"Section Five. More Speed:" A Marxist Analysis of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and Its Portrayal of the Modern Industrial Factory Worker (original) (raw)

Portrayal of the Modern Industrial Factory Worker Charlie Chaplin's satirical film Modern Times (1936) is a classic of the medium that offers a comedic yet cogent critique of workers' conditions in modern industrialized factories, and the impact that these conditions have on the social and mental life of the average assembly line worker in the early twentieth century. Specifically, Chaplin's protagonist everyman, Little Tramp, suffers a mental breakdown due to the pressures placed upon him by his work and the working conditions there, by the machinery that enslaves him daily to a series of absurdly repetitive actions, and by the inhumane treatment that he receives from his section's over-looker and, ultimately, by the bourgeois manufacturer running the factory. Indeed, Modern Times' emphasis on the plight of the proletarian assembly line worker clearly resonates with Karl Marx's critique of capitalism in his masterful work, The Communist Manifesto; in particular, Modern Times highlights the ephemeral nature of Modern life in capitalist society, its attendant issues of speed, and the need for the bourgeoise to constantly revolutionize the means of production. Modern Times highlights the ephemeral nature of Modern life in capitalist society. As society shifted from a mostly agrarian lifestyle with a feudal system of trade and its attendant guild system to an urban industrialized capitalist one, the pace of Modern life accelerated dramatically during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The film establishes this motif during the opening credits with the presence of a clock that is relentlessly keeping time. The use of the clock symbolically gestures towards the capitalist dictum that 'time is money' and furthermore, that the life of the average industrial factory worker is 'on the clock.' This, of course, suggests that the factory worker, when under the employ of the bourgeois manufacturer, is nothing more than an instrument pushed to their physical and mental limits in order to reach the capitalists' goal of exponential growth. This impossible goal of exponential growth demands the greatest