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Can Marxist criticism be used to analyze text with no dominant class or social classes? I need this for homework

Hi yall, just what the title says… can anyone recommend good books on Islam and socialism/ communism and or Soviet history and Islam like in Central Asia. Thanks🙏 🇵🇸

Hi everyone. I'm teaching Marxist literary criticism and I was wondering if you could recommend any good Marxist poems or short stories. Texts which are teachable and accessible to non-Native English speakers. Thank you!

I saw this "reminist reimagination of 1984" yesterday at a book store and got curious. I read Orwell's bullshit novel as a teen and liked it a lot back then, and now I've got educated both on the novel's flaws and the author's atrocities. That's why I'd like to know: Is this book marxsist? Or is it just a white "feminist" version of Orwell's anticommunist rhetoric? My interest is peaked to read it critically, so I want to know if it's worth spending my money on.

The 1967 Marxist critical theory by Guy Debord talks about how life presents itself as an "immense accumulation of spectacles." When I analysed the text w.r.t social media especially Instagram, it made a lot of sense.

The life we present on Instagram is chosen deliberately with a lot of thought. It is in fact a separate entity. "Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation."

The posts or the presentation doesn't remain as a different aspect instead it can create a relation between users or can be the major factor in the case of networking. "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images." When the interpretation of a specific account or a post becomes a majority opinion, it has the tendency to become the general pespective. " It is a world vision which has become objectified."

This representation is not something extra or superficial added to reality; it is more fundamental and integrated into the fabric of society. (We might often fail to see the separateness because it is deeply weaved into the society) "It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of SOCIALLY DOMINANT LIFE. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production." Instagram's "language" is made up of visual signs (photos, videos, captions) that reflect dominant cultural and economic values. These signs are both produced by and serve the goals of the ruling production systems—capitalism, consumerism, and popular culture. For instance, influencers promote products and lifestyles that align with commercial interests, driving consumer behavior and perpetuating the spectacle.

The division between reality and Instagram (the spectacle) distorts the overall social experience. People may prioritise creating content for Instagram over engaging in real-life experiences. The spectacle (Instagram) becomes the goal, with users striving to capture and share moments for the platform rather than for their intrinsic value. "But the split within this totality mutilates it to the point of making the spectacle appear as its goal."

Instagram presents itself as a platform filled with positivity, glamour, and idealized lifestyles. The content often seems perfect and beyond reach, creating an impression of an unattainable ideal. "The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance." People consume content without questioning its authenticity or underlying reality because the platform dominates visual culture. Its design and user interface encourage scrolling, not always critical engagement.

"In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false."

Hello everyone,

As we all know, almost all history books focus exclusively on the role of the rich and powerful, kings and generals--mind-numbing recitations of facts, dates, names, and places, without every asking "why" history took the course it did. I've just published a book that looks at the driving forces that produced Ancient, Medieval, and Capitalist civilizations from the perspective of the role of farmers. These are my main findings, which I'll be more than happy to discuss. I'm also selling the book at cost here.

1.     Rome’s rise was powered by the productivity and combativity of its free farmers.

2.     Rome’s decline was caused by the destruction of its free farmers by its slaveholders, emperors, tax collectors, and army commanders.

3.     In northern Europe, free barbarians developed a more productive agriculture, with which they produced more food, more farmers, more warriors, until they overran the empire.

4.     The early medieval period was a brawl over whether slavery would survive. The farmers half-won, abolishing slavery, but were held in serfdom.

5.     Charlemagne tried to create a new empire, based in northern Europe, but more advances in agricultural production by this now-freer peasantry fed the rise of an aristocracy independent of the emperor that overthrew this empire as well and opened the road to the rise of feudalism.

6.     Europe’s medieval economic takeoff began on the farms in those regions where the farmers first and most completely conquered their freedom: northern Italy, Flanders, and England, opening the way for farmers to develop an agricultural revolution. The great surpluses these farmers produced fueled the rise of a merchant class and cities, where craftspeople made an industrial revolution, further fueling growth. This fight for freedom by the farmers and new townspeople spread across the continent.

