marxist criticism essay

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Marxist Criticism refers to a method you'll encounter in literary and cultural analysis. It breaks down texts and societal structures using foundational concepts like class, alienation, base, and superstructure. By understanding this, you'll gain insights into how power dynamics and socio-economic factors influence narratives and cultural perspectives

What is Marxist Criticism?

Marxist Criticism refers to both

an interpretive framework
a genre of discourse .

Marxist Criticism as both a theoretical approach and a conversational genre within academic discourse . Critics using this framework analyze literature and other cultural forms through the lens of Marxist theory, which includes an exploration of how economic and social structures influence ideology and culture. For example, a Marxist reading of a novel might explore how the narrative reinforces or challenges the existing social hierarchy and economic inequalities.

Marxist Criticism prioritizes four foundational Marxist concepts:

class struggle
the alienation of the individual under capitalism
the relationship between a society’s economic base and
its cultural superstructure.

Key Terms: Dialectic ; Hermeneutics ; Literary Criticism ; Semiotics ; Textual Research Methods

Why Does Marxist Criticism Matter?

Marxist criticism thus emphasizes class, socioeconomic status, power relations among various segments of society, and the representation of those segments. Marxist literary criticism is valuable because it enables readers to see the role that class plays in the plot of a text.

What Are the Four Primary Perspectives of Marxism?

Did karl marx create marxist criticism.

Karl Marx himself did not create Marxist criticism as a literary or cultural methodology . He was a philosopher, economist, and sociologist, and his works laid the foundation for Marxist theory in the context of social and economic analysis. The key concepts that Marx developed—such as class struggle, the theory of surplus value, and historical materialism—are central to understanding the mechanisms of capitalism and class relations.

Marxist criticism as a distinct approach to literature and culture developed later, as thinkers in the 20th century began to apply Marx’s ideas to the arts and humanities. It is a product of various scholars and theorists who found Marx’s social theories to be useful tools for analyzing and critiquing literature and culture. These include figures such as György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, and later the Frankfurt School, among others, who expanded Marxist theory into the realms of ideology, consciousness, and cultural production.

So, while Marx provided the ideological framework, it was later theorists who adapted his ideas into what is now known as Marxist criticism.

Who Are the Key Figures in Marxist Theory?

Bressler notes that “Marxist theory has its roots in the nineteenth-century writings of Karl Heinrich Marx, though his ideas did not fully develop until the twentieth century” (183).

Key figures in Marxist theory include Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács, and Louis Althusser. Although these figures have shaped the concepts and path of Marxist theory, Marxist literary criticism did not specifically develop from Marxism itself. One who approaches a literary text from a Marxist perspective may not necessarily support Marxist ideology.

For example, a Marxist approach to Langston Hughes’s poem “ Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria ” might examine how the socioeconomic status of the speaker and other citizens of New York City affect the speaker’s perspective. The Waldorf Astoria opened during the midst of the Great Depression. Thus, the poem’s speaker uses sarcasm to declare, “Fine living . . . a la carte? / Come to the Waldorf-Astoria! / LISTEN HUNGRY ONES! / Look! See what Vanity Fair says about the / new Waldorf-Astoria” (lines 1-5). The speaker further expresses how class contributes to the conflict described in the poem by contrasting the targeted audience of the hotel with the citizens of its surrounding area: “So when you’ve no place else to go, homeless and hungry / ones, choose the Waldorf as a background for your rags” (lines 15-16). Hughes’s poem invites readers to consider how class restricts particular segments of society.

What are the Foundational Questions of Marxist Criticism?

What classes, or socioeconomic statuses, are represented in the text?
Are all the segments of society accounted for, or does the text exclude a particular class?
Does class restrict or empower the characters in the text?
How does the text depict a struggle between classes, or how does class contribute to the conflict of the text?
How does the text depict the relationship between the individual and the state? Does the state view individuals as a means of production, or as ends in themselves?

Example of Marxist Criticism

The Working Class Beats: a Marxist analysis of Beat Writing and (studylib.net)

Discussion Questions and Activities: Marxist Criticism

Define class, alienation, base, and superstructure in your own words.
Explain why a base determines its superstructure.
Choose the lines or stanzas that you think most markedly represent a struggle between classes in Langston Hughes’s “ Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria .” Hughes’s poem also addresses racial issues; consider referring to the relationship between race and class in your written response.
Contrast the lines that appear in quotation marks and parentheses in Hughes’s poem. How do these lines differ? Does it seem like the lines in parentheses respond to the lines in quotation marks, the latter of which represent excerpts from an advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria published in Vanity Fair? How does this contrast illustrate a struggle between classes?
What is Hughes’s purpose for writing “ Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria ?” Defend your interpretation with evidence from the poem.

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32 Student Example: Marxist Criticism

The following student essay example of Marxist Criticism is taken from Beginnings and Endings: A Critical Edition . This is the publication created by students in English 211. This essay discusses Raymond Carver’s short story, “A Small, Good Thing.”

“A Small, Good Thing” by Raymond Carver and the 1980s AIDS Epidemic

By Jasper Chappel

Raymond Carver’s short story “A Small, Good Thing” was published in 1983, in his collection Cathedral. In 1983 in the United States, the AIDS epidemic was barely beginning to be understood by the CDC and the general public. Under President Ronald Reagan since 1981, anti-communist and pro-capitalist sentiment was expected of Americans because of tense relations with the USSR. This political climate informed Carver’s writing of “A Small, Good Thing,” and the previous version of the same story published in 1981, titled “The Bath;” Carver’s personal life partially influenced the drastic changes between each story, and so did the emerging political tensions caused by the AIDS epidemic and relations with the USSR. “A Small, Good Thing,” despite being written in a turbulent time, encourages people to value each other, put less trust in institutions such as government and healthcare, and ultimately come together in times of hardship.

The baker is a criticism of capitalism and excessive labor with unfair pay. He has lost part of his humanity to his work, because maintaining financial security is a more immediate concern than forming relationships; he and other unnamed employees represent the proletariat. His behavior throughout the story shows his lack of feeling towards other people, and at the end, he admits as much, saying, “I’m just a baker. I don’t claim to be anything else… [M]aybe years ago I was a different kind of human being” (page 26). Industry has forced the characters to lose their individuality – none of the nurses are named or physically distinguishable from each other, and they do not offer Ann and Howard comfort or answers. When asked questions about Scotty’s condition, they simply say, “Doctor Francis will be here in a few minutes,” (page 6). Doctor Francis has reached a high enough class that he can retain some humanity while still doing his job, which is why he is afforded a name. However, he is nearing the status of the bourgeoisie, which is ultimately why he fails to give Scotty the correct diagnosis and treatment. He and Howard are somewhat similar in this regard; because Howard has the privilege to leave his job in the middle of a work day, and for an indefinite amount of time when Scotty is hospitalized, the audience can assume Howard is nearing a high-class position. He is not expendable, like a nurse or a baker would be.

Ann appears to be a full-time mom, and while this is unpaid labor, the reader is led to understand her emotions the most because she retains the most humanity in her job; she simply has the privilege to not work for a company. Her trade is motherhood, and when this is stripped from her, she feels more aimless than the others; just like if the nurse or the baker lost their positions, Ann forms her identity around the job of being a mom. The difference is that it is her job to empathize with others, to care for others, and she can find another niche to fill without sending in an application first. Her grief manifests in being unable to care for her son, despite her skills; she knows Scotty is in a coma and that something has gone horribly wrong, but because the bourgeoisie does not value self-employed, unpaid labor, her concerns are brushed aside.

