Marxism
A body of social, economic, and political thought developed from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the nineteenth century. At its core is a materialist analysis of history in which class conflict — between those who own the means of production and those who sell their labour — drives social change. Marxism predicts that capitalism's internal contradictions will eventually give way to socialism and then a stateless, classless communism. Beyond its political programme, Marxism has been enormously influential as a lens of literary and cultural criticism, reading texts as expressions of, or struggles against, the material conditions and class structures that produced them.
Episodes
Fleeting mentions
- 65. Walking away from 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas'
- 61. Atomised, part 2: Sympathy for the Incel
- 60. Was the sexual revolution a mistake? (Houellebecq's Atomised, part 1)
- 39. Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed: Real anarchy has never been tried
- 23. Crime and Punishment, part 1: Mister Schizo and the First Trad
- 20. Albert Camus' The Fall: Signalling, scrupulosity, and pathological self-awareness
- 19. Philip K. Dick's paranoid classic Ubik: Fluttering at the windowpane of reality
- 5. Borges' Garden of Forking Paths: a ramble through the multiverse