Marxism

Marxism is the political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19^th century philosopher, economist, journalist and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. Marx drew on Hegel’s philosophy, the political economy of Adam Smith, Ricardian economics and 19^th century French socialism to develop a critique of society which he claimed was both scientific and revolutionary. This critique achieved his most systematic expression in his master piece, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Das Kapital). Georg Lukacs attempted a philosophical justification  of Bolshevism in his 1923 History and Class Consciousness and became the leading Marxist theoretician of literature, writing from the Soviet Union and his native Hungary. In Lukacs’s view realism meant more than rendering the surface appearance: it meant providing a more complete, true, vivid and dynamic view of the world around. Novels were reflections of life and therefore not real, but they nonetheless involved the mental framing that eluded photographic representation. Lukacs also adopted the Hegelian dialectic in stressing the contradictions of class struggle. Capitalism had destroyed the feudal order, replacing it by more efficient production. Social realism was also Bertolt Brecht’s detestation, and his famous technique of  “baring the device” derives from the Russian Formalist concept of defamiliarization. Brecht as a Marxist rejected a formal construction of place and was constantly attempting to unmask the disguises of an ever-devious capitalist system.