Marxism

At Marx U, you don't pick your class—your class picks you.

Meet Karl, venerable founder of Marx U. He's a big, bearded, 19th-century bourgeois, and he spent much of his adulthood in the British Library. Imagine his portrait on the wall: he's not smiling.

Okay, he may not seem like the likeliest founder of the world's most radical intellectual and political movement, but beneath that grandfatherly exterior lurks a wickedly subversive mind.

For Karl, it's all about the power struggle: rich versus poor, owners versus workers, cats versus dogs. And when we say it's all about the power struggle for this dude, we mean it's allllll about the power struggle. We're looking at you, literature. That's right: for Marx, the power struggle plays out in every novel, poem, movie, song, whatever.

According to Marxists, any time you write, you're advancing your cause. Don't know what your cause is? Marxists sure do.

According to Marxists, every story tells us something about the world—and about which side the author is on. The goal of the Marxist critic is to figure out what that is. And thanks to Marx, we can make some pretty good guesses before we even open the book.

Say what? Well, Marxists think they have the answer to pretty much any question you might have. They even think they can predict the future. So what's this all about? Is it mind-reading? Sorcery? Mumbo-jumbo? Well, according to Marxists, what they have to offer is a total theory of history and society. We're talking a total theory of everything.

So pick up your hammers and sickles, comrades, because it's time for Communist Literature 101.