Tag: Communist Manifesto

  • Marx and Shakespeare: The Hellscape of Macbeth

    Marx and Shakespeare: The Hellscape of Macbeth

    Nought’s had, all’s spent,
    Where our desire is got without content.
    ‘Tis safer to be that which we destroy
    Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.

    —Lady Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 2.

    Macbeth ranks among the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays alongside Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. It is commonly taught in primary English classes and is a frequent visitor to the stage and screen, with recent films featuring Michael Fassbender and Denzel Washington in the titular role.

    The play famously tells the story of Macbeth, Thane of Glamis, beginning with his heroic victory against Scottish rebels who have allied with Norway to depose the Scottish King Duncan. An encounter with three witches—or the Weird Sisters—sets Macbeth onto fulfilling a prophecy that he should become king.1 He accomplishes this, but in the most violent of ways: by conspiring with his wife to murder the king in his sleep overnight at Inverness Castle and frame the royal bodyguards for the crime.

    Their plan succeeds but it inflicts enormous psychic damage on the Macbeths. Aware of their criminal accession to the Scottish throne, they resort to increasingly paranoid and depraved actions to cover up their original crime and secure their power, with Macbeth arranging the murder of his friend and fellow thane, Banquo, as well as the innocent family of Macduff. Ultimately, Macduff and Duncan’s son, Malcolm, join forces to overthrow the maniacal Macbeth and restore order to the crown.

    Bad Magic

    A number of Shakespeare’s stories centre around competition for a throne or regicide or the power struggles that bring strife to a kingdom. Macbeth is no different in this regard. Unique to this play are the use of witches to foment the initial conflicts that put the plot in motion. The Weird Sisters present themselves in the very first scene, where they declare an intention to meet with Macbeth, parting with the line: “Fair is foul and foul is fair / Hover through the fog and filthy air.”

    The precise motivations of the witches are never made explicit. As an aside, they are only referred to as “witches” in the stage directions; in spoken verse they are known as the “weyward” or “weird” sisters. They are described as having beards and “withered attire” and are best conceptualized as androgynous demonic beings set on spreading moral chaos—quite different from the caricature of broomstick-riding women wearing pointy black hats.

    In the second scene of the play, just after the Weird Sisters present themselves to the audience, we learn that Macbeth has distinguished himself in battle on the side of his king, by executing the rebel Macdonwald in a brutal fashion: cutting him open from his navel to his jaw before chopping off his head and displaying it on a parapet.2 We can deduce that the savage manner of this slaying is what drew the witches’ attention to Macbeth and summoned them to the Scottish highlands—a place where “fair is foul and foul is fair.”

    Accentuating this point is Macbeth’s first spoken verse in the play. Marching back from battle, he says to Banquo: “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.” The Weird Sisters possess a disordered ethics; one that revels in mortal chaos, thunderstorms and dead livestock. In Macbeth, the witches recognize a kindred spirit and fellow traveller, even though he is oblivious to this himself.

    When the sisters appear to Macbeth and Banquo along their march, Macbeth finds himself riveted by their prostration before him as both Thane of Cawdor and King of Scotland. Meeting King Duncan shortly thereafter, he is granted the Thane of Cawdor title in addition to his existing Thane of Glamis, solidifying the witches as prophetic beings in the mind of Macbeth.

    The witches also tempt Banquo’s curiosity by suggesting that his descendants will themselves be kings of Scotland. He is unmoved by this, which demonstrates a couple of facts: one, Banquo is not morally deficient as Macbeth is and, two, the witches have no real controlling power beyond suggestion. After Macbeth is made Thane of Cawdor, Banquo cautions him:

    But ‘tis strange;
    The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
    Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s
    In deepest consequence.3

    Banquo’s warning affirms the widely held belief in early modern England that demonic power is not often represented by direct, physical intervention in the world but, rather, it is something that acts upon the conscience.4 Although Macbeth and his wife believed they were touched by some supranatural divination, the Weird Sisters really just activated the pair’s own ambition by stoking temptation and suspicion. At no point did they give instructions to the Macbeths to kill anybody. As they dangled the possibility of Macbeth taking the throne or pointed out threats to his power, murder—even child murder—was the reflexive response.