From one perspective, Ann benefits from being a mother. From another, her characterization has reduced her to being only a mother. The only outside information we have for another main character is what Howard and the baker tell us about their lives. While Howard is driving home from the hospital, he reflects on his life and his good fortune, or his privilege. Ann does not do the same – the audience is unsure of whether Ann thinks the marriage is successful, if she went to college, or if she gave anything up to become a mother. She is only a mother and wife – a loving one, but a one-dimensional character. It seems that Ann is defined only by the fact she has a son. Ann’s designated role to help the men in the story remember their humanity is a stereotypically feminine role that is largely informed by Raymond Carver’s identity and life experiences, but is also in line with the idea that motherhood is a full-time job unrecognized by capitalism.

The bourgeoisie in this story are best represented by the hospital and doctor, and the situation with Scotty exposes the flawed system the proletariat have to live under. Scotty represents its most vulnerable victims, and the family Ann meets in the lobby of the hospital represents how tragedy can touch all our lives regardless of class or race. Ann and Howard learn through the events of the story, despite being middle-class and white, that certain tragedies touch all lives; this is a translation of the AIDS epidemic into literature. Disease does not discriminate based off class, sexuality, or race, but institutions and governments do.

Scotty has no speaking lines–the narrator only supplies information on what he saying, so the audience doesn’t have access to his exact words. All we know about him is that he probably likes aliens, has one friend he used to walk to school with, and “howls” before he dies, a very inhuman noise. Even though the story revolves around his injury, he only serves as a character who affects other characters. His injury allows the audience to see the contrast between employees who take care of people as a job, and people who take care of others free from industry interference. He also serves to bring the baker and Ann together; the baker needed to be reminded of his humanity and have a reason to turn his back on the capitalist system for a while. Ann is the most likely character to help him reconnect with his humanity, and in her grief she is more human than any other character. Although Howard also shows his humanity in his grief, it is Ann who helps him along, “’There, there,’ she said tenderly. ‘Howard, he’s gone. He’s gone now and we’ll have to get used to that. To being alone” (page 22). When Scotty’s death makes his parents feel alienated, just as capitalism alienates people from each other to prevent an uprising, they start to accept this; then the baker calls again, and Ann’s anger at his behavior pushes them into action, and eventually reconciliation and comfort.

When Ann encounters the black family in the waiting room, they serve as a mirror for her situation, and represent understanding each other’s humanity despite differences. There is a previous version of this short story called “The Bath,” which does not specify the race of the family, does not include the two dark-skinned orderlies, and lacks the reconciliation with the baker. Part of the fear around AIDS was due to the uncertainty about how it spread, but there was also an element of stigma around African-American populations and their inaccurate image in the media as drug users (therefore, re-use needles and spread AIDS). Early on, it became clear that AIDS was spreading through bodily fluids, but more information than that tended to be conflicting.

In 1985, according to the article “Save Our Kids, Keep AIDS Out” by Jennifer Brier, black and white families would unite in Queens to protest the CDC regulations stating that children diagnosed with AIDS should be allowed in public schools. We can see this sentiment represented before this occurrence in Ann’s desire to connect with the black family in the waiting room. Just like the mothers in the article fear their children being exposed to AIDS at school, a hospital must have been a nightmare for a mother in this time period. Seeing Scotty have his blood drawn, and other needles inserted into his veins, probably caused her panic each time; not only because his condition was not improving, but also for the risk of contracting AIDS the longer he stayed in the hospital. Scotty’s hospital stay can be considered a metaphor for how AIDS was considered during the time of publication. It comes out of nowhere, just like the car that hit Scotty, then disappeared without a trace. Those who are hit seem fine at first, but progressively, their condition declines. The doctors and nurses do not know enough about the disease, and sometimes, their intuition is wrong, causing tragic deaths. The message the audience is left with is this: a mother knows best for her child. This is echoed in the later movement in Queens, “Thus, parents and local communities, not a dishonest city bureaucracy or out-of-touch scientific establishment, were better able to make decisions about local children” (Brier 4).

In “A Small, Good Thing,” instead of exploiting the fear people had around the AIDS epidemic, Carver encourages people to find common ground and come together. Doctor Francis expresses his regrets in not being able to save Scotty, the family in the waiting room symbolizes connecting with each other despite differences, and the baker is able to acknowledge his loss of humanity over the years after witnessing Ann and Howard’s grief. This short story is a touching addition to the literary time period, and handles each political undertone with care and empathy.

Works Cited

Brier, Jennifer. “‘Save Our Kids, Keep AIDS out:” Anti-AIDS Activism and the Legacy of Community Control in Queens, New York.” Journal of Social History, vol. 39, no. 4, 2006, pp. 965–987. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3790237 . Accessed 14 May 2021.

Carver, Raymond. “A Small, Good Thing.” Ploughshares, vol. 8, no. 2/3, 1982, pp. 213–240. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40348924 . Accessed 14 May 2021.

Carver, Raymond. “The Bath.” Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, no. 6, 1981, pp. 32–41. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42744338 . Accessed 14 May 2021.

McCaffery, Larry, et al. “An Interview with Raymond Carver.” Mississippi Review, vol. 14, no. 1/2, 1985, pp. 62–82. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20115387 . Accessed 14 May 2021.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Marxist Literary Criticism: An Overview

Marxist Literary Criticism: An Overview

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on January 22, 2018 • ( 2 )

Marx and Engels produced no systematic theory of literature or art. Equally, the subsequent history of Marxist aesthetics has hardly comprised the cumulative unfolding of a coherent perspective. Rather, it has emerged, aptly, as a series of responses to concrete political exigencies. While these responses have sometimes collided at various theoretical planes, they achieve a dynamic and expansive coherence (rather than the static coherence of a closed, finished system) through both a general overlap of political motivation and the persistent reworking of a core of predispositions about literature and art deriving from Marx and Engels themselves. These predispositions include:

(1) The rejection, following Hegel, of the notion of “identity” and a consequent denial of the view that any object, including literature, can somehow exist independently. The aesthetic corollary of this is that literature can only be understood in the fullness of its relations with ideology, class, and economic substructure.

(2) The view that the so-called “objective” world is actually a progressive construction out of collective human subjectivity. What passes as “truth,” then, is not eternal but institutionally created. “Private property,” for example, is a bourgeois reification of an abstract category; it does not necessarily possess eternal validity. Language itself, as Marx said in The German Ideology: Part One, must be understood not as a self-sufficient system but as social practice (GI, 51, 118).

(3) The understanding of art itself as a commodity, sharing with other commodities an entry into material aspects of production. If, as Marx said, human beings produce themselves through labor, artistic production can be viewed as a branch of production in general.

(4) A focus on the connections between class struggle as the inner dynamic of history and literature as the ideologically refracted site of such struggle. This has sometimes gone hand in hand with prescriptions for literature as an ideological ancillary to the aims and results of political revolution.

(5) An insistence that language is not a self-enclosed system of relations but must be understood as social practice, as deeply rooted in material conditions as any other practice (GI, 51).

To these predispositions could be added, for example, Engels’ comments on “typicality,” recommending that art should express what is typical about a class or a peculiar intersection of ideological circumstances. One might also include the problem raised by Engels’ granting a “relative autonomy” to art, his comments that art can transcend its ideological genesis and that superstructural elements are determined only in the “last instance” by economic relations: what exactly is the connection between art and the material base into which its constituting relations extend? Given the inconclusive and sometimes ambiguous nature of Marx’s and Engels’ scattered comments on art, the proposed solutions to such dilemmas have been as various as the political soils on which they were sown.

