• Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby reveals the hollowness of the American Dream by showing how old money (Tom Buchanan) maintains power over new money (Gatsby) and the working class (the Wilsons) alike
• Brontë's Jane Eyre navigates class boundaries through a protagonist who is neither servant nor equal in the households she inhabits

These works invite readers to examine how class position determines opportunity, identity, and survival.

Working-Class Literature

Working-class literature centers the experiences of laborers and the poor, often written by authors from those backgrounds. Notable examples:

• George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier documents coal miners' lives in 1930s England with unflinching detail about wages, housing, and physical toll
• Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio: From the Thirties follows a working-class family through the Depression, capturing how poverty constrains not just material life but imagination and aspiration
• John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath traces displaced Oklahoma farmers exploited by California agribusiness

This tradition challenges bourgeois literary culture by insisting that working-class lives are worthy subjects for serious art.

Socialist Realism

Socialist realism was an officially mandated artistic doctrine in the Soviet Union (formalized in 1934) that required literature to depict the working class heroically and promote socialist values. Key examples:

• Maxim Gorky's Mother portrays a working-class woman's political awakening through her son's revolutionary activity
• Nikolai Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered follows a young revolutionary's sacrifices for the socialist cause

Socialist realism is worth studying as a case where literature was explicitly enlisted in class struggle. But it also raises difficult questions: when the state dictates artistic content, does literature serve the working class or the ruling party? Critics note that socialist realism often functioned as propaganda, suppressing artistic experimentation and dissent.

Class and Intersectionality

A purely class-based analysis can miss how other systems of oppression interact with economic exploitation. Intersectionality (a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989) recognizes that class, race, gender, and other categories overlap, creating distinct experiences that can't be understood through any single lens.

Race and Class

Working-class people of color face compounded oppression: class exploitation and racial discrimination reinforce each other. Literary examples that explore this intersection:

• Richard Wright's Native Son: Bigger Thomas's fate in 1930s Chicago is shaped by both poverty and anti-Black racism. His limited choices reflect structural forces, not personal failings.
• Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye: the Breedlove family's suffering stems from the intertwined effects of economic deprivation and internalized racial self-hatred

Marxist critics who ignore race risk flattening these experiences into a single narrative of class exploitation.

Gender and Class

Working-class women face both economic exploitation and patriarchal oppression, and these often reinforce each other:

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper: the narrator's confinement reflects how bourgeois gender norms and economic dependence on a husband combine to strip women of autonomy
• Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: explores how gender expectations, immigrant labor, and racial marginalization intersect in a Chinese-American working-class family

An intersectional approach reveals layers of oppression that a class-only analysis would miss.

Contemporary Relevance

Class struggle hasn't disappeared; it has taken new forms. Economic inequality has widened dramatically in recent decades, and contemporary literature continues to grapple with these dynamics.

Globalization and Class

Globalization has created new patterns of exploitation as transnational corporations move production to wherever labor is cheapest. Contemporary works exploring this include:

• Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger: a darkly comic novel about a servant in India who sees through the myths justifying class hierarchy in a globalizing economy
• Monica Ali's Brick Lane: follows a Bangladeshi immigrant woman in London, tracing how global migration creates new class positions and vulnerabilities

These texts show that class struggle now operates across national borders.

Precariat vs. Ruling Elite

The precariat (a term popularized by economist Guy Standing) describes a growing class of workers in unstable, low-wage jobs with few protections. Unlike the traditional proletariat, the precariat often lacks even the stability of regular employment.

• Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (a film, but widely discussed in literary/cultural criticism) dramatizes the gulf between a wealthy family and a poor family through spatial metaphors of above and below
• Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You uses surrealist satire to expose how corporations commodify workers

Note: both of these are films rather than novels, but they're frequently analyzed in cultural and literary studies for how they represent contemporary class dynamics.

Neoliberalism and Class Struggle

Neoliberalism refers to the economic ideology favoring privatization, deregulation, reduced social spending, and free-market solutions. Critics argue it has weakened organized labor and deepened inequality.

• Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: the author works minimum-wage jobs to reveal how the working poor cannot survive on low wages, no matter how hard they work
• Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions: explores the disillusionment of a former radical now living in neoliberal Britain

Marxist critics see neoliberalism as the latest phase of capitalist class struggle, one that has shifted power decisively toward capital.

Literary Analysis Through a Class Lens

Applying a class lens means asking specific questions about how a text represents economic relations, who benefits from the social order depicted, and whose perspective is centered or marginalized.

Identifying Class Themes

When reading through a class lens, look for these recurring themes:

• Exploitation: who profits from whose labor?
• Alienation: do characters feel disconnected from their work, their communities, or themselves?
• Class consciousness: do characters recognize their class position? Do they accept or resist it?
• Class mobility: is upward movement possible, or is the class structure rigid?
• Ideology: what beliefs about wealth and poverty does the text present as "natural"?

For example, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath addresses nearly all of these: the Joad family is exploited by agribusiness, alienated from their land, and gradually develops class consciousness through collective organizing.

Class-Based Interpretation Strategies

Here's a practical approach to class-based literary analysis:

1. Identify the class positions of major characters. Who owns property? Who works for wages? Who is unemployed or dispossessed?
2. Examine class conflict in the plot. Where do characters from different classes come into tension? What causes the conflict?
3. Analyze ideology. What does the text present as normal or inevitable about class relations? Does it challenge or reinforce those assumptions?
4. Consider the author's position. What class did the author belong to? How might that shape their representation of other classes?
5. Look at form and genre. Who is the intended audience? Does the literary form itself carry class associations (e.g., the novel as a bourgeois form)?

Applying these to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, for instance, you'd notice that the "mechanicals" (working-class characters like Bottom) are played for comedy, while the aristocratic lovers drive the main plot. What does that structural choice reveal about class hierarchy in the text?

Criticisms and Limitations

Marxist class analysis is a powerful critical tool, but it has real limitations worth understanding.

Economic Reductionism

Economic reductionism is the tendency to explain all social and cultural phenomena as products of economic forces. Critics argue that reducing everything to class struggle oversimplifies human experience. Not every conflict in a text is about economics, and not every form of oppression can be traced back to who owns the means of production.

Post-Marxist thinkers like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have argued that political identity and struggle can't be reduced to class alone.

Neglect of Individual Agency

Classical Marxism emphasizes structural forces and collective action, which can sometimes leave little room for individual choice. Critics point out that people aren't simply products of their class position; they make decisions, resist in unexpected ways, and hold contradictory beliefs.

A balanced approach recognizes that individuals act within structural constraints without being entirely determined by them.

Alternatives to Class-Based Analysis

Other theoretical frameworks address what class analysis can miss:

• Postcolonial theory examines how colonialism and its legacies shape culture and identity, sometimes in ways that cut across class lines
• Feminist theory foregrounds gender as a primary axis of power, arguing that patriarchy operates independently of (though often alongside) class exploitation
• Critical race theory centers race and racism as structuring forces in society

These aren't necessarily opposed to Marxist analysis. Many contemporary critics combine class-based approaches with these frameworks to produce richer, more layered readings. The strongest literary criticism often draws on multiple lenses rather than relying on any single one.