    The Demonic King

    Lady Macbeth is eventually consumed by unconscious guilt as she is unable to conciliate her spiritual damnation. But by Act 3 Macbeth openly acknowledges having given his immortal soul over to Satan, the “common enemy of man.”5 Resigned to spiritual destitution, Macbeth becomes even more dangerous and depraved. For him, securing the throne became a sort of moral sunk cost fallacy: if he already lost his soul by committing regicide, why should he avoid violence if it secures his Earthly gains?

    Even for Shakespeare, Macbeth is a bleak and brooding story that likely would not have been written if it was not for the prior ascension of James I to the English throne. James believed that he had been targeted by witchcraft when he encountered storms while sailing to Denmark in order to meet his future bride. The incident inspired him to write a treatise called Daemonologie, concerning all matters of dark magic, sorcery and demonic forces at work corrupting humanity.6

    James had an acute interest in the subject, but demonic beings were an accepted presence of early modern English life at the time. The historian Kathryn Morris writes:

    Renaissance discourse included the idea of civil authority as a likely target of the demonic conspiracy. Jean Bodin claimed that political authorities (the sovereign, as well as the magistrates) should expect witches’ aggression. This clearly followed from the sovereign’s status as God’s vice-regent: the sovereign had a special obligation in the fight against the Devil, and so was especially likely to be the subject of attacks.7

    Morris goes on to explain that “legitimate, godly authority will be the target of the demonic usurper,” while “the sovereign’s authority was tied up in the ability to counter this pressing threat and to preserve epistemic stability.”8 King Duncan, his hands full with rebellious subjects, failed to recognize the demonic forces gathering in his midst. By rewarding the vicious slaying of Macdonwald, Duncan inadvertently kicked off a sequence of events that saw Macbeth transmogrify into the demonic usurper and proceed to wreak havoc on the kingdom.

    A Changing Face of Evil

    The sociologist Max Weber described modern society as one that is “disenchanted.” We no longer see the human realm as a battlefield between angels and demons, good and evil, magic and miracles, God and Satan. Macbeth can only be understood on the terms of the previously-existing traditional, enchanted society.

    For Karl Marx, it was the advancing forces of production that spurred the application of scientific rigour to all manners of the economy, and then, the society. The Industrial Revolution has purged traditional superstitions from the cultural landscape by developing a high-tech economic base with a secular, science-oriented superstructure hanging overhead.

    That said, in one instance Marx and Engels actually invoke the imagery of dark magic to describe the modern economy:

    Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells…It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence.9

    Marx and Engels’ choice of analogy was not accidental. The wars, hunger and environmental catastrophes familiar to us today by way of unchecked capital accumulation and recurring economic crises are the very things that were blamed on demonic forces during history’s previous epoch. Just as it was the God-given job of civil authorities to manage the cosmic balance of “good versus evil” during the feudal period, so it is the secular job of our leaders today to ward off economic crisis and bring forward prosperity.

    Money, like magic, has the occult power to lift collective fortunes, improve individual status, exercise power over others, pervert our conscious thoughts and cast calamities onto entire nations. Instead of witchcraft, we see today that crude monetary interest can drive people toward any sort of theft, deception and murder. Macbeth is a meditation on the impersonal forces that governed the early modern world. And Marxism is a meditation on the impersonal forces governing us today.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. In the first publication of Macbeth, the witches are referred to as “weyward” in the Early Modern English. Because the root of “weird” is the Old English “wyrd,” meaning “power to control fate,” the witches came to be referred to as the “Weird Sisters” in subsequent publications of the play. Interestingly, they are never referred to as “witches” in the spoken dialogue, only in the stage directions. ↩︎

    2. As told by the Captain: “For brave Macbeth, disdaining Fortune…Which ne’er shook hands nor bade farewell to him / Till he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chaps / And fixed his head upon our battlements.” ↩︎

