Oryx and Crake and Marx: Class Struggle in Atwood

    Oryx and Crake isn’t a story about Marxism. It never mentions the Proletariat and does not touch on the Bourgeoisie, at least not with those words. It doesn’t discuss Communism and doesn’t address a utopian future without labour. But, if you gaze at it obliquely, Atwood’s novel begins to run parallel to some Marxist ideas—not because of some hidden agenda on her part, but because Marxism, for all its flaws, addresses some fundamental truths. And drawing parallels is an interesting exercise, both literarily and politically.

    One of Marx’s most famous quotes is, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” He wasn’t wrong. Class permeates the world, and there have always been (will always be?) societal strata. The near-future world of Oryx and Crake is no different. The highest echelons of society are not visible to the reader: we never see the billionaires who run the companies, even though they must certainly exist. The reader never sees what little happiness this society creates, only the detritus.

    The lowest rung of society is depicted in more detail. The pleeblands, which used to be the major metropolises, are the slums of the West. They are crowded, disgusting, and crime-ridden, and we don’t see much of them. Even the name, however, is full of meaning. Atwood seems to enjoy her strange little perverted new words, like pigoon and rakunk. Pleeblands seems to stem from “pleb,” which is of course an excellent descriptor of their population. Average, poor, and politically irrelevant.

    Through Oryx’s eyes, however, we see a bit more of the foreign lower-class. Her family was so poor that they were forced to sell her to a “businessman” in order to avoid starvation—a textbook example of the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy. This businessman wasn’t cruel, but he did profit from child labour; his successor, however, was much worse. He produced pornography with the children. Oryx’s entire story is a tale of class exploitation.

    Oryx and Crake also depicts something that didn’t really exist in Marx’s time: the middle class. Jimmy and Crake are not rich, but they are not poor. They don’t own anyone, but they in turn are not owned. They exist in the middle, exploited but exploiting. They modernize Marx’s antiquated ideas. Jimmy and Crake certainly profit from the ills of the poor—all the prorn and snuff films they watch tell the sad story of countless sex slaves and executed dissidents, and the two of them hardly bat an eye. And yet they do not have privacy: Jimmy is regularly interrogated by the CorpSeCorps about the whereabouts of his escaped mother. Furthermore, Jimmy’s father is an image of what they can expect upon growing up—a mediocre life as a scientist, living to work as much as working to live. They aren’t oppressed quite so much, but they don’t have a lot of the privilege of the rich.

    Jimmy’s mother couldn’t live with it. She knew that the work her husband was doing was dangerous for the world and for humanity, and she took action. During the Russian revolution, communism was split between two parties: the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Mensheviks favoured a more democratic style of government, and were uncomfortable with violence. Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, were more hardline. They wanted a fight, and were prepared for one. Jimmy’s mother seems to side more with the latter, ideologically speaking. She absconds from her family to rebel against the establishment, always concealing her location, and showing up in anti-government riots. She’s in favour of attacking the status quo in order to change it for the better.

    The Marxist lens can even be applied to the utopia Crake has tried to create within the Crakers. Crakers certainly seem to be classless (ha ha); their society functions without the notion of “the poor” or “the rich.” Individuals simply perform their jobs. In fact, Crake once said to “Be wary of leaders,” perhaps because one person being in charge of others is the first step to the creation of social strata. Furthermore, Marx once said, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people". It’s a heck of a coincidence, then, that Crake sought to remove it from his new utopian creature; he said that religion comes from a group of brain cells, and that he could remove it. It seems as if he didn’t manage to, though: Snowman has instilled them with religious ideas about Oryx and Crake. Does this point to the idea that Snowman is the Crakers’ upper class? He takes advantage of them, gives little back, and seeds religion in them. But Snowman is so much worse off than they are. He is having trouble surviving in this new world where they thrive. I suppose the parallels with Marxism only run so deep. Crake, it seems, has indeed created a Marxist utopia. No more class struggle.

    As with any lens, Marxism highlights certain truths that necessarily come across in any story about humanity, whether or not they were placed there deliberately or not. Oryx and Crake is full of class struggle, if you take a moment to look. Marx was wrong about a lot, but he was right about a fair bit. Only an apocalypse can end class conflict.