Ideological Contradictions and Capitalist Collapse
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Description
This paper contends that Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent is a critique of capitalist and bourgeois ideology, suggesting that the decay and corruption in the novel are not the result of individual failures, but rather the material contradictions of late capitalism. The study departs from readings of character tragedy and poses three questions. How does The Secret Agent depict the way capitalist economic structures shape and distort human relationships? In what ways does the novel's vision of decay reflect the ideological contradictions produced by bourgeois society? Why does The Secret Agent depict capitalism as inherently self-destructive? Neo-Marxist reading using the ideas of Gramsci’s cultural hegemony, Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses, and Adorno’s culture of self-negation reveal how Verloc’s longing for bourgeois respectability undermines his own consciousness, the anarchists are just products of the system they rebel against, and Winnie’s fate shows the tendency of capitalism to reduce relationships to transactions. In the end, Conrad presents capitalism as a self-destructive system which rules out real human relations.