After Marx’s death in 1883, Engels’ attempt to shed light on his colleague’s aesthetic views was less assiduous than his clarifications of other aspects of Marx’s work. As Europe witnessed a widespread nascence of socialist political parties, together with the impact of Marxism in sociology, anthropology, history, and political science, the first generation of Marxist intellectuals included the Italian Antonio Labriola (1843–1904), who attempted the first effective synthesis of Marx’s thought and popularized the premises of Marxism. His works , translated into all the major European languages, exerted enormous influence and made a particularly striking impression on Georgi Plekhanov , who introduced his work to Russia, as well as on Lenin and Trotsky. In his Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History (1895–1896) Labriola reaffirms Marx’s premise that (material) being determines consciousness rather than vice versa but takes some pains to emphasize that while legal and political systems are “a true and proper projection of economic conditions . . . in artistic or religious production the mediation from the conditions to the products is very complicated.” Hence, although art and ideas can have no independent history, they are themselves a part of history in the sense that they too are a causal agency in subsequent economic and superstructural developments.

Another star in the firmament of early Marxist theory was the Prussian-born Franz Mehring (1846–1919). A one-time follower of Ferdinand Lassalle, Mehring became an outstanding Marxist historian and aesthetician who, along with Rosa Luxemburg and others, founded the German Communist Party in 1918. His writings included the first authoritative biography of Marx, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (1918), and The Lessing-Legend (1892–1893), which both applied Marxist categories to the analysis of major German literary figures and brought these within the reach of working-class readers. Mehring attempted to situate Marxist aesthetics, and Marxist thought in general, in necessary relation to the German classical philosophy and aesthetics which had preceded it. This elicited censure from such figures as Paul Reimann and F. P. Schiller, and later from György Lukács, who saw Mehring as a reactionary ideologue. There is much in Mehring which might justify such a response. One of the central questions he confronts is: how are objective aesthetic judgments possible, given the subjectivity of taste? Mehring urges that a “scientific aesthetics” must demonstrate, as Kant did, that art is “a peculiar and aboriginal capacity of mankind.” But Lukács somewhat overlooks Mehring’s account of Kant’s weaknesses: Kant’s inability, for example, to recognize that his aesthetic laws were historically conditioned and that a “pure” aesthetic judgment, dirempted from logical and moral considerations, was impossible. Moreover, Mehring’s analyses of specific literary texts bear out his view that, like all ideology, literary criticism must ultimately be determined by economic infrastructure.

German Marxist theory found a further advocate in Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), whose preeminence endured till around 1915. A propagandist for the Social Democratic Party, he founded in 1883 a prestigious Marxist journal, Die Neue Zeit , which offered a forum for the elaboration of Marx’s economic and political thought. His works included Karl Marx’s Economic Teachings (1887) and The Foundations of Christianity (1908). In the 1880s he produced a number of reflections on art such as “Development in Art,” “Art and Society,” and “Artist and Worker.” In The Foundations of Christianity Kautsky, typifying his method, showed how religious ideas are tied to the levels of artistic and industrial maturity allowed by a particular economic substructure. He developed the thesis that the major monotheistic religions arose in nations bound by a nomadic way of life; they had not developed the industry or art necessary to construct the localized human images of deities which facilitated polytheism. Ironically, these more backward cultures could make a leap beyond polytheism to a higher form of religion whose progress was retarded in more advanced societies.

Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918), the “father of Russian Marxism,” was a founder of the Russian Social Democratic Party. His writings include Socialism and the Political Struggle (1883) and Fundamental Problems of Marxism (1908), as well as his highly influential Art and Social Life (1912) and some shorter pieces such as The Role of the Individual in History (1898). In the last of these he argues that the role of gifted individuals, such as Napoleon, in history has been exaggerated. Plekhanov’s own position is that such persons appear “wherever and whenever” social conditions facilitate their development: “every talent which becomes a social force, is the fruit of social relations.” Moreover, individuals can change only the individual character, not the general direction, of events. Hence particular trends in art or literature do not depend exclusively on certain individuals for their expression; if the trend is sufficiently profound, it will compensate the premature death of one individual by giving rise to other talents who might embody it. The depth of a literary trend is determined by its significance for the class whose tastes it expresses, and by the social role of that class. In Art and Social Life Plekhanov raises the crucial question of the relative values of “art for art’s sake” and a “utilitarian” view of art which sees it as instrumental in promoting the improvement of the social order. Plekhanov refuses to approach this question by abstractly asserting the priority of one or the other. Rather, he inquires into the principal social conditions in which each of these attitudes arises and arrives at the thesis that the “art for art’s sake” tendency arises when an artist is “in hopeless disaccord with the social environment.” The utilitarian attitude, which grants art a function in social struggles as well as the power of judgment concerning the real world, “arises and becomes stronger wherever a mutual sympathy exists between the individuals . . . interested in artistic creation and some considerable part of society.”7

Another area in which Plekhanov pioneered a Marxist standpoint was the significance of “play,” whereby human beings pursue an activity not for its usefulness but simply for pleasure. Plekhanov believed that Karl Bucher ’s theory that in primitive cultures play and art preceded labor and the production of useful objects was a test case for the materialist explanation of history. If Bucher were right, the Marxist explanation would be turned upside down. As against Bucher , Plekhanov, following Herbert Spencer, maintains that play is a dramatization and imitation of labor or useful activity. Hence utilitarian activity precedes play and is what determines its content. The implications of Plekhanov’s comments on play were not taken up systematically by a Marxist until Herbert Marcuse ’s Eros and Civilization appeared in 1955.

