Marxist Criticism

     Marxist Criticism, in its diverse forms, grounds its theory and practice on the economic and cultural theory of Karl Marx (1818-83) and his fellowthinker Friedrich Engels, and especially on the following claims: 

     (1) In the last analysis, the evolving history of humanity, of its social groupings and relations, of its institutions, and of its ways of thinking are largely determined by the changing mode of its "material production", that is, of its overall economic organization for producing and distributing material goods. 

     (2) Historical changes in the fundamental mode of material production effect changes in the class structure of a society, establishing in each era dominant and subordinate classes that engage in a struggle for economic, political, and social advantage. 

     (3) Human consciousness is constituted by an ideology, that is, the beliefs, values, and ways of thinking and feeling through which human beings perceive, and by recourse to which they explain, what they take to be reality. An ideology is, in complex ways, the product of the position and interests of a particular class. In any historical era, the dominant ideology embodies, and serves to legitimize and perpetuate, the interests of the dominant economic and social class. 

     Ideology was not much discussed by Marx and Engels after The German Ideology, which they wrote jointly in 1845-46, but it has become a key concept in Marxist criticism of literature and the other arts. Marx inherited the term from French philosophers of the late eighteenth century, who used it to designate the study of the way that all general concepts develop from senseperceptions. In the present era, "ideology" is used in a variety of non-Marxist ways, ranging from a derogatory name for any set of political ideas that are held dogmatically and applied rigorously, to a neutral name for ways of perceiving and thinking that are specific to an individual's race, or sex, or education, or ethnic group. In its distinctively Marxist use, the reigning ideology in any era is conceived to be, ultimately, the product of its economic structure and the resulting class-relations and class-interests. In a famed architectural metaphor, Marx represented ideology as a "superstructure" of which the concurrent socioeconomic system is the "base." Friedrich Engels described ideology as "a false consciousness," and many later Marxists consider it to be constituted largely by unconscious prepossessions that are illusory, in contrast to the "scientific" (that is, Marxist) knowledge of the economic determinants, historical evolution, and present constitution of the social world. A further claim is that, in the present era of capitalist economic organization that emerged during the eighteenth century, the reigning ideology incorporates the interests of the dominant and exploitative class, the "bourgeoisie," who are the owners of the means of production and distribution, as opposed to the "proletariat," or wage-earning working class. This ideology, to those who live in and with it, it is claimed, seems a natural and inevitable way of seeing, explaining, and dealing with the environing world, but in fact has the hidden function of legitimizing and maintaining the position, power, and economic interests of the ruling class. Bourgeois ideology is regarded as both producing and permeating the social and cultural institutions and practices of the present era—including religion, morality, philosophy, politics, and the legal system, as well as (though in a less direct way) literature and the other arts. 

     In accordance with some version of the views just outlined, a Marxist critic typically undertakes to explain the literature in any historical era, not as works created in accordance with timeless artistic criteria, but as "products" of the economic and ideological determinants specific to that era. What some Marxist critics themselves decry as "vulgar Marxism" analyzes a "bourgeois" literary work as in direct correlation with the present stage of the class struggle and demands that such works be replaced by a "social realism" that will represent the true reality and progressive forces of our time; in practice, this has usually turned out to be the demand that literature conform to an official party line. More flexible Marxists, on the other hand, building upon scattered comments on literature in Marx and Engels themselves, grant that traditional literary works possess a degree of autonomy that enables some of them to transcend the prevailing bourgeois ideology sufficiently to represent (or in the frequent Marxist equivalent, to reflect) aspects of the "objective" reality of their time (see imitation). 

     The Hungarian thinker Georg Lukács, the most widely influential of Marxist critics, represents a flexible view of the role of ideology. He proposed that each great work of literature creates "its own world," which is unique and seemingly distinct from "everyday reality." But masters of realism in the novel such as Balzac or Tolstoy, by "bringing to life the greatest possible richness of the objective conditions of life," and by creating "typical" characters who manifest to an extreme the essential tendencies and determinants of their epoch, succeed—often "in opposition to [the author's] own conscious ideology"—in producing a fictional world which is a "reflection of life in the greatest concreteness and clarity and with all its motivating contradictions." That is, the fictional world of such writers accords with the Marxist conception of the real world as constituted by class conflict, economic and social "contradictions," and the alienation of the individual under capitalism. (See bourgeois epic, under epic, and refer to Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic and Other Essays, trans. 1970; the volume also includes Lukács' useful review of the foundational tenets of Marxist criticism, in "Marx and Engels on Aesthetics.") 