7.     From this expansion, the papacy and the German aristocracy grew wealthy, allied with each other, and in a bitter civil war broke the power of the king, blocking Germany from uniting under a national monarchy.

8.     By 1250, the new masters of society, the feudal lords, had tightened their grip on the peasantry. This caused declining agricultural yields, malnutrition, the spread of the bubonic plague, and the Hundred Years War.

9.     This infighting among the feudal lords weakened them, allowing the peasants to regain some freedom and begin rebuilding.

10.  In a running fight over whether land and labor would be freed from serfdom, the feudal lords defeated the farmers, urban workers, and merchants in Germany in a series of wars in 1389, 1440–60, and finally in the Peasant War of 1525.

11.  The feudal lords reestablished their stranglehold on society, tightening the shackles of serfdom and raising rents before and after the Peasant War. This blocked Germany’s transition to capitalism and guaranteed its decay into widespread malnutrition, famine, plague, witch hunts, and the Thirty Years War.

12.  Meanwhile, farmers in Holland and England fought their way out of serfdom and continued to increase agricultural production, which powered the growth of commerce and cities. Strong farmer and merchant classes—and the beginnings of a working class—developed that allied and destroyed the remnants of feudalism and launched these countries to world power.

13.  The last part of this book responds to claims that the twists and turns of history were caused by the weather, overpopulation, sunspots, property rights for the rich, and so forth.

As today is #BastilleDay, I've put together a series of perspectives on the French Revolution from a working-class perspective. Here's Rosa Luxemburg's view on how the French Revolution. She shows that failure of the bourgeois class to realise its own aims, such as economic equality, led to conflict with its erstwhile allies, the propertyless and poor classes of France. However, those groups, as yet undeveloped as a working-class, meant that their class consciousness was not at a level of development required to take power. Additionally, the means of production were as yet undeveloped as the Industrial Revolution was just beginning. Ultimately, the working class could not yet take power, and the bourgeoisie could not achieve the abstract ideals on which the revolution was based. In Luxemburg's view, it requires a working class revolution to make a material reality of the idealist, abstract "dreams" of the otherwise "well intentioned" bourgeois Jacobins.

https://proletarianperspective.wordpress.com/2024/07/13/perspectives-on-the-french-revolution-rosa-luxemburg-on-the-year-1793/

#July14 #14July #FrenchRevolution

I'm thinking stuff that really goes into the nitty gritty of how people relate to labour, especially salaried labour, from a Marxist lens. Cooperation/rivalry with the peers. Pleasing/threatening/wrangling the managers. Having a healthy rapport with people you manage. Dealing with customers and suppliers and contractors. Dealing with the State. Work/life balance. Health issues, especially caused by stress. And that pervading sense that you're wasting the best hours of your best days away.

Hi, I’m looking for Marxist literature on the topic of religion. Particularly on the compatibility of religion with Marxism or communism.

Hi everyone,

I recently saw a comment on a subreddit post, which I believed I’d saved, but I now can’t find it (I believe it was on a something like r/marxistculture, but I can’t find that either)!

The comment mentioned the name of a book which provided a level and critical breakdown of Stalin’s time in power, referenced against Western/US government propaganda (I think). The comment said it was important reading and enlightening, and I’d like to, but I don’t know the name!

If you’ve made it this far, and know the name of the book, or a similar book, I’d love to know. For context, I’m leftist, communist sympathetic, and eager to learn more about history, rather than myths and legends that are passed down through capitalist shills.

Thanks for reading this post, if you do, and I hope you have a pleasant end of December. ✊

TLDR; someone recommended a book about that actual history of Stalin, and for one reason of another I can’t find the comment that I thought I’d saved, or remember the name of the book.

Also, I recognise it’s not expressly Marxist, rather, Stalinist. I’m hoping that someone can still help. If not any book recommendations would be most welcome. Thank you

Hello:) For my thesis (I am going to be a child care worker) on family abolition's Bye to eugenics, i am looking for (early) Marxist and communist anti-eugenicist writing and (later) socialist writing in support of the disability rights movement. Also Marx' notions of Mehrarbeit's emancipatory potential (I remember I read somewhere about what could be done with it when it no longer serves profit-making). Happy for any help!