One of the most striking figures in the Marxist canon was Rosa Luxemburg (1870– 1919). Born into a Jewish business background in Poland, she migrated to Germany where she joined the Social Democratic Party, rising to a lofty prominence until her assassination in 1919. Her most renowned contribution was The Accumulation of Capital (1913). Centrally concerned with the reasons behind the stagnation and lack of development of Marxist theory, she was also anxious to preserve an aesthetic dimension for art, a recalcitrance to what she saw as reductive analysis. While acknowledging that both Dostoyevsky’s and Tolstoy’s doctrines were reactionary and mystical, she nevertheless praised their liberating effects on the reader and their profound response to social injustice. Luxemburg justified this by urging that the “social formula” recommended by an artist was secondary to the source or animating spirit of the art. The starting points of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, she affirmed, were not reactionary. She urged that a working-class culture could not be produced within a bourgeois economic framework, and that the workers could only advance if they created for themselves the necessary intellectual weapons in their struggle for liberation. Luxemburg believed that Marx provided much more than was directly essential for practically conducting the class war and that the theoretical fruits of his system could only be realized more gradually. Evident here is the implication that, in Luxemburg’s eyes, the superstructural world of art, law, and ethics cannot be appropriated by the revolutionary class in a manner consonant with the general displacement of the bourgeois political apparatus but must evolve, lagging slowly behind those more prosaic shifts in economic substructure.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) occupied a central role not only in the revolution of 1917 but also in the unfolding of Marxist aesthetics toward a more politically interventionist stance. In the latter respect, Lenin’s most celebrated and controversial piece is his Party Organization and Party Literature (1905), which, along with certain comments of Marx and Engels, was later misleadingly claimed to authorize “socialist realism,” adopted in 1934 as the official party aesthetic. But hostile, non-Marxist critics have also misinterpreted Lenin’s essay, viewing it as an attempt to repress free creativity in literature. Such a view overlooks both the context in which the essay was conceived and its actual arguments. Written shortly after the general strike of October 1905, it belongs to a politically volatile period in which the work of revolution was far from complete, as Lenin emphasizes: “While tsarism is no longer strong enough to defeat the revolution, the revolution is not yet strong enough to defeat tsarism.”8 Moreover, free speech and a free press, as Lenin points out, did not in any case exist. It can come as no surprise, then, that Lenin insists that literature “must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, ‘a cog and screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism.” Lenin is well aware that art cannot be “subject to mechanical adjustment or levelling, to the rule of the majority over the minority.” But he is not prescribing partisanship (partinost) for all literature, only literature which claims to be party literature. He grants that freedom “of speech and the press must be complete.” What he is suggesting is that “freedom of association” must also be complete: the party reserves the right to circumscribe the ideological boundaries of writing conducted under its banner. Lenin also points out that in bourgeois society the writer cherishes but an illusory freedom: “The freedom of the bourgeois writer . . . is simply masked . . . dependence on the money-bag, on corruption, on prostitution.” The writers imagine themselves to be free but are actually dependent upon an entire prescriptive network of commercial relations and interests, “prisoners of bourgeois-shopkeeper literary relations.” In contrast, the free literature that Lenin desires “will be openly linked to the proletariat.” Also underscoring Lenin’s arguments is his recognition that literature “cannot . . . be an individual undertaking,” as liberal-bourgeois individualism would have us believe (149–152).

Lenin’s Articles on Tolstoy, produced between 1908 and 1911, exemplify through their detailed analyses both the political urgency informing Lenin’s aesthetic approach and his ability to explain the circumstances limiting the potential partisanship of great writers. According to Lenin, the contradictions in Tolstoy’s works – for example, his “ruthless criticism of capitalist exploitation,” his denunciation of “poverty, degradation and misery among the toiling masses” as against his “crazy preaching of ‘resist not evil’ with violence” and his preaching of a reformed religion – mirror the contradictory conditions of the revolutionary peasantry (9). Tolstoy’s misguided renunciation of politics reflected the “seething hatred, a mature striving for a better lot, a desire to get rid of the past – and also immature dreaming, political ignorance and revolutionary flabbiness” characterizing the peasantry (14). But while Tolstoy’s doctrines are “certainly utopian,” Lenin is able to call them “socialistic” and to hail Tolstoy’s portrayal of the epoch of revolution as “a step forward in the artistic development of the whole of mankind” (16). Lenin’s methodological insights are equally interesting: the contradictions in Tolstoy can only be apprehended from the standpoint of the class which led the struggle for freedom during the revolution (20). This helps to put into perspective some of Lenin’s earlier comments on “Party literature”: not only is it impossible to write as an individual, but equally, “individual” acts of reading and interpreting are conducted within parameters dictated by class interests. At a deeper level, Lenin’s approach to aesthetic value, embracing as it does the totality of historical circumstances including class, preceding literary traditions, and relation to political exigency, can be seen to derive from his acknowledgment of the dialectical character of Marxism. In his Philosophical Notebooks he cites “Dialectics” as the theory of knowledge of both Hegel and Marxism, a theory which focuses on the necessary connection between the individual and the universal, the infinite expansibility through various levels of an individual’s constituting relations, as well as the connections between necessity and contingency.

It can be seen from the foregoing that the early debates on art during and after the revolutionary period in Russia focused on questions such as the degree of party control over the arts, the stance toward the bourgeois cultural legacy, and the imperative to clarify the connections between the political and the aesthetic. A related question was the possibility of creating a proletarian culture. The other major protagonist in the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), played a crucial role in these debates. His works include Lenin (1924), History of the Russian Revolution (1932), and The Revolution Betrayed (1937), as well as his renowned Literature and Revolution (1923). Trotsky, already exiled in 1900 and 1905 for his revolutionary activities, was finally ousted by Joseph Stalin in the struggle for leadership following Lenin’s death in 1904. He continued, in exile, to oppose Stalin’s regime until his murder in 1940. The literary debates were far from academic: they are indices of bitter political alignments. In Literature and Revolution Trotsky stressed that only in some domains can the party offer direct leadership; the “domain of art is not one in which the Party is called upon to command. It can and must protect and help it, but can only lead it indirectly.”9 But, just as Lenin’s views on this topic have been misread, so Trotsky’s claims for freedom of art have been subject to misprision. He states quite clearly that what is needed is “a watchful revolutionary censorship, and a broad and flexible policy in the field of art.” What is important for Trotsky is that the limits of such censorship be defined very clearly: he is against “the liberal principle of laissez faire and laissez passer, even in the field of art” (221).

Hence Trotsky cannot be accused of blatant tolerance of reactionary literature and ideas, although in a 1938 manifesto, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, drawn up in collaboration with André Breton, Trotsky urges a “complete freedom for art” while acknowledging that all true art is revolutionary in nature. The latter position was adopted in reaction to what Trotsky calls Stalin’s “police patrol spirit.”10 In Literature and Revolution Trotsky also urges that the party should give “its confidence” to what he calls “literary fellow-travelers,” those non-party writers sympathetic to the revolution. What lies behind this is Trotsky’s insistence that the proletariat cannot begin the construction of a new culture without absorbing and assimilating the elements of the old cultures (226). Given the proletariat’s need for a continuity of creative tradition, it currently “realizes this continuity . . . indirectly, through the creative bourgeois intelligentsia which gravitates towards the proletariat” (227). In the same work, Trotsky addresses the question of whether proletarian culture is possible. The question, to Trotsky, is “formless” because not only will the energy of the proletariat be directed primarily toward the acquisition of power but, as it succeeds, it “will be more and more dissolved into a Socialist community and will free itself from its class characteristics and thus cease to be a proletariat . . . The proletariat acquires power for the purpose of doing away forever with class culture and to make way for human culture” (185–186).

Other aspects of Tolstoy’s approach to aesthetics are exemplified in his speech of 1924, Class and Art. Here, Trotsky suggests that art has “its own laws of development” and that there is no guarantee of an organic link between artistic creativity and class interests. Moreover, such creativity “lags behind” the spirit of a class and is not subject to conscious influence. Trotsky maintains that certain great writers, such as Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe , appeal to us precisely because they transcend the limitations of their class outlook. Throughout his comments on aesthetics, Trotsky seems to travel a fine line between granting art a certain autonomy while viewing it as serving, in a highly mediated fashion, an important social function.

The call to create a proletarian culture was the originating theme of Proletkult, a left-wing group of artists and writers whose foremost ideologist was A. A. Bogdanov . This group, opposed by the Bolshevik leadership, insisted on art as a weapon in class struggle and rejected all bourgeois art. Also active in the debates of this period were the Formalists and the Futurists, notably the critic Osip Brik , whose term “social command” embodied the idea of interventionist art, and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky , who wrote an influential pamphlet, How Are Verses Made? The Formalists and Futurists found a common platform in the journal LEF (Left Front of Art). The Formalists, focusing on artistic forms and techniques on the basis of linguistic studies, had arisen in pre-revolutionary Russia but now saw their opposition to traditional art as a political gesture, allying them somewhat with the revolution. All of these groups were attacked by the most prominent Soviet theoreticians, such as Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1937), Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933), and Voronsky , who decried the attempt to break completely with the past and what they saw as a reductive denial of the social and cognitive aspects of art. Valentin Voloshinov (Bakhtin) later attempted to harmonize the two sides of the debate, viz., formal linguistic analysis and sociological emphasis, by treating language itself as the supreme ideological phenomenon. A further group was the Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP; later RAPP), which insisted on communist literary hegemony.