    3. From Act 1, Scene 3. Stephen Orgel, ed., The Pelican Shakespeare: Macbeth (Penguin, 2000): 12. ↩︎

    4. Gregory Dodds, “Review of The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England,” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 1: 274-275. ↩︎

    5. As spoken by Macbeth in Act 3, Scene 1. Orgel, Macbeth, 42. ↩︎

    6. James RX, Daemonologie, In Forme of a Dialogie, (Printer to the Kings Majestie, 1597). Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25929/pg25929-images.html ↩︎

    7. Kathryn Morris, “Past, Present, and the Politics of Witch Hunts,” Renaissance and Restoration, Vol. 47, No. 4: 162. Reference to political philosopher Jean Bodin’s 1580 treatise entitled, On the Demon-Mania of Witches. ↩︎

    8. Ibid, 155, 163. ↩︎

    9. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Arcturus, 2017): 43-44. ↩︎
  • Marx and Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing

    Marx and Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing

    If ever the sensible Benedick bear it,
    pluck off the bull’s horns and set them in my forehead,
    and let me be vilely painted, and in such great letters
    as they write “Here is good horse to hire”
    let them signify under my sign
    “Here you may see Benedick the married man.”

    —Benedick, Act 1, Scene 1.

    One thing that Marx and Shakespeare had in common was living through periods of quantum leaps in culture and thought. The Renaissance was the cultural expression formed by increasing commerce, urbanization and loosening feudal bonds, and codified by painters like Leonardo Da Vinci, sculptors like Michelangelo and playwrights like Shakespeare.

    The Industrial Revolution, on the other hand, spurned an interest in science and rapid change reflected in the biological theories of Charles Darwin, the social theories of Karl Marx and the psychoanalytic proposals of Sigmund Freud. Closer to the present, we have seen developments in mass communications and recording technologies give space to pioneering musicians like The Beatles and Bob Dylan, while the digital age has seen the rise of the viral clip and the podcast. Marx and Shakespeare trailed the material changes of society, as all revolutions in thought and culture tend to do.

    Cultural productions are artifacts. They are crystallized objects transmitting historical information about the society that produced it—the psychology, the politics, the economy, the zeitgeist. In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare gives the subject of romance, love and marriage a light, comedic touch in contrast to his treatment of these subjects in crushing tragedies like Romeo and Juliet and Othello.

    Chivalry in the Court

    Saying nothing of emotional attraction, marriage evolved to institutionalize sexual reproduction and hereditary transmission of property. In Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, he notes that during the Middle Ages “the pairing marriage” was most often a “matter of convenience which was arranged by the parents.” Passion, on the other hand, “heads straight for adultery, and all the poets of love celebrated adultery.”1

    What Engels refers to is the culture of courtly love that developed among the feudal nobility, in particular the knights and ladies of the court. Engulfed by jousting matches and the dangers of battle, knights would dedicate their pursuits to a noble woman as part of the chivalric culture.2 Courtly love took place outside the bonds of marriage, layering erotic desire with both courtesy and surreptitiousness.

    Like many of Shakespeare’s plays, Much Ado About Nothing cannot be understood without contextualizing the feudal culture that the Renaissance emerged from. The rise of gunpowder had steadily diminished the scope of knighthood until it was little more than an honorific title. But the complicated culture of furtive romance and noble courtship residually remained, even as society was moving toward voluntary marriages based on love. Infidelity, once packaged as a chivalric passion, is seen across Shakespeare’s work as an ominous presence dragged down the aisle beneath the bridal gown.

    By the Renaissance period, it was armed soldiers waging battle, and the story picks up with news that Don Pedro and his men would be arriving in Messina after a successful battle. Benedick is among the arriving entourage and he carries an intense fear of being cuckolded—so much so, that he vows to never marry a woman: “Because I will not do them the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none. And the fine is, for which I may go finer, I will live a bachelor.”