     While lauding nineteenth-century literary realism, Lukács attacked modernist experimental writers as "decadent" instances of concern with the subjectivity of the alienated individual in the fragmented world of our late stage of capitalism. (See modernism.) He thereby inaugurated a vigorous debate among Marxist critics about the political standing of formal innovators in twentieth-century literature. In opposition to Lukács, the Frankfurt School of German Marxists, especially Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, lauded modernist writers such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Samuel Beckett, proposing that their formal experiments, by the very fact that they fragment and disrupt the life they "reflect," effect a distance and detachment that serve as an implicit critique—or yield a "negative knowledge"—of the dehumanizing institutions and processes of society under capitalism. 

     Two rather maverick German Marxists, Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, who also supported modernist and nonrealistic art, have had considerable influence on non-Marxist as well as Marxist criticism. In his critical theory, and in his own dramatic writings (see epic theater), Bertolt Brecht rejected what he called the "Aristotelian" concept that a tragic play is an imitation of reality with a unified plot and a universal theme which establishes an identification of the audience with the hero and produces a catharsis of the spectator's emotions. (See Aristotle, under tragedy and plot) Brecht proposes instead that the illusion of reality should be deliberately shattered by an episodic plot, by protagonists who do not attract the audience's sympathy, by a striking theatricality in staging and acting, and by other ways of baring the artifice of drama so as to produce an "alienation effect" (see under distance and involvement). The result of such alienation will be to jar audiences out of their passive acceptance of modern capitalist society as a natural way of life, into an attitude not only (as in Adorno) of critical understanding of capitalist shortcomings, but of active engagement with the forces of change. Another notable critic, Walter Benjamin, was both an admirer of Brecht and briefly an associate of the Frankfurt School. Particularly influential was Benjamin's attention to the effects of changing material conditions in the production of the arts, especially the recent technological developments of the mass media that have promoted, he said, "a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art." In his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin proposes that modern technical innovations such as photography, the phonograph, the radio, and especially the cinema, have transformed the very concept and status of a work of art. Formerly an artist or author produced a work which was a single object, regarded as the special preserve of the bourgeois elite, around which developed a quasi-religious "aura" of uniqueness, autonomy, and aesthetic value independent of any social function— an aura which invited in the spectator a passive attitude of absorbed contemplation in the object itself. The new media not only make possible the infinite and precise reproducibility of the objects of art, but effect the production of works which, like motion pictures, are specifically designed to be reproduced in multiple copies. Such modes of art, Benjamin argues, by destroying the mystique of the unique work of art as a subject for pure contemplation, make possible a radical role for works of art by opening the way to "the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art." (A useful collection of central essays by the Marxist critics Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno is R. Taylor, ed., Aesthetics and Politics, 1977.) 

     Since the middle of the present century there has been a resurgence of Marxist criticism, marked by an openness, on some level of literary analysis, to other current critical perspectives; a flexibility which acknowledges that Marxist critical theory is itself not a set of timeless truths but at least to some degree an evolving historical process; a subtilizing of the concept of ideology as applied to literary content; and a tendency to grant an increased role to non-ideological and distinctively artistic determinants of literary structures. 

     In the 1960s the influential French Marxist Louis Althusser assimilated the structuralism then current into his view that the structure of society is not a monolithic whole, but is constituted by a diversity of "nonsynchronous" social formations, or "ideological state apparatuses," including religious, legal, political, and literary institutions. Each of these is interrelated with the others in complex ways, but possesses a "relative autonomy"; only "in the last instance" is the ideology of a particular institution determined by its material base in contemporary economic production. In an influential reconsideration of the nature of ideology, Althusser opposes its definition as simply "false consciousness"; he declares instead that ideologies vary according to the form and practices of each mode of state apparatus, and that the ideology of each mode operates by means of a type of discourse which interpellates (calls upon) the individual to take up a pre-established "subject position"—that is, a position as a person with certain views and values which, in every instance, serve the ultimate interests of the ruling class. (See discourse under poststructuralism.) Within the particular social formation of literature, furthermore, a great work is not a mere product of ideology, because its fiction establishes for the reader a distance from which to recognize, hence expose, "the ideology from which it is born . . . from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes." Pierre Macherey, in A Theory of Literary Production (1966, trans. 1978), stressed the supplementary claim that a literary text not only distances itself from its ideology by its fiction and form, but also exposes the "contradictions" that are inherent in that ideology by its "silences" or "gaps"—that is, by what the text fails to say because its ideology makes it impossible to say it. Such textual "absences" are symptoms of ideological repressions of the contents in the text's own "unconscious." The aim of Marxist criticism, Macherey asserts, is to make these silences "speak" and so to reveal, behind what an author consciously intended to say, the text's unconscious content—that is, its repressed awareness of the flaws, stresses, and incoherence in the very ideology that it incorporates. 

