Class Antagonism, Alienation, and Gorky's Depiction

Introduction

Disclaimer: This article has spoilers about the book. The Mother, by Maxim Gorky, is perhaps one of the most engaging books I’ve had the pleasure of reading. The book itself is a description of the lives of ordinary working people coming face to face with the colourless world painted for them by the “rulers”, which is just a placeholder for the bourgeoisie: the owners of the means of production. The entire painting is shown through the eyes of a mother, who gradually notes the changes in her son, Pavel, as he discovers the socialist cause and dedicates his life to it, eventually being exiled to Siberia by the authorities.

The mother, who at first does not understand this entire ordeal, becomes more and more involved with the cause, eventually becoming a centerpiece on the entire board. Eventually, at the end of the book, she is caught with banned literature by the authorities, and goes down chanting the slogans of freedom, and encouraging the working class to rise against the demons that haunt them. Beyond the vividness and careful articulation of the story, I’d like this article to express a much more subtle side of this book, as well as some of the fundamental Marxist critique that inspired the 1917 revolution to soon follow its publication in 1906.

The Labour Theory of Value

The Marxist critique of capitalism has several pivoting elements to it that we can effectively use to summarise a component of his thought. One such element is the labour theory of value, which Marx uses to explain how surplus value originates in goods. The theory, in modern economic lenses, has been subjected to substantial attack, especially by the Austrian economic school. The prevailing economic theory of value today is perhaps the theory of marginal utility, or subjective value.

The point, however, is that Maxim Gorky, through the character of the mother, attempts to paint a different picture of Marxism. A picture that is not subject to the formalisations of a theory, but rather, the small personal experiences of people living in a world that is drunk on the idea of wealth. I think that for the characters in the book, and by extension the billions of workers around the globe, the question as to what exactly gives rise to surplus value, for example, and how they are technically exploited by the bourgeoisie, is irrelevant to an extent. What’s relevant to them are the conditions they are being subjected to: how the fruits of their toil and labour are snatched away from them for evidently mundane reasons.

In their eyes, the idea that the primary benefactor of labour is not the labourer, but someone else, is enough to prove to them that they are subject to exploitation. I think that in the book, the idea of the factory clearing the marshes through extra money extracted from the workers is a very good example of this illustration. The factory pitches this entire idea to them as some grand service to the community, which was, in reality, an extra instrument of exploitation for the benefit of the factory. We see this entire paradigm in modern capitalism quite clearly: more or less any given marketed benefit to the consumer is actually a benefit to the corporation, with the consumers being the ones to pay for it. This theme often repeats itself, sometimes quite explicitly. As the workers put it, if the factory really cared, they’d do it from their own already-overflowing pockets.

The Alienation of The Worker

Similarly, we see that Marxist discourse brings alienation of the worker into its critique. The idea is that in a capitalist economy, the labourer never owns any of the products of their labour. The craftsman fails to see his excellence in the work that he creates, simply because it is not his. It follows from Marx’s theory that any given human labour yields objects in a certain social context. Alienation happens when the given agent or actor is separated from meaningful agency. In the case of capitalism, there are about four such separations happening: the alienation of the worker from his work, from his objects, from his social context, and finally, from himself.

The worker no longer has agency over the work he chooses to do, or what the results of that work would be, or the social context that work finds itself in. Marx argues that capitalism itself demands that the means of production are owned by another entity, and the producers be another entity altogether, and that this model is the correct way to proceed. What the labourer produces is not only not his, but is hostile to him. The very object that he produces is the very thing that gives the capitalist power over him: the more they produce, the more power the capitalist accumulates to control the labour market. They work for forty or fifty years, but are no better than when they started. Society gets richer, but they do not. The same goes for his labour. As one professor says,

The capitalist himself is merely a priest who lives well off the service of capital, and not a god. When the god speaks, he too must jump, or he will find himself in my place, where god knows no one wants to be. So, between him and me, it’s “nothing personal”.

The activity of the labourer is no longer his own expression but the expression of the capitalist agency. It has no relation to who he is or chooses to become. In fact, a perfection of this alienation is to want to become what the capitalist agency states. For Marx, animals do the same: work only to live. Interestingly, the worker is now alienated with himself: his non-work hours are free times, or leisure times, or he needs a work-life balance, and an amazing company is the one that has a life associated with the work of an employee: an amazing work-life balance! That means for nine hours a day I do meaningful activity, for eight I sleep, and for the rest, I live/am free/in leisure.

