Manisfesto , Marx declares, “all history is history of the class struggles”.
According to Sidney Hook, Marx’s statement proves that class struggle is not always caused by economic interest but also political struggles. He explains that,
A dominant economic class may not at any given moment be the dominant political class, but unless it becomes such, its economic interests and the
functioning of society as a whole are subject to continuous frustration. When the struggle becomes hot, the state appears nakedly as the
“executive committee” of the ruling class. It must be captured by new class which in time clothes the state once more with a rhetoric that
describes it as neutral or above battle or as the instrument of the general interest Hook, 1955: 26-27.
Nikolai Bukharin 1969: 298 explains, “class struggle therefore means a struggle in which one class has entered into action against the other class. From
this arises the extremely important principle that “every class struggle is a political struggle” Marx”. Josef Wilczynski 1981: 80 divides two spheres of
class struggle: a.
Economic struggle: a struggle for the improvement of the condition of work and a change in the principle governing the distribution of the
fruits of labour. b.
Political struggle: a struggle for seizure and maintenance of political power.
C. Kahlil Gibran’s Works and Social Background
Marxist literary criticism sees the background of the author and the background of the literary work as the important things as the consideration to
conduct the analysis. As Peter Barry 2002: 158 says, “all the same, Marxist literary criticism maintains that a writer’s social classand its prevailing ‘ideology’
outlook, values, tacit assumptions, half-realised allegiances, etc. have a major
bearing on what is written by a member of that class”. Charles E. Bressler 1994: 214 also says that “a critic must place a work in its historical setting, paying
attention to the author’s life, the time period in which the work was written, and the cultural milieu of both the text and the author, all of these corcerns being
related to sociological issues”. Bressler 1994: 218 adds “One of critic’s tasks, then, is to reconstruct an author’s ideology or the author’s ideological milieu”.
These quotations clearly states that in analysing any particular works by using Marxism theory, the information about the author of the literary work such
as social class, etc. can give certain contributions to the analysis. Marxist criticism methods are related with the social background of the author and the social
assumption when a particular literary work is released. The background of the author affects in the message of the work. In this study, the social background of
Kahlil Gibran affects the poems “We and You”. How Gibran, as the author, stands in the poem proves his position in society. This section explains about the review
of social backgrounds of the author, Kahlil Gibran and the situation during his lifetime which was impacting to his works, including the poem “We and You”.
Kahlil Gibran was born in Besharri, Lebanon in 1883. He lived in a religious Manorite Catholic family. Taken from a review of biography of Kahlil
Gibran which is written by Suhail Ibn and Salim Hanna 1975: 599, “Besharri, Lebanon, where Gibran was born in 1883, was part of the Ottoman Empire. That
Empire tottered in the late nineteenth century, verging on certain collapse”. The Ottoman Empire conquer the Lebanon from 1516 to 1918. Suheil Bushrui and Joe
