Hello, I am Himanshi Parmar, student of MK Bhavnagar University. This blog i have written as a response to Thinking Activity, Which is a Part of my academic Work. Which we get after each unit. In this blog, i am going to discuss about Marxist Criticism. And will do criticism of some movies. Before that, it is important to understand that what is Marxist criticism and what Marxist critics do.
Marxism :-
Definition :-
According to Oxford Dictionary, 'Marxism is the political and economic theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, later developed by their followers to form the basis of communism.'
According to Cambridge Business English Dictionary, 'Marxism is a social, political, and economic theory based on the ideas of Karl Marx, who imagined a society where the methods of production would be owned and controlled by all its members.'
Meaning :-
Theory of marxism was applied by Karl Marx (1818–83) and his fellow-thinker Friedrich Engels (1820–95). Karl Marx was highly critical of politics, economics and capitalistic system. Marxism applies political science and economic to study of literature.Marxist criticism is analyzing how government and business empires controlling means of productions and even working class people. Marxism is concerned with class conflicts, wealth distribution, work and other issues. Here, we can relate one quote of Karl Marx,
"The history of all existing society is the history of class conflict."
Watch this videos to understand theory of Marxism more clearly.
What Marxist critics do?
1) Marxist practice is to relate the literary work to the social assumptions of the time in which it is 'consumed', a strategy which is used particularly in the later variant of Marxist criticism known as cultural materialism.
2) Marxist critics is relate the context of a work to the social-class status of the author. In such cases an assumption is made (which again is similar to those made by psychoanalytic critics) that the author is unaware of precisely what he or she is saying or revealing in the text.
Click here to read more.
Examples
1) Taal Movie
Movie 'Taal' was directed by Subhash Ghai.Taal is a 1999 Hindi musical drama film starring Anil Kapoor, Akshaye Khanna and Aishwarya Rai. In this movie we find aishwarya Rai is from poor or we can say lower middle class family, Son of one rich businessman called Manav falls in love with Mansi (Aishwarya Rai), while Manav's aunties, uncles and Father opposed it. When Mansi and her Father visit Manav's bungalow to talk for their engagement, Manav's rich family members insulted them, forced them to sit with dog, ignored them, showoff, and created huge quarrel. This seen is proper symbolism of crisis between Rich and poor. After that Mansi started doing modeling and becomes famous, also one music director fall in love with her and proposed her for marriage, but at last out of all the conflicts Mansi and Manav get married, Means difference of rich and poor ended and equality or we can say balanced cycle emerged in Marxism.
In this poster we find Manav is standing at height and Mansi is at bottom, it is also symbolizing their character's social status, or we can say economic conditions. Where Manav is richer than Mansi. He is in the dominant power.
Watch entire movie here.
2) Ishq Movie
In this movie, there is two rich businessman are friends and both their childs are of same age group. They both want their childrens to marry each other, but they are in love with someone eles, who are belonging from Lower class or working class, when their parents came to know about that, they make every effort to sperate them from their poor lovers. And when they found that they are getting failed in convincing their childrens to leave their poor lovers, they started torturing poor lovers, with the help of police and government power. Also they hired Coadjutors and try to kill them also.
This all bad things they able to do because they have money, so in 'Marxism', money is always at the center. Those who have money, they town's the power, government, and sometimes even a nation. Moneyless people are always marginalized community and working class. And Marxism trying to balance this inequality by various ways, marriage between rich and poor is one of the way of balancing the cycle. In this movie also we find at the end all four, Rich hero and heroin and poor heroin and hero happily came together and get married. Again we find 'Marxism' in this movie.
