persons. It happens usually in the relation of parents and their children. The parents have to adapt to the development of their children.
One’s personality change can also be determined from changes in social pressure which is usually resulted from social rejection. Another cause of personality
change according to Hurlock is the change of role is society. Strong motivation and changes is self concept may also cause personality change. The desire for acceptance
and for better life may provoke people to change their attitudes and finally personality. The last is the use of psychotherapy to change one’s personality and to
find out his or her self-concept.
2.2. Theory of Marxism
This is the second part of chapter two. It includes the general theory of Marxism, Marxist perspective on social class, Marxist perspective on class
consciousness, and the theory of Marxist literary criticism approach, an approach being used in this study.
2.2.1. The Overview of the General Theory of Marxism
Marxism is a social, political and economic philosophy, social science, and also a critical theory. The center idea of Marxism is that the human behavior is
governed by their relation to production. Marxism as a critical theory is based on the idea of social philosophy that addresses all kinds of economic exploitations,
inequalities of distribution, social class and political change Honderich ed. 559. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
Yet, the focus of attention of Marxism has undergone dialectics since it was first put forward by Engels in the nineteenth century. There are some shifts of focus
in the part of the theory following the development of capitalism. Versions and theoretical emphasis of Marxism also develop. It is in the first half of the twentieth
century where the relative shift of attention happened. Marxism which aroused outside the USSR centered its attention toward “the way in which industrial
capitalism had substituted machine-like relations for genuine human relations.” This, as is expected, shifted the theoretical emphasis away from scientific economic theory
such as Das Capital, towards socio-cultural topics like alienation of workers the process of workers becoming foreign to the world and life they are living in because
they are not valued from the products they work. The latter topic is more focusing on the relation of humans workers and the means of production Harland 137; Marxist
Internet Archive. This focus of socio-cultural topics of Marxism is I think in accordance with the story of the novel Mother by Maxim Gorky, which pictures the
way workers were reduced to merely mechanical instruments. As shown in the first part of the novel, the results are the depression, hatred, despair, anger, and feeling of
utter hopelessness—although eventually, they learn something from socialism ideas that was brought by Pavel, Pelagea’s son.
This central tenet of alienation in Marxism views human beings in capitalist society as alienated or becoming foreign from themselves because the work they
perform takes an “alien and inhuman form”. It is against the truly human activity, which is “free social self-expression.” This is true specifically for the life of working
class which is “increasingly stunted, reduced to meaningless physical activity which, far from developing and exercising their humanity, reduces them to abstract organs
of a lifeless mechanism” Honderich ed. 558. This is so because the working class “do[es] not experience the products of
their labor as their expression, or indeed as theirs in any sense.” They sell their activity to the capitalist for a wage, not for fulfilling their social self-expressions, but
for merely sustaining their lives. Marxism as a science of political economy moreover portrays human beings, especially laborers, whose social life and relationships are at
the mercy not of their collective choice but of an alien, inhuman mechanism, the marker-place, which allege to be a sphere of individual freedom, but it is in fact a
sphere of collective slavery to inhuman and destructive forces. Honderich ed. 558 To be free from alienation, Marx asserts that all we need is a “new form of
earthly existence,” which is the key to fulfilled human beings, meaning, never lacking material conditions. To gain human freedom, human beings must be self conscious of
their “essential human power”, namely the power of production, which in capitalist system, it is constrained. Therefore, only conscious self actualization, human beings
can achieve their ultimate freedom. The idea of this consciousness is then of importance.
The vision of Marxism is to form a classless society. The historical materialism provides the working class a way of full understanding to consciously
achieve a classless society. In Marx’s materialist conception of history, a conscious revolutionary practice should not advance by formulating “utopian goals” and then
find the means to achieve them, rather, it is a matter of devoting the conscious revolutionary movements into participating in “an already developing class
movement” that happens in the current time, and to define themselves the goals and to realize the goal by using their weapons “inherent in the class’s historical situation”
Honderich ed. 559. So, instead of orthodox and static, revolutionary movements must see the reality surrounding them and find the way to achieve the goals. And in
the struggle to achieve that ends, they must not be independent from their historical situation.
With regards to religion and God, which is the central controversy of Marxist doctrine, Marx argues in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of
Law, that “[t]o abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness” Marxist Internet Archive. Since Marxism is a materialistic
belief, the idea of God and religion play a parasitic role to building the society of workers.
Marx believed that in classless community, or the eventual communist society, the private ownership of means of production and commodity production is
abolished. He believed that in a communist society, all form of human alienation is non existent. Yet, he never stated that this eventual society is a static society and
unchanging, instead, it is the truest beginning of the human history that is governed by conscious human development.
2.2.2. Marxist Theory of Social Class
