The Trajectories of the Human-Robot Conflict in Rossum’s Universal Robots: Production, Class Struggle, and Consciousness

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2025-12-01

Author

Derin, Ozan Ekin
Bozdoğan, Melike

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Karel Čapek’s play,Rossumovi Univerzalni Roboti(RUR), has remarkable content ranging from the foundation of utopia to the end of a dystopian world, where the invention of robots evolves into a global class struggle and finally into a destructive interspecies antagonism. The idea of robotic automation, which is at the heart of the play, is discussed by the author to the maxim of the social relations it involves, resulting in a text that can be considered both as a critical allegory of the real political relations of the era in which it was written and as a critical interpretation of the future of capitalism. To develop these dual perspectives, Čapek adopted a peculiar Marxist understanding of social conflicts as the constitutive element of RUR such as relations of production, class and status problems, and the social development of consciousness, correspond to the dialectical trajectories of the human-robot conflicts in the play. On the other hand, the difference between Čapek’s understanding of the formation and way of giving content to these categories as well as bringing social contradictions to a fictional solution largely determines the political meaning of the play in a quasi-conservative manner. This study focuses on the main forms of those conflicts in RUR and aims to reveal their underlying arguments and analyze them critically.

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https://hdl.handle.net/11511/116465

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Article