The Communist Party’s attitude toward art in this period was, in general, epiphenomenal of its economic policy. A resolution of 1925 voiced the party’s refusal to sanction any one literary faction. This reflected the New Economic Policy (NEP) of a limited free market economy. The period of the first Five-Year Plan (1928–1932) saw a more or less voluntary return to a more committed artistic posture, and during the second Five-Year Plan (1932–1936) this commitment was crystallized in the formation of a Writers’ Union. The first congress of this union in 1934, featuring speeches by Maxim Gorky and Bukharin, officially adopted socialist realism, as defined primarily by Andrei Zhdanov (1896–1948). Aptly dubbed by Terry Eagleton as “Stalin’s cultural thug,” it was Zhdanov whose proscriptive shadow thenceforward fell over Soviet cultural affairs. Although Nikolai Bukharin ’s speech at the congress had attempted a synthesis of Formalist and sociological attitudes, premised on his assertion that within “the microcosm of the word is embedded the macrocosm of history,” Bukharin was eventually to fall from his position as leading theoretician of the party: his trial and execution, stemming from his political and economic differences with Stalin, were also symptomatic of the fact that Formalism soon became a sin once more. Bukharin had called for socialist realism to portray not reality “as it is” but rather as it exists in socialist imagination. Zhdanov defined socialist realism as the depiction of “reality in its revolutionary development. The truthfulness . . . of the artistic image must be linked with the task of ideological transformation.”11 But, as several commentators have pointed out, despite the calls for socialist realism to express social values as embodied in the movement of history (rather than embracing a static naturalism), the actual aesthetic adopted was largely a return to nineteenth-century realist techniques infused with a socialist content.

Socialist realism received its most articulate theoretical expression in the work of the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács , the foremost Marxist aesthetician of the twentieth century. Lukács ’ ideas are examined in some detail below; here, it is necessary merely to mention that his notion of realism collided with that of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). In some ways this debate can be regarded as a collision between two personalities, or between writer (Brecht) and critic ( Lukács ), since their “definitions” of socialist realism overlap in crucial aspects, a fact which is often ignored. According to Lukács , modern capitalist society is riven by contradictions, by chasms between universal and particular, intelligible and sensible, part and whole. The realist artist expresses a vision of the possible totality embracing these contradictions, a totality achieved by embodying what is “typical” about various historical stages. For example, an individual character might enshrine an entire complex of historical forces. Brecht, in his notebooks, also equates realism with the ability to capture the “typical” or “historically significant.” Realists also identify the contradictions in human relationships, as well as their enabling conditions. Socialist realists, moreover, view reality from the viewpoint of the proletariat. Brecht adds that realist art battles false views of reality, thereby facilitating correct views.12 Perhaps the conflict between the two thinkers is rooted in Lukács ’ (arguably Stalinist-inspired) aversion to modernist and experimental art on the grounds that the ontological image of humanity it portrayed was fragmented, decadent, and politically impotent. In the 1930s Brecht’s work was viewed as tainted, though later he was received into the ranks of Marxist aestheticians. In contrast, Brecht’s experimentalism was crucial to his attempts to combine theory and practice in a Marxist aesthetic. Contrasting dramatic theater (which follows Aristotle’s guidelines) with his own “epic” theater, Brecht avers that the audience’s capacity for action must be roused and, far from undergoing katharsis, it must be forced to take decisions, partly by its standard expectations being disappointed (a procedure Brecht called “the alienation effect”). The action on stage must also implicitly point to other, alternative versions of itself. Far from being sterile, the disputes between Lukács and Brecht display the multidimensional potential of any concept approached from Marxist viewpoints as well as the inevitable grounding of those viewpoints in political circumstances.

Mention should also be made of the Italian Marxist theorist and political activist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), whose main contribution to Marxism is widely thought to lie in his elaboration of the notion of hegemony . Autonomous revolutionary potential on the part of the proletariat could only be realized, argued Gramsci, through political and intellectual autonomy. A mass movement alone was insufficient: also, initiated through a vanguard with working-class roots and sympathies, this class “must train and educate itself in the management of society,” acquiring both the culture and psychology of a dominant class through its own channels: “meetings, congresses, discussions, mutual education.”13 The transformation to a socialist state cannot be successful without the proletariat’s own organic intellectuals forging an alternative hegemony. The notion of hegemony is effectively a metonymic affirmation of the dialectical connection between economic and superstructural spheres, stressing the transformative role of human agency rather than relying on the “inevitability” of economic determinism. Gramsci wrote some thirty-four notebooks while in prison, ranging from literary topics such as Dante and Pirandello to philosophical and political themes. These were not published until after Mussolini’s downfall. Gramsci ’s literary criticism insisted on understanding literary production within its historical and political context (as against Croce’s ahistorical view of art as autonomous) and, following De Sanctis, viewed the critic’s task as one of harmonizing with the general cultural and political struggle toward a socialist order.

Later critics have continued to reinterpret and develop the insights of Marx and Engels. The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, whose leading exponents were Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, produced a number of philosophical and cultural analyses informed primarily by Hegel’s work and also by Freud. In general, these theorists saw modern mass culture as regimented and reduced to a commercial dimension; and they saw art as embodying a unique critical distance from this social and political world. Walter Benjamin argued in his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that modern technology has transformed the work of art, stripping it of the “aura” of uniqueness it possessed in earlier eras. Modern works are reproduced for mass consumption, and are effectively copies which relate to no original form. However, this new status of art, thought Benjamin, also gave it a revived political and subversive potential.

Subsequent Marxist cultural and literary theory, such as that of Louis Althusser , Lucien Goldmann, and Pierre Macherey , turned away from Hegel and was heavily influenced by the structuralist movements of the earlier twentieth century, which stressed the role of larger signifying systems and institutional structures over individual agency and intention. Louis Althusser emphasized the later Marx’s “epistemological break” from his own earlier humanism, and Marx’s scientificity and his departure from, rather than his debt to, Hegel. Althusser ’s structuralist Marxism – as stated in his Pour Marx (For Marx, 1965) and his often cited Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses , rejected earlier humanist and historicist readings of Marx, as well as literary-critical emphases on authorial intention and subjective agency. Goldmann rejected the Romantic–humanist notion of individual creativity and held that texts are productions of larger mental structures representing the mentality of particular social classes. He stressed the operation of larger forces and doctrines in literary texts, and developed the notion of “homology” to register the parallels between artistic and social forms. Pierre Macherey ’s A Theory of Literary Production (1966) saw the literary text as the product of the artist’s reworking of linguistic and ideological raw material, unwittingly exposing, through its lacunae and contradictions, ideological elements which the author had attempted to suppress into a false coherence. In this way, a critique of ideology could emerge through the literary text.

