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Marxism In The Film Matewan

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Marxism is often a philosophy only understood by advanced scholars and criticized by those that wrongfully dub it as being solely “communist. Marxism is a lot more than communism and socialism. The film Matewan takes place in the 1920s and Matrix which takes place in 2199 are two very different films that share similar ideas. The ideas range from class alienation, commodity fetishism, class consciousness as well as tactics used by the state to support capitalist exploitation and bourgeois hegemony. A background into the first film Matewan, tells the story of an incident in the struggle to unionize the Mingo County in the West Virginia coalfield. The film begins underground with a coalface being blown and the news is passed round that the Stone Mountain Company has imposed a wage cut. Joe Kenehan, the protagonist is a union organizer on his way to Matewan by train (Sayles, Renzi, & Rajski, 1987). The Matrix on the other hand depicts a dystopian future in which reality as perceived by most humans is actually a simulated reality called "the Matrix", created by conscious machines to moderate the human population. Neo, the protagonist in Matrix, takes the 'red pill' and is reborn into the reality of Earth 2199, where he learns about the exploitation of humans (Wachowski et al., 1999). The concepts of class consciousness as mentioned by Karl Marx first needs to be between people was determined primarily through who controlled the mode of economic production i.e. land or

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