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Brave New World Marxist Analysis

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Brave New World In his text, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley imagines a society genetically engineered and socially conditioned to be a fully functioning society where everyone appears truly happy. This society is created with each person being assigned a social status from birth, much like the caste system in modern society strata applied to everyday society. Huxley shows the issue of class struggle from the Marxist perspective when Bernard Marx, who is a resemblance to 20th century Karl Marx, states “Community, Identity, Stability” (Huxley,3) .Huxley creates a society where certain human qualities are produced to make sure everybody fits the system. Class struggle within Marxist theory is explained in Donald Hall’s text Literary and Cultural …show more content…

Each caste is subdivided into pluses and minuses, although all wear the same color regardless of being an Alpha-plus or Alpha-minus. To reinforce the lower caste feeling that the upper castes are superior and to keep the lower castes in their place, the higher the caste the taller the person is. The color of the castes is based on what their occupation is as in unknown voice in Brave New World says “Alpha children...work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid... Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta." (Huxley, 27). One of Hall’s key principles is that “The traditional social structure of classes, within and around texts, is built on the oppression of the worker.” (Hall, 77) The Gammas are the workers as they were khaki, are helicopter attendants, cold pressers, screw cutters, package packers and are mass produced to have no …show more content…

Pain and stress — grief, humiliation, disappointment — representing uniquely individual reactions to conflict still occur sometimes in the brave new world. The people of the brave new world "solve" their conflict problems by swallowing a few tablets or taking an extended soma-holiday, which removes or sufficiently masks the negative feelings and emotions that other, more creative, problem-solving techniques might have and which cuts off the possibility of action that might have socially disruptive or revolutionary results. The society, therefore, encourages everyone to take soma as a means of social control by eliminating the effects of conflict. John's plea to the Deltas to throw away their soma, then, constitutes a cry for rebellion that goes unheeded. Somatized people do not know their own degradation. They are not even fully conscious that they are

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