Marxist criticism, in its diverse forms, grounds its theory and practice on the economic and cultural theory of Karl Marx (1818–83) and his fellow-thinker Friedrich Engels (1820–95), and especially on the following claims:
1. In the last analysis, the evolving history of humankind, 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. 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 particular sense perceptions. 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, sex, nationality, 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 era of capitalist economic organization that emerged in the West during the eighteenth century, the reigning ideology incorporates the interests of the dominant and exploitative class, the “bourgeoisie,” who own the means of production and distribution, as opposed to the “proletariat,” or wage-earning working class. This ideology, it is claimed, to those who live in and with it, 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, beliefs, and practices of the present era—including religion, morality, philosophy, politics, and the legal system, as well as (although 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 decried as “vulgar Marxism” analyzed a “bourgeois” literary work as in direct correlation with the present stage of the class struggle and demanded that such works be replaced by a “social realism” that would represent the true reality and progressive forces of our time; in practice, this 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, one of the most widely influential of Marxist critics, represents such 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 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 great 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,” establish 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. Adorno and Horkheimer attempted, after World War II, to explain “why humanity, instead of entering into a truly human condition” (as Marxists had predicted) “is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.” See the entry critique, and refer to The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (1982), and for an authoritative history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (1996).
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 that 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, Brecht asserts, 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 cooperation 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 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. (See aestheticism.) 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 the 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.” (Benjamin’s writings are available in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4 vols., 2002–04. Useful collections of essays by the Marxist critics Lukács, Brecht, Adorno, and Horkheimer are R. Taylor, ed., Aesthetics and Politics, 1977; and Roger S. Gottlieb, ed., An Anthology of Western Marxism: From Lukács and Gramsci to Socialist-Feminism, 1989.)
The second half of the twentieth century witnessed 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, 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 nonideological and distinctively artistic determinants of literary structures and values.
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 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 general nature of ideology, Althusser opposes its definition as simply “false consciousness.” He declares instead that the ideology of each mode of state apparatus is different, and operates by means of a 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, however, in every instance serve the ultimate interests of the ruling class. (See discourse and subject under poststructuralism.) Althusser affirms, furthermore, that a great work of literature 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 inherent ideology makes it impossible to say it. Combining Marxism and Freudianism, Macherey asserts that 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.
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 claim that culture is a disguised “reflection” of the material base with the concept that the relationship 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 views so pervasive that the subordinate classes unwittingly accept and participate in their own oppression. The concept of hegemony, unlike the classical Marxist conception of ideology, implies an openness to negotiation and exchange, as well as conflict, between classes, and so refashions Marxist categories to fit a modern, post-industrial society in which diverse concepts and ideas, apart from “modes of production,” play a leading role. Another appealing feature of Gramsci’s thought to recent theorists is his emphasis on the role of intellectuals and opinion makers in helping people understand how they can effect their own transformation. Especially since Gramsci’s prison writings began to be translated into English in 1971, they have had a strong influence on literary and social critics such as Terry Eagleton in England and Fredric Jameson and Edward Said in America, who argue for the power of literary culture to intervene in and transform existing economic and political arrangements and activities. (See Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, trans. William Boelhower, 1985; David Forgacs, ed., The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935, 2000; Chantal Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory, 1979.)
Gramsci’s writings also inspired a number of post-Marxist thinkers, who sought to adapt Marxism to poststructural discourse. Among these was a leader of the British Cultural Studies movement, Stuart Hall. (See cultural studies, also cultural materialism under the entry new historicism.) Hall insisted that ideology must not be considered a “false consciousness” or kind of concealment, but rather as a multifaceted force in the struggle for cultural power, carried on in the mode of the production of meaning. All “meaning,” Hall said, “is always a social production, a practice. The world has to be made to mean.” (See Hall, “The Recovery of ‘Ideology,’” in Michael Gurevitch and others, eds., Culture, Society and the Media, 1982.)
Also strongly influenced by Gramsci were Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) argued for an understanding of society grounded, not in economic determinism, but in the nature of language. Adapting the linguistic view of Ferdinand de Saussure that the identity of a sign and of its significance was not intrinsic, but determined by its position in a differential system, they argued that such “unfixity” was “the condition of every social identity,” so that the place of power in a society can be legitimately occupied by anyone or any group. With the aid of Sausserian language theory, Laclau and Mouffe propose a view of society that, instead of being strictly determined by