    The Timeless Art of Seduction

    Benedick’s intransigence toward marriage mark him for a sort of prank, whereby Don Pedro and his men lead him to believe that the governor’s niece, Beatrice, is in love with him. At the same time, Beatrice is led to believe that Benedick harbours feelings for her. It is a fabrication but it works, and Beatrice and Benedick are both privately delighted to be the object of the other’s affections. The speed by which Benedick accepts Beatrice’s feelings leads one to believe that Benedick’s aversion to marriage all along may have been a fear of rejection.

    In a parallel storyline, Claudio courts the governor’s daughter, Hero. This is thrown off course by Don Pedro’s jealous—and illegitimate—brother, Don John. Don John orchestrates a scheme whereby a member of his entourage advances on a chambermaid, with Claudio as a witness through the window. Claudio believes it is actually Hero being seduced and he denounces her at the altar the next day:

    Would you not swear,
    All that see her, that she were a maid
    By these exterior shows? But she is none.
    She knows the heat of a luxurious bed.
    Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty.

    —Claudio, Act 4, Scene 1.

    Being a comedy, the plot lines resolve through turns and ultimately conclude with the happy marriages of Benedick to Beatrice and Claudio to Hero. The scheming and side quests were, in the end, “much ado about nothing.”3 What this story does indicate is the immense anxiety and wicked humour around the prospect of female infidelity, primarily told from the point of view of the male characters. It peels back the social attitudes underpinning English coverture, which effectively rendered wives the property of their husbands.

    Romance during the age of chivalry was replaced in the modern age with something far more transactional and economical and potentially humiliating. Shakespeare’s play reflects the social anxieties of the commercial revolution as it transformed courtly love into the modern marriage.

    The historical construction of romance and marriage was largely passed down from a position of male accommodation, however. Gender relations since the advent of class society has been a disaster. This is because the economic scarcity created by property relations—through slavery, serfdom and meagre wage labour—has squeezed the bulk of humanity onto the lower rungs of the economic hierarchy, and women were largely pushed off the ladder altogether. Recent movement toward gender equality has burst into the open only since capitalism has demanded the labour-power of more and more people, men and women alike.4

    Universal Exploitation

    As the economic inequality between men and women have shrunk, so have the legal and cultural discriminations. But they cannot be done away under a system that freely discriminates against all people on the basis of economic class. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote: “Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.”5 The latter bit about “seducing each other’s wives” is clearly what fixates Benedick and Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing.

    But think about the financial elites with proletarian wives and daughters “at their disposal.” Think about Jeffrey Epstein and associates feasting on the bodies of working class children. Think about Thomas Jefferson’s sexual exploitation of enslaved women. Think about Harvey Weinstein and the “quid pro quos” demanded of aspiring actresses.

    Sexual exploitation is the sharpest edge on the Luciferian tower of economic exploitation. But the solution isn’t to smooth the edges—it’s to get rid of the tower. Given the current reality of exploitation in Shakespeare’s world and our own, we cannot expect the double standards set between rich and poor, whites and non-whites, men and women to disappear outright. They won’t. 

    For all the fixations of the male characters in Much Ado, it is Don Pedro’s attendant who implores the ladies of the court to forgive the transgressions of men even though they are unwilling to do the same in kind. He sings:

    Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.
    Men were deceivers ever,
    One foot in sea, and one on shore.
    To one thing constant never.
    Then sigh not so, but let them go,
    And be you blithe and bonny,
    Converting all your sounds of woe
    Into hey nonny, nonny.

    —Balthasar, Act 2, Scene 3.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. Friedrich Engels, “The Monogamous Family” in Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. ↩︎

    2. It should be noted that detailed information and artifacts of this chivalric culture are disputed and sketchy. The historians that Engels leaned on drew heavily from the poetry of Provençal troubadours. ↩︎

    3. Of interest is Shakespeare’s usage of “nothing,” which carried a triple entendre: it is nothing, as we would say today, and it also denotes “no-thing” between the legs of a woman. Additionally it was homophonic to “noting” in Elizabethan English—with “noting” being a colloquial term for gossip and rumour. ↩︎

    4. David Harvey elaborates on the massive integration of the human population into the global capitalist system in Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014): 108. ↩︎

    5. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Arcturus, 2017): 79. ↩︎