Marxism is dead. It died in November 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. After 1989, Russians used to joke about the death of Marxism by saying that in capitalism men exploit men, while in Marxist socialism it is the other way around – a very Machadian joke, by the way. But – one could argue – Marxism and Marxist socialism, although interconnected, are two distinct concepts: the former is an umbrella term that covers that latter. In this regard, it would be more accurate to affirm that, even though Marxist socialism is dead, Marxism is not; as a tool of critical analysis, Marxism remains useful and valuable to date.

Did Machado read Marx? Most likely, he did not. Nevertheless, there exist areas of intersection, or common interests, between Machado’s fiction and Marx’s propositions. Simply put, the analysis of how the social-economic system controls human behavior can be seen as a point of convergence. But this isn’t the only point on which they concur. The mediator between behavior and the social world is the human mind. And for both Marx and Machado, the social-economic system, beyond controlling human behavior, constitutes a shaping force that molds human psyche and sentiments. In other words, the materialistic basis of capitalism, upon being absorbed by the human mind, created a new way of thinking: the bourgeois mindset. The deep desire that underpins this mindset – the lust for power – wasn’t new, but the material conditions for it to emerge certainly were.

In his fiction, Machado skillfully intermingled metaphysics (the will to power) and history (post-revolutionary liberalism and capitalism), without losing sight of the local order (the nineteenth-century Brazilian society). One Marxist question Machado’s fiction often poses to its readers can be summed up as follows: how does a typical bourgeois respond to the moral inquiries of his own consciousness about his immoral – or at least morally reprehensible – actions? The answer is that the bourgeois consciousness, as an act of self-protection and self-deception, go through a series of argumentative contortions to rationalize his (mis)conduct and, as a result, transform moral vices into virtues. Furthermore, Machado makes this moral contortionism a structural component of the narrative through the recurrent employment of digressions and the strategic use of fickle, unreliable narrators, for instance.