Social Hierarchies under Capitalist Rule: A Marxist Reading of Class Struggle in Condie’s Crossed

Abstract

This paper analyzes Ally Condie’s Crossed through a Marxist lens, exploring how the novel portrays class hierarchy, systemic oppression, and the awakening of revolutionary consciousness. The Society functions as the bourgeoisie, maintaining control through technological surveillance, ideological manipulation, and physical coercion, while the lower-class workers—represented by Cassia, Ky, Indie, and Vick—embody the exploited proletariat. Through depictions of forced labor, confiscation of personal property, restricted relationships, and harsh punitive measures like Reclassification, the novel exposes the mechanisms of human exploitation within a capitalist framework. However, amid this oppression, Condie illustrates the emergence of defiance and solidarity as powerful forms of resistance, as the oppressed characters move toward collective liberation through the Rising. Overall, this paper contends that Crossed serves as a critique of capitalist domination, revealing that awareness, unity, and rebellion function as essential forces in challenging systemic inequality and reclaiming human freedom.