THE PROCESS OF ‘THEM’ISATION: A MARXIST READING OF BARRY HINES’S A KESTREL FOR A KNAVE

The objective of this article is to propose a Marxist reading of Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave (1968) and to analyse the them-us contradiction through a close reading of the subjective experiences of the protagonist, Billy, in order to put forward that the antagonism between ‘them’ and ‘us’ is, despite the fact that it seems to comply with the Marxist conception of class and class consciousness, perceived more in cultural and personal terms than in economic terms. The article suggests that the lack of a class-conscious approach based on the exploiter and the exploited is, as in the case of Billy and his defiant and self-centred reactions to the world of ‘them’, unable to lead to a radical transformation of the money-oriented world, capitalism, and that this, on the contrary, interpellates Billy, a fictional representative of the socio-historical reality of the English working class, into the totality of the social relations of production and materialises the hegemonic and reductionist politics of power relations. This process will, over the course of the article, be referred to as the process of ‘them’isation