KAFKA
MARX
COMBO
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Kafka wrote about the contradictions and anxieties of his time but the central theme of his works, indisputably, is the theme of alienation. Alienation is a complex subject which is linked with its vast historicity from the Judeo-Christian beginnings. To understand alienation in Kafka’s works, it is essential to understand its foundation within a socio-economic context of the modern society. In this regard, Karl Marx and his theory of alienation can help steering our way.

The human society, as Marx had stressed in the Grundrisse, “does not consist of individuals; it expresses the sum of connections and relationships in which individuals find themselves”. Human beings therefore cannot exist independently of the society but are shaped by the society they live in. Human lives are dominated by natural and impersonal forces that control society to a great extent.

While studying the nature and functioning of the capitalistic form of production Marx had discovered the uniqueness of human labor: “At the end of every labor-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer”. This physical and intellectual labor of man has resulted in the collective development of the productive forces and subsequently became capable of producing a surplus. By taking over control of the means of production, a particular minority class of people adroitly set themselves free from the need to produce directly and live on the labor of others. The rise of industrial capitalism witnessed the majority of the people losing control over their labor as well as the process of production since modern science and technology has invented machinery “with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour” and substituted them.

Human beings must produce in order to survive. Productive activity is therefore the foundation of human consciousness. For transforming the world, human labour is the highest decisive factor. As a result of losing control over the process of production, man starts getting alienated from the product of their labor. Production activity turns into an alienated activity and further develops into alienation of consciousness. The cycle finally gets completed when men reach the stage of self-alienation from the very nature of human beings and is also alienated from other human beings. Individuals are unable to understand each another – alienation becomes a way of life.

Alienation affects individuals of every class but as Marx has noted, experience their alienation in different ways. The propertied class “feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement” while the proletariat class “feels annihilated, this means that they cease to exist in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence.” (Mészáros)

In short, the social relations of production under capitalism have ensured the creation of the modern alienated man. Capitalism has taught mankind to consider “other human beings as competitors, as inferiors or superiors” and see other people “through the lens of profit and loss”. Marx had brilliantly described the capitalist process that leads towards alienation:

It is true that labour produces marvels for the rich, but it produces privation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It procures beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labour by machines, but it casts some of the workers back into barbarous forms of labour and turns others into machines. It produces intelligence, but it produces idiocy and cretinism for the worker.

A feeling of suffocation, isolation and solitude, the ‘unconscious condition of mankind’, is therefore a systemic result of the industrial age and capitalism. Thus it is obvious that capitalistic alienation will be reflected in every form of reciprocal human trends and actions – in the practice of religion, philosophy, art, law and politics.

CLEARLY, THE WORK OF FRANZ KAFKA CANNOT BE REDUCED to a political doctrine of any kind. Kafka did not give speeches but fashioned individuals and situations. In his work, he expressed a Stimmung or sense of feelings and attitudes. The symbolic world of literature cannot be reduced to the discursive world of ideologies. Literary work is not an abstract conceptual system similar to philosophical or political doctrines but rather the creation of a concrete imaginary universe of individuals and things. (Cf. Lucien Goldmann)

However none of this should be an obstacle to making use of the passages, bridges, and subterranean links between his anti-authoritarian spirit, his libertarian sensibility, and his sympathies for anarchism on the one hand, and his principal writings on the other. These passages provide us with privileged access to what can be termed the internal landscape of Kafka's work.
Kafka's socialist leanings were evident very early on in his life. According to his childhood friend and schoolmate -- Hugo Bergmann, they had a slight falling out during their last academic year (1900-1901) because "his socialism and my Zionism were much too strident." (Hugo Bergmann)

Kafka further extends his critique of American ideals to a burlesque of American politics. He describes a political campaign rally that arouses Karl’s excitement and incites him to watch from an apartment balcony:

Down below the main body of the procession had now come into sight behind the band. On the shoulders of a gigantic man sat a gentleman of whom nothing could be seen at this height save the faint gleam of a bald crown... [T]he whole breadth of the street... was filled with the gentleman’s supporters, who clapped their hands in rhythm and kept proclaiming in a chanting cadence what seemed to be the gentleman’s... short but incomprehensible name. Single supporters... were carrying motor-car lamps of enormous power, which they slowly shone up and down the houses on both sides of the street.... On the balconies where supporters of the candidate were packed, the people joined in chanting his name, stretching their hands far over the railings and clapping with machine- like regularity. On the opposition balconies... a howl of retaliation arose.... All the enemies of the... candidate united in a general cat-calling.... Here and there unrecognisable objects were being flung by particularly heated partisans... into the street, where they provoked yells of rage (Kafka 248-251).

What begins as an orderly parade with the purpose of increasing popular support for a candidate hoping to be elected as district judge degenerates into a barbaric yawping match among political rivals. As the confusion exemplified by Kafka’s description of New York’s industrialized atmosphere transfers to this representation of a highly charged political rally, so too does his faultfinding commentary on America. Somewhat hyperbolic in nature, this passage in Kafka’s satiric writing even infuses into the verbal nature of contemporary political mudslinging the physical aspect of throwing objects at the candidate and his supporters. In doing so, Kafka manifests America’s political savagery and its lack of a civilized political system. “Kafka would seem to equate democracy with mob life, ... giv[ing] intimation of the madness if not the barbarism, of all culture,” argues Doctorow. “[T]his is an American political rally seen, so to speak, from a European balcony” (Doctorow xvi). Moreover, Kafka amplifies his conception of the foolishness of Americans by later mentioning the “round of free drinks” (Kafka 253) that the candidate distributes to the already lively crowd as he delivers his speech. As one can imagine, a drunken electorate holding a mob mentality will be influenced more by the alcohol than the candidate’s political platform. Kafka’s portrayal of the political rally thus makes a bitter farce of American democracy; true democracy based on merits cannot exist in his Amerika.

In a capitalist American society dominated by the theory of social Darwinism, only the fittest exploiters and opportunists can survive and attain the American dream; thus, Kafka makes the American dream an elitist concept. Unwitting and innocent individuals like Karl Rossman, always hoping to please the desires of their so-called friends, neglect their own well-being for the welfare of their friends and become “totally engaged, moment by moment, in analyzing and evaluating [their] choices in the face of the expectations or demands of others” (Doctorow xiii). Hence, Karl becomes utilized as a means to others’ ends. His own naiveté may be to blame, but in Kafka’s broader perspective, Karl exemplifies the victims of the systemic injustices of capitalism that deeply pervade American society.

The time period in which “Metamorphosis” was written in (1912) is very significant, because of its historical impact on the novel and the particular views of the time. America was becoming increasingly prosperous with its capitalist views, and was seen by the world as ‘the land of opportunity’, where anyone could be wealthy. Between 1880 and 1930, approximately 2,800,000 Germans and Czechs immigrated to America, in search of a better life, possibly causing resentment and bitterness from those left behind for the capitalist way of life.

Penal Colony
-There are few texts in universal literature which present authority with such an unjust and murderous face. Authority is not bound up with the power of an individual such as the camp commandant (old and new) who plays only a secondary role in the story. Instead, authority inheres in an impersonal mechanism.
-The context of the story is colonialism -- French in this instance. The officers and commandants of the colony are French while the lowly soldiers, dockers, and victims awaiting execution are the people "indigenous" to the country who "do not understand a word of French." A native soldier is sentenced to death by officers for whom juridical doctrine can be summed up in a few words which are the quintessence of the arbitrary: Guilt should never be questioned! The soldier's execution must be carried out by a torture device which slowly carves the words: "Honor thy superiors" into his flesh with needles.
-The central character of the novel is not the traveler who watches the events unfold with mute hostility. Neither is it the prisoner who scarcely shows any reaction, the officer who presides over the execution, nor the commandant of the colony. The main character is the machine itself.
-The entire story is centered on this sinister apparatus which, more and more in the course of a very detailed explanation given by the officer to the traveler, comes to appear an end-in-itself. The apparatus does not exist to execute the man but rather the victim exists for the sake of the apparatus. The native soldier provides a body upon which the machine can write its aesthetic masterpiece, its bloody inscription illustrated with many "flourishes and embellishments." The officer is only a servant of the machine and is finally sacrificed himself to this insatiable Moloch.
What concrete "power machine" and "apparatus of Authority" sacrificing human lives did Kafka have in mind? The Penal Colony was written in October 1914, three months after the outbreak of the Great War.

In The Trial and The Castle, one finds authority to be a hierarchical, abstract, and impersonal "apparatus." Despite their brutal, petty, and sordid characters, the bureaucrats are only cogs in this machine. As Walter Benjamin acutely observed, Kafka writes from the perspective of a "modern citizen who realizes that his fate is being determined by an impenetrable bureaucratic apparatus whose operation is controlled by procedures which remain shadowy even to those carrying out its orders and a fortiori to those being manipulated by it." (W. Benjamin)

Without casting any doubt on this homage to the prescience of the Prague writer, it should nevertheless be kept in mind that Kafka is not describing "exceptional" states in this work. One of the most important ideas suggested by his work, bearing an obvious relationship to anarchism, is the alienated and oppressive nature of the "normal" legal and constitutional state. It is clearly stated in the early pages of The Trial:
K. lived in a country with a legal constitution, there was universal peace, all the laws were in force; who, then, dared seize him in his own dwelling?

By their inherent nature, the state and its justice are both systems founded on lies. Nothing illustrates this better than the dialogue in The Trial between K. and the priest on the subject of the parable of the guardian of the law. For the priest, "to question the dignity of the guardian would be to question the law." This is the classic argument of all the representatives of order. K. objects that if one adopts this view, "we have to believe everything that the warder tells us" which to him seems impossible:
-- No, says the priest. We are not obliged to accept everything he says as true. It suffices that it is accepted as necessary.
--A mournful opinion, said K... . It elevates the lie to the stature of a world principle.

As Hannah Arendt rightly observed in her essay on Kafka, the priest's speech reveals:
The sacred theology and innermost conviction of bureaucrats to be a belief in necessity for its own sake. Bureaucrats are, in the last analysis, the functionaries of necessity. (Hannah Arendt)

IT IS NO ACCIDENT THAT THE WORD "KAFKAESQUE" HAS ENTERED our current vocabulary. The term denotes an aspect of social reality that sociology and political science tend to overlook. With his libertarian sensibility, Kafka has succeeded marvelously in capturing the oppressive and absurd nature of the bureaucratic nightmare, the opacity, the impenetrable and incomprehensible character of the rules of the state hierarchy as they are seen from below and the outside. This runs contrary to social science which generally confines itself to examining the bureaucratic machine from the "inside" and taking the point of view of those "at the top," the authorities, and institutions: its "functional" or "dysfunctional," "rational" or "pre-rational" character. (M. Carrouges)

• Cf. Lucien Goldmann, "Materialisme dialectique et histoire de la littérature," Recherches Dialectiques, Paris: Gallimard, 1959. pp. 45-64.
•Doctorow, E.L. “Foreword.” Amerika. New York: Schocken Books, 1996.
• Kafka, Franz. Amerika. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken Books, 1946.
• F. Kafka, "In the Penal Colony," Erzaehlung und kleine Prosa. New York: Schocken Books, 1946. pp. 181
• W. Benjamin, Letter to G. Scholem, 1938. Correspondance, Paris: Aubier. 1980. II. p. 248.
• F. Kafka, The Trial, New York: Schoken, 1970. p. 4; Der Prozess, Frankfurt: Fischer, 1979, p. 9].
• H. Arendt. Sechs Essays. Heidelberg: Lambert-Schneider, 1948. p. 133.
• M. Carrouges. In the Laughter and the Tears of Life. Cahiers de la Compagnie M. Renaud, J.L. Barrault, Paris, Julliard, October 1957, p. 19.
• Mészáros, István. Marx's Theory of Alienation. London: Merlin P., 1970.