In the Anglo-American world a “cultural materialist” criticism was first revived by Raymond Williams ’ work, notably Culture and Society 1780–1950, which analyzes the cultural critique of capitalism in English literary tradition. Williams rejected a simplistic explanation of culture as the efflux of material conditions, but stressed the contribution of cultural forms to economic and political development. The Long Revolution (1961) continued and refined this project using categories such as dominant, residual, and emergent cultures mediated by what Williams called “structures of feeling.” Williams’ work became overtly Marxist with the publication in 1977 of Marxism and Literature. In this work Williams undertook a critical review of earlier Marxist theories and offered his own analyses of fundamental Marxist notions such as ideology, hegemony, base and superstructure. His own cultural materialism as set forth here attempts to integrate Marxist conceptions of language and literature. Keywords (1976) examines the history of fundamental concepts and categories. In general, Williams’ work analyzed the history of language, the role of the media, mass communications, and the cultural connections between the country and the city.

The major American Marxist critic Fredric Jameson outlined a dialectical theory of literary criticism in his Marxism and Form (1971), drawing on Hegelian categories such as the notion of totality and the connection of abstract and concrete. Such criticism recognizes the need to see its objects of analysis within a broad historical context, acknowledges its own history and perspective, and seeks the profound inner form of a literary text. Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981) attempts to integrate this dialectical thinking with insights from structuralism and Freud, using the Freudian notion of repression to analyze the function of ideology, the status of literary texts, and the epistemological function of literary form. In subsequent work such as Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Jameson performed the valuable task of extending Marx’s insights into the central role of postmodernism in determining the very form of our artistic and intellectual experience.

In Britain, Terry Eagleton has outlined the categories of a Marxist analysis of literature, and has persistently rearticulated the terms of communication, as well as the differences, between Marxism and much of modern literary theory. We can now undertake a closer examination of two Marxist critics whose ideas have been highly influential: the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács and the aforementioned critic Terry Eagleton , as his work relates to modern literary theory.

Notes 1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1952; rpt. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), pp. 11–16. Hereafter cited as MCP. 2 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1959; rpt. Moscow and London: Progress Publishers/Lawrence and Wishart, 1981), pp. 127–143. 3 Marx and Engels, On Religion (1957; rpt. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 39. 4 Marx, Capital: Volume I (1954; rpt. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), p. 29. Hereafter cited as Capital. 5 “Preface and Introduction,” in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976), p. 3. Hereafter cited as CPE. 6 Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, introd. Michèle Barrett (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 105. Hereafter cited as OF. 7 George V. Plekhanov, Art and Social Life (New York: Oriole Editions, 1974), pp. 177–178. 8 V. I. Lenin, On Literature and Art (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967), p. 148. Hereafter citations from this volume are given in the text. 9 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (New York: Russell and Russell, 1924), p. 218. Hereafter citations are given in the text. 10 Leon Trotsky, Culture and Socialism and a Manifesto: Art and Revolution (London: New Park Publications, 1975), pp. 31–34. 11 A. A. Zhdanov, On Literature, Music and Philosophy (New York and London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1950), p. 15. 12 Berel Lang and Forrest Williams, eds., Marxism and Art: Writings in Aesthetics and Criticism (New York: McKay, 1972), pp. 226–227. 13 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, trans. J. Mathews, ed. Q. Hoare (New York: International Publishers, 1977), p. 171. 14 Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1984), p. 93. 15 Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1981), p. 84. Hereafter cited as WB. 16 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford and Minnesota: Blackwell/ University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 208. Hereafter cited as LT. 17 Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London: New Left Books, 1986), pp. 81–82. 18 See Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1976), pp. 8–10. 19 Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 54. Hereafter cited as CI. 20 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 9. Hereafter cited as POS.

Bibliography Bertolt Brecht, Schriften zum Theater (1957, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett, 1964); V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (46 vols., 1960-70,1978), On Literature and Art (1970), Selected Works (1971); Karl Marx, Selected Writings (ed. David McLellan, 1977); Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Correspondence of Marx and Engels, 1846-1895: A Selection with Commentary and Notes (ed. and trans. Dona Torr, n.d.), The Marx-Engels Reader (2d ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker, 1978), On Literature and Art (1978); George V. Plekhanov, Art and Social Life (1970); Maynard Solomon, ed., Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary (1973); Leon Trotsky, The Basic Writings of Trotsky (ed. Irving Howe, 1965), Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art (ed. Paul N. Siegel, 1970); A. A. Zhdanov, Essays on Literature, Philosophy, and Music (1950). Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (trans. Ben Brewster, 1971); Chris Bullock and David Peck, Guide to Marxist Literary Criticism (1980); Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels, and the Poets: Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism (trans. J. L. Sammons, 1967); Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976); Dave Laing, The Marxist Theory of Art: An Introductory Survey (1978); Cliff Slaughter, Marxism, Ideology, and Literature (1980); Robert H. Stacy, Russian Literary Criticism: A Short History (1974); Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977). Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

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Marxism by Wendy Lynne Lee LAST MODIFIED: 26 July 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0031

Marxism encompasses a wide range of both scholarly and popular work. It spans from the early, more philosophically oriented, Karl Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the German Ideology , to later economic works like Das Kapital , to specifically polemical works like The Communist Manifesto . While our focus is not Marx’s own contributions to philosophy or political economy, per se, it is important to note that the sheer breadth of scholarship rightly regarded as “Marxist” or “Marxian,” owes itself to engagement with texts ranging across the works of a younger, more explicitly Hegelian, “philosophical Marx” to those of the more astute, if perhaps more cynical, thinker of his later work, to the revolutionary of the Manifesto’s “Workers unite!” Hence, while it is not surprising to see an expansive literature that includes feminist, anti-racist, and environmental appropriations of Marx, it is also not unexpected to see considerable conflict and variation as a salient characteristic of any such compilation. Indeed, it is difficult to capture the full range of what “Marxism” includes, and it is thus important to acknowledge that to some extent the choice of organizing category is destined to be arbitrary. But this may be more a virtue than a deficit since not only have few thinkers had more significant global impact, few have seen their work applied to a broader range of issues, philosophic, economic, geopolitical, environmental, and social. Marx’s conviction that the point of philosophy is not merely to know the world but to change it for the good continues to infuse the essential bone marrow of virtually every major movement for economic, social, and now environmental justice on the beleaguered planet. Although his principle focus may have been the emancipation of workers, the model he articulates for understanding the systemic injustices inherent to capitalism is echoed in Marxist analyses of oppression across disciplines as otherwise diverse as political economy, feminist theory, anti-slavery analyses, aesthetic experience, liberation theology, and environmental philosophy. To be sure, Marxism is not Marx; it is not necessarily even a reflection of Marx’s own convictions. But however far flung from Marx’s efforts to turn G. F. W. Hegel on his head, Marxism has remained largely true to its central objective, namely, to demonstrate the dehumanizing character of an economic system whose voracious quest for capital accumulation is inconsistent not only with virtually any vision of the good life, but with the necessary conditions of life itself.

For a general overview of Karl Marx, look to Sidney Hook’s Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation (1933), Isaiah Berlin’s Karl Marx (1963), Louis Dupré’s The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism (1966), Frederic Bender’s Karl Marx: The Essential Writings (1972), or David Mc’Lellan’s Karl Marx: Selected Writings (1977). General overviews of Marxism present, however, a more daunting challenge. These range not only over an expansive array of subject matter, but also across a wide and diverse span of application. A distinctive feature of Marxist scholarship is the effort to include interpretation of Marx’s original arguments and their application to a range of issues. Georg Lukacs offers an example of this strategy in History and Class Consciousness ( Lukacs 1966 ). Louis Althusser takes a similar tack in Reading Kapital ( Althusser 1998 ) and For Marx ( Althusser 2006 ) arguing for an important philosophical transition between the young Marx and the Marx of Kapital —that Marxism should reflect this “epistemological break.” Throughout a career which included Marx and Literary Criticism ( Eagleton 1976 ), Why Marx was Right ( Eagleton 2011 ), and Marx and Freedom ( Eagleton 1997 ), Terry Eagleton demonstrates why Marx and Marxism remain relevant to our reading of literature. In On Marx ( Lee 2002 ), Wendy Lynne Lee endeavors to bridge the gap between general introduction and application via contemporary examples relevant to Marxist scholars and civic activists across a range of disciplines and accessibility. John Sitton’s Marx Today ( Sitton 2010 ) takes a historically contextualized approach to contemporary socialist theorizing via The Communist Manifesto . Through a diverse selection including Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?,” John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney’s “Monopoly-Finance Capital and the Paradox of Accumulation,” and Terry Eagleton’s “Where Do Postmodernists Come From?,” Sitton demonstrates the continuing relevance of the Marxist commitment to make philosophy speak to real world issues. One of the best general works, however, is Kevin M. Brien’s Marx, Reason, and the Art of Freedom ( Brien 2006 ). Brien argues that Marxism can and should proceed from the assumption that, contrary to Althusser, Marx can be read as a coherent whole. As Marx Wartofsky puts it, Brien’s reading of Marx creates opportunities to theorize an internally consistent Marxism, but also incites “lively criticism.” Lastly, though perhaps less a general introduction to Marxism than to a Marxist view of political/economic revolution, the Norton Critical Edition of The Communist Manifesto ( Bender 2013 ) includes essays situating Marx’s incendiary pamphlet in the history of Marxist scholarship. It includes a rich selection of pieces devoted to themes including the revolutionary potential of Marx’s critique of capitalism (Mihailo Markoviç), his theory of wage labor (Ernest Mandel), Marxist ethics (Howard Selsam), and the applicability of Marxist analyses to contemporary dilemmas (Slavoj Zizek, Joe Bender).

Althusser, Louis. Reading Kapital . London: New Left Review/Verso, 1998.

In Reading Kapital Althusser argues for an epistemological break between the young Marx and the Marx of Kapital . Marxist analyses, according to Althusser, should not only reflect this maturation in Marx’s thinking, but should seek to understand and capitalize on the important changes in Marx’s view of capitalism.

Althusser, Louis. For Marx . London: New Left Review/Verso, 2006.

In For Marx Althusser continues his argument for an epistemological break between the young Marx and the Marx of Kapital utilizing specifically Freudian and Structuralist concepts to support his analysis. The focus here is on the “scientific” Marx as opposed to the younger, more Hegelian thinker. But, as Althusserlater acknowledged, more attention needed to be paid to class struggle.

Bender, Frederic, ed. The Communist Manifesto: A Norton Critical Edition . New York: Norton, 2013.

The Norton Critical Edition of The Communist Manifesto includes essays situating Marx’s incendiary pamphlet in the history of Marxist scholarship. It includes a rich selection of pieces devoted to themes including the revolutionary potential of Marx’s critique of capitalism (Mihailo Markoviç), his theory of wage labor (Ernest Mandel), a socialist feminist interpretation (Wendy Lynne Lee), a Marxist-inspired ethics (Howard Selsam), and an analysis of the applicability of Marxist work to contemporary dilemmas (Slavoj Zizek, Joe Bender).

Brien, Kevin M. Marx, Reason, and the Art of Freedom . Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2006.

In Marx, Reason, and the Art of Freedom Brien argues that Marxism can and should proceed from the assumption that Marx can be read as a coherent whole, that is, that there’s no “epistemological break” as identified by Althusser. As Marx scholar Marx Wartofsky puts it, Brien’s reading of Marx creates opportunities to theorize an internally consistent Marxism, but also incites “lively criticism.”

Eagleton, Terry. Marx and Literary Criticism . Oakland: University of California Press, 1976.

In Marx and Literary Criticism , Eagleton’s seminal work, he shows how and why it is that Marx is relevant to our reading not only of political economy, but to a wide array of literature. Among other topics, he offers an analysis of the relationship of literature to its historical context, and of literature to political activity. He also situates Marxist critique in the larger context of understanding the human relationship to society and civilization.

Eagleton, Terry. Marx and Freedom . London: Phoenix House, 1997.

In Marx and Freedom , Eagleton continues his critique of capitalism, arguing that freedom means not only liberation from material constraints to more creative praxis, but emancipation from capitalist labor as a variety of alienation. Eagleton incorporates a very rich account of individual perception and activity as key to realizing freedom.

Eagleton, Terry. Why Marx Was Right . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.

In Why Marx Was Right Eagleton adopts a more combative tone, defending against the claim that Marxism has outlived its usefulness. He takes on a number of common objections to Marxism, including that it leads to tyranny, or that it’s ideologically reductionistic.

Lee, Wendy Lynne. On Marx . Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002.

Lee’s aim is to offer an introduction to Marx and to Marxism accessible to a wide range of disciplines and audiences. On Marx also provides concise possible applications of Marxist themes for use in environmental philosophy and feminist theory with an emphasis on bridging the gap between philosophical comprehension and activist application—theory and praxis.

Lukacs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics . Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1966.

History and Class Consciousness offers a classic example of a strategy common in Marx scholarship, namely, an interpretation of Marx’s work (particularly the concept of alienation), the influence of G. W. F. Hegel on Marx, and an application of Marx to contemporary themes, in Lukacs’s case, the defense of Bolshevism.

Sitton, John. Marx Today: Selected Works and Recent Debates . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230117457

Marx Today takes a historically contextualized approach to contemporary socialist theorizing via The Communist Manifesto , among other Marx’s works. Aimed at a broad audience, this anthology includes both sympathetic and critical readings. Sitton’s selections demonstrate the relevance of the Marxist commitment to make philosophy speak to real world issues.

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Marxist Criticism on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Essay

The story The Lottery continues to bring forth heated debates since its publication. The story touches the nerves of people as they try to interpret its meaning. The focus of this paper will be on a Marxist criticism of the story.

Kosenko (1985) posits that the story employs Marxist undertones. According to him, the story symbolises an attack on capitalism. The story attacks the ideology and social order of the town. One Marxist explanation for the story lies in the symbol of the black dot made on a paper for the lottery. The black color of the dot represents evil that is linked to business, which in turn stands for capitalism.

For example, Mr. Summers who draws the dot is involved in the coal business. He represents the powerful class in capitalism that has the control of the town both politically and economically because Mr. Summers also administers the lottery (Kosenko, 1985).

Moreover, the location of the lottery at the town square between two buildings- the post office and the bank represents the political and economic power of the government and those in power such as Mr. Graves and Mr. Summers. The common people stand no chance against the capitalist order.

The lottery is an old tradition that represents the rigidity of a capitalist society. The ritual of the lottery has been in the town for so long that the people no longer know its origin but continue to practise it annually. When some people suggest that other towns have abandoned the ritual, the Old man rebukes them and says that the ritual must go on because it is tradition.

The old man represents people in a capitalist society who opt for maintenance of the status quo. They are afraid of abandoning the way they do things to continue benefiting at the expense of the majority. The people are deluded by the lottery that the society is democratic hence they will not criticize the ruling class.