      Between 1929 and 1935 the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, while imprisoned by the fascist government, wrote approximately thirty documents on political, social, and cultural subjects, known as the "prison notebooks." Gramsci maintains the original Marxist distinction between the economic base and the cultural superstructure, but replaces the older notion that culture is a disguised "reflection" of the material base with the concept that the relation between the two is one of "reciprocity," or interactive influence. Gramsci places special emphasis on the popular, as opposed to the elite elements of culture, ranging from folklore and popular music to the cinema. Gramsci's most widely echoed concept is that of hegemony: that a social class achieves a predominant influence and power, not by direct and overt means, but by succeeding in making its ideological view of society so pervasive that the subordinate classes unwittingly accept and participate in their own oppression. Gramsci's prison writings have become widely influential since they were published late in the 1940s, especially among literary and social critics, such as Terry Eagleton in England and Fredric Jameson and Edward Said in America, who concern themselves with the power of literary culture to intervene in and to transform existing economic and political arrangements and activities. See Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, trans. William Boelhower, 1985; Chantal Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory, 1979. 

     In England the many social and critical writings of Raymond Williams manifest an adaptation of Marxist concepts to his humanistic concern with the overall texture of an individual's "lived experience." A leading theorist of Marxist criticism in England is Terry Eagleton, who has expanded and elaborated the concepts of Althusser and Macherey into his view that a literary text is a special kind of production in which ideological discourse—described as any system of mental representations of lived experience—is reworked into a specifically literary discourse. In recent years Eagleton has been increasingly hospitable to the tactical use, for dealing with ideology in literature, of concepts derived from deconstruction and from Lacan's version of Freudian psychoanalysis. Eagleton views such poststructuralist analyses as useful to Marxist critics of literary texts insofar as they serve to undermine reigning beliefs and certainties, but only as preliminary to the properly Marxist enterprise of exposing their ideological motivation and to the application of the criticism of literature toward politically desirable ends. 

     The most prominent American theorist, Fredric Jameson, is also the most eclectic of current Marxist critics. In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Symbolic Act (1981), Jameson expressly adapts to his synthetic critical enterprise such seemingly incompatible viewpoints as the medieval theory of fourfold levels of meaning in the allegorical interpretation of the Bible, the archetypal criticism of Northrop Frye, structuralist criticism, Lacan's reinterpretations of Freud, semiotics, and deconstruction. These modes of criticism, Jameson asserts, are applicable at various stages of the critical interpretation of a literary work; but Marxist criticism, he contends, "subsumes" all the other "interpretive modes," by retaining their positive findings within a "political interpretation of literary texts" which stands as the "final" or "absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation." This last-analysis "political interpretation" of a literary text involves an exposure of the hidden role of the "political unconscious"—a concept which Jameson describes as his "collective," or "political," adaptation of the Freudian concept that each individual's unconscious is a repository of repressed desires. (See psychological and psychoanalytic criticism.) In any literary product of our late capitalist era, the "rifts and discontinuities" in the text, and especially those elements which, in the French phrase, are its "non-dit" (its not-said), are symptoms of the repression by a predominant ideology of the contradictions of "History" into the depths of the political unconscious; and the content of this repressed History, Jameson asserts, is the revolutionary process of "the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity." In the final stage of an interpretation, Jameson holds, the Marxist critic "rewrites," in the mode of "allegory," the literary text "in such a way that the [text] may be seen as the . . . reconstruction of a prior historical or ideological subtext"—that is, of the text's unspoken, because repressed and unconscious, awareness of the ways it is determined not only by current ideology, but also by the long-term process of true "History." 

     See sociology of literature, and for the Marxist wing of the new historicism, see cultural materialism under the entry new historicism. In addition to writings listed above, refer to: Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism (1950); Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1960) and Marxism and Literature (1977); Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels and the Poets: Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism (1967); Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (trans., 1968); Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (1969, trans. 1971); Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (1971); Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, eds. Marx and Engels on Literature and Art (1973); Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (1976) and Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976)—the latter is a useful introduction to Marxist criticism in general; Chris Bullock and David Peck, eds., Guide to Marxist Literary Criticism (1980); Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction (1982); J. J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (1983); J. G Merquior, Western Marxism (1986); and the comprehensive survey, "Marxist Criticism," by Walter Cohen in Redrawing the Boundaries, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (1992). Various essays by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak assimilate Marxist concepts both to deconstruction and to the viewpoint of feminist criticism; see, for example, her "Displacement and the Discourse of Women," in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. Mark Krupnick (1983). For a sharp critique of recent theorists of Marxist criticism, see Frederick Crews, "Dialectical Immaterialism," in Skeptical Engagements (1986); also Richard Levin, "The New Interdisciplinarity in Literary Criticism," in Nancy Easterlin and Barbara Riebling, eds., After Poststructuralism: Interdisciplinarity and Literary Theory, 1993. Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), write a poststructuralist challenge to the "master narrative" of Marxist theory.

-Abrams, M. H. (1999). A glossary of literary terms (7th ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.