The book, on the other hand, does not care to delve into such an arrangement of explanations. Instead, it shows you the alienation of the worker. However, the most important part of showing this is how Gorky never mentions the objects that the labourers produce. There is very little detail about what the characters actually do for most of their day, or for whom, or how much they earn, or what their aspirations related to work are.

Instead, most of the characters in the book only come to life when discussing the socialist cause late at night, outside their work. I think it fits perfectly with the idea that their alienation from work makes them see their time in the day as being spent unconsciously, and they only begin to talk and think when they engage in conscious activity at night. Their social context is destroyed, and we say that by the complete absence of any mentions of the type of society they were in with respect to culture, location, and customs. The book barely mentions any cultural items except those that are in the space where the characters interact, possibly to demonstrate the undoing of their alienation.

Class Antagonism

The last element, and perhaps the most important, is the class antagonisms that result between the two classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. According to Marx, all history is a history of class struggle, and Gorky aims to depict this rather brilliantly. In this case, I think I will conclude with just two passages from the end of the book, which depict Pavel giving his final words against the enslaving system (capitalism), and the monstrous, devilish description of the judge that Gorky paints.

He doesn’t just show the two opposing ideas in words, but rather, he manages to turn these feelings into living creatures and monsters that evoke passion, disgust, hate, and many other feelings. For him, capitalism is a flesh-hungry old monster ready to devour any disobedience, and socialism is a giant growing from the fire lit in the hearts of ordinary working people. These two beasts hate each other, have hated each other, and have no form of reconciliation possible between them. And so, Pavel (the son of the Mother) states the thoughts of an ordinary socialist:

We are revolutionists, and will be such as long as private property exists, as long as some merely command, and as long as others merely work. We take stand against the society whose interests you are bidden to protect as your irreconcilable enemies, and reconciliation between us is impossible until we shall have been victorious. We will conquer–we workingmen! Your society is not at all so powerful as it thinks itself. That very property, for the production and preservation of which it sacrifices millions of people enslaved by it–that very force which gives it the power over us–stirs up discord within its own ranks, destroys them physically and morally. Property requires extremely great efforts for its protection; and in reality all of you, our rulers, are greater slaves than we–you are enslaved spiritually, we only physically. YOU cannot withdraw from under the weight of your prejudices and habits, the weight which deadens you spiritually; nothing hinders US from being inwardly free. The poisons with which you poison us are weaker than the antidote you unwittingly administer to our consciences. This antidote penetrates deeper and deeper into the body of workingmen; the flames mount higher and higher, sucking in the best forces, the spiritual powers, the healthy elements even from among you. Look! Not one of you can any longer fight for your power as an ideal! You have already expended all the arguments capable of guarding you against the pressure of historic justice. You can create nothing new in the domain of ideas; you are spiritually barren. Our ideas grow; they flare up ever more dazzling; they seize hold of the mass of the people, organizing them for the war of freedom. The consciousness of their great role unites all the workingmen of the world into one soul.

And the Judge, a tool of the system that they are fighting, becomes the monster to depict the antagonism displayed by the rulers:

But the mother kept her gaze fastened unwaveringly on the judges, and saw that they got more and more excited, conversing with one another in indistinct voices. The sound of their words, cold and tickling, touched her face, puckering the skin on it, and filling her mouth with a sickly, disgusting taste. The mother somehow conceived that they were all speaking of the bodies of her son and his comrades, their vigorous bare bodies, their muscles, their youthful limbs full of hot blood, of living force. These bodies kindled in the judges the sinister, impotent envy of the rich by the poor, the unwholesome greed felt by wasted and sick people for the strength of the healthy. Their mouths watered regretfully for these bodies, capable of working and enriching, of rejoicing and creating. The youths produced in the old judges the revengeful, painful excitement of an enfeebled beast which sees the fresh prey, but no longer has the power to seize it, and howls dismally at its powerlessness.

This thought, rude and strange, grew more vivid the more attentively the mother scrutinized the judges. They seemed not to conceal their excited greed–the impotent vexation of the hungry who at one time had been able to consume in abundance. To her, a woman and a mother, to whom after all the body of her son is always dearer than that in him which is called a soul, to her it was horrible to see how these sticky, lightless eyes crept over his face, felt his chest, shoulders, hands, tore at the hot skin, as if seeking the possibility of taking fire, of warming the blood in their hardened brains and fatigued muscles–the brains and muscles of people already half dead, but now to some degree reanimated by the pricks of greed and envy of a young life that they presumed to sentence and remove to a distance from themselves. It seemed to her that her son, too, felt this damp, unpleasant tickling contact, and, shuddering, looked at her.