The people in the society are made to believe that the lottery is democratic and anyone stands an equal chance of selection. There is a possibility that Summers knows the paper with the black dot and his family members are safe from being stoned at the lottery. Thus, we can say the lottery is an election for the powerful but a random selection for the common people.

The story also depicts the social order in a capitalist society in which few powerful individuals control the rest of the society. For example, the powerful people in the lottery are Mr. Summers, Mr. Graves the postmaster and Mr. Martin the grocer respectively. These three individuals are powerful in the small town due to their position.

To illustrate this point when the lottery is picked it is asked who has picked it, was it the Watsons or the Dunbars. The two families mentioned are not powerful in the town. Why did they not ask whether the Graves or the summers had it? This shows that the powerful are in control of the lottery and have no chance of being victims of stoning.

In addition, the women in this society are low in status. They have no power and only the men in their families can pick the lottery for the families and if the man of the family is absent, his son represents him instead of the wife. Just like in a capitalist society, people who have no power have no say in the affairs of the society, which is left to the powerful few.

Finally, the author of the story seems to criticize a society that oppresses the weak and depends on outdated practices to maintain discriminative social order. The lottery helps the powerful to continue to control the town in other words capitalism goes on to enable Mr. Summers and his likes remain in positions of power.

Reference List

Kosenko, P. (1985): A Marxist-Feminist Reading of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’ New Orleans Review, 12, 27-32.

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IvyPanda. (2023, October 28). Marxist Criticism on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Essay. https://ivypanda.com/essays/marxist-criticism-on-the-lottery-by-shirley-jackson/

"Marxist Criticism on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Essay." IvyPanda , 28 Oct. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/marxist-criticism-on-the-lottery-by-shirley-jackson/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Marxist Criticism on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Essay'. 28 October.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Marxist Criticism on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Essay." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/marxist-criticism-on-the-lottery-by-shirley-jackson/.

1. IvyPanda . "Marxist Criticism on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Essay." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/marxist-criticism-on-the-lottery-by-shirley-jackson/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Marxist Criticism on The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Essay." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/marxist-criticism-on-the-lottery-by-shirley-jackson/.

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12 Texts for Introducing Marxist Criticism

Instructional and Assessment Strategies , Reading Instruction

When my students study literary criticism , I usually introduce Marxist criticism after feminist criticism . In part, I introduce these two lenses in close order because they are both political lenses. They’re not political in the sense of partisan politics. But they both deal with how literature navigates issues of power and privilege.

However, I usually introduce Marxist criticism after feminist criticism because students stumble over the “Marxist” title. Students know Karl Marx from their social studies classes. And they know about communism from reading The Crucible . Sometimes that leads students to believe that Marxist criticism is all about communism. So I spend a lot of time upfront addressing this misunderstanding.

From that point forward, we apply Marxist criticism by evaluating how social class and privilege intersect. At the high school level, I work to keep criticism as straightforward as possible. In other words, we’re asking these questions over and over:

First, what social classes or hierarchies appear in the text?
Second, which characters have privilege? What does privilege look like in the text? How does access to or distance from privilege affect a character?
Similarly, how does the text treat characters from various social classes? How does membership in a particular social class affect a character’s actions and/or how they are treated by other characters?

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Introducing Marxist Criticism

At the high school level, students don’t need all the vocabulary of Marxist criticism. However, the concept of “privilege” is so closely related to Marxist criticism that we always explore this term. Most of my students are at least familiar with the concept of privilege even if they can’t define it. For this reason, the essay “ Privileged ” by Kyle Korver can be a good text for introducing and unpacking this term.

Oftentimes, I find short works to be useful in exploring a new concept. The brevity of poetry can make it ideal for exploring a new idea. To practice applying Marxist criticism, teachers might consider “ Richard Cory ” by Edwin Arlington Robinson. This poem has a straightforward “plot.” The content of the poem is also high interest, so students will be engaged. Then, students can practice applying Marxist criticism to explore the relationship between Richard Cory and the speaker. Grab “Richard Cory” and two more of Robinson’s most-famous poems in this great bundle !

Additionally, a short story like “ A Worn Path ” by Eudora Welty is a good tool for practicing Marxist criticism. For one, this is a short short story, and the plot is clear and easy to follow. Furthermore, social class plays a clear role in how the main character is treated and how she interacts with the white, urban world. Read it here .

Short Stories

Short stories are the primary way that I teach students to apply literary criticism. These three short stories provide readers with plenty of opportunities to evaluate how social class and privilege affect a text’s meaning.

First, “ A White Heron ” by Sarah Orne Jewett is straightforward enough that students can usually read the story independently. Then, students can apply literary criticism with a partner or small group. Read it here .
Second, “ Berenice ” by Edgar Allan Poe may seem like an unusual suggestion. However, this text is high interest, and the main character’s life would be wildly different if he didn’t have privilege. He simply could not have gotten away with his crimes if his social class didn’t protect him. Read it here .
Finally, “ Winter Dreams ” by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the longest short story on this list. My students usually enjoy this story because the main characters are so infuriating! The social classes of the main characters play a clear part in their interactions. Of the texts mentioned so far, this is the only one with a character actively working to advance his social class. This text also lends itself to feminist criticism . Read it here .

Grab all my lesson plans for these short stories plus “A Worn Path” and lessons for 5 other short stories in the 9-12 Short Stories Bundle !

Longer Works

Longer texts take more time to read, so I usually incorporate longer works after we have tried different critical lenses. I also like to choose texts that lend themselves to a variety of critical lenses. All the longer works on this list would be good candidates for historical criticism , too! Exploring the intersection of history and literature also adds another layer of complexity to Marxist criticism.

First, The Crucible by Arthur Miller is an ideal candidate for applying several critical lenses. The allegory for McCarthyism lends itself to historical criticism. Also, Miller makes it clear that social class plays an important part in the Salem Witch Trials. Check out my favorite activities for teaching The Crucible .
Similarly, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the first texts I think of when discussing Marxist criticism. The symbolism of East and West Egg and the Valley of Ashes lends itself beautifully to evaluating the role of social class and privilege in the text. These are my favorite activities for teaching The Great Gatsby .
Additionally, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is not a text I usually associate with literary criticism. However, social class is an unavoidable part of teaching and reading this novel. The text also covers issues related to race and gender, so it suits a variety of critical lenses. I also pair To Kill a Mockingbird with a variety of related texts that provide a richer view of Maycomb.
Finally, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen is a text that clearly lends itself to Marxist criticism. Because social class plays such an important part in this novel, I usually start students with this primer about class in the Victorian Era. I also love this collection of activities for helping students engage with Pride and Prejudice .

Honorable Mentions

These two texts lend themselves to Marxist criticism although they are not my first choices.

First, the poem “ The Last of the Light Brigade ” by Rudyard Kipling focuses on the lives of the brave survivors of “ The Light Brigade .” Because this premise of this poem is based on another poem, it takes a little more time to get students to the Marxist criticism. That being said, this poem also connects well with Pride and Prejudice because it emphasizes the hardship of life in Victorian England. Read it here .

Finally, Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare is one of my favorite plays to read with students! While this play more closely aligns with archetypal criticism, social class also plays a role in the drama. The citizens in the play are cast as a moronic, gullible mob. That they come from the plebian class and not from the patrician class of the main characters suits Marxist criticism. Julius Caesar also goes well with these unexpected text pairings !

What other texts would you recommend for teaching Marxist criticism?

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Essays on Marxist Criticism

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