Brave New World Marxist Analysis

Mass Happiness at the Cost of Freedom and Individuality
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World demonstrates key principles of Marxist literary theory by creating a world where mass happiness is the tool used by positions of power known as the Alphas to control the masses known as the Epsilons at the cost of the people's freedom to choose. The social castes of Brave New World, Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, draw parallels to the castes applied in Marxist literary theory, the Aristocracy, the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat.
Karl Marx was a nineteenth century, German philosopher, economist, a revolutionary socialist whose philosophy known as Marxism became the foundation of communism. ”Despite Karl Marx stating social classes are the

main cause of internal conflict in a society, Huxley writes his utopian society as founded heavily on the concept of social castes. The social castes in Brave New World (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon), all serve a purpose in society and all remain in their own caste as they are conditioned to think their class meets and exceeds all their needs and desires. Donald E. Hall further clarifies this concept of social castes in the text Literary and Cultural Theory , “According to Marx, society is stratified into three primary classes – the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat “each with a different worldview and a set of interests.”(Hall 74) An example of each social castes having their “different worldview and a set of interests” is described in the text in page twenty-seven of Brave New World, “Alpha children wear grey. They 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. “ Each class meets the wants and needs of the embers of their respective class.
The citizens of the World State found in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World are conditioned since infancy to love and to have an appreciation of the social caste, to appreciate each aspect that comes with their social caste, the climate they live in, the color of clothes they wear and their position in the society they live in. The people think they are like the gears in a complicated clock where each gear in needed in order to function properly. The people are conditioned to think the way they do, due to classical conditioning a type of associative learning discovered by a Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov in the twentieth century while studying the digestive behaviors of dogs. Classical conditioning is a learning process by which a subject comes to respond in a specific way to a previously neutral stimulus after the subject repeatedly encounters the neutral stimulus together with another stimulus that already elicits the response. In Brave New World page eighteen you can see how the World State conditions its citizens from childbirth using Pavlov's method of classical conditions, “The infants were unloaded. 'Now turn them so they can see the flowers and books ...There was a violent explosion.... The children screamed; their faces were distorted with terror ... Offer them the flowers and the books again., at the mere sight of those gaily-coloured images, the infants shrank away in horror; (Huxley 17)
The epsilons were conditioned to hate nature for they can thrive in an industrial setting and to hate knowledge for they can never climb up the ranks seeking newer and better things being content and satisfied with the position they have in the world.Since their education was limited they do not know any better than the situation they find themselves in.

They do not try to exceed what is expected from them or to better themselves because they are happy in the position they find themselves in. The people love what they are doing they do not desire any change in their lives what's there more to want when you are doing what you love everyday. Eliminating the class struggle by having the people love their class is the method used for achieving the utopian society found in Huxley’s Brave New World.
The World State in Brave New World believes that individuality is a source of conflict in their ideal society, “When the individual feels, the community reels,"(Huxley 94) the community is prioritized over the individual in Brave New World. The World State does not care about how you feel as long as you are not causing disruption in the community. In fact it is frowned upon being different causes disruption in society, heads are turning to see the difference in a world where everything is the same humans have the habit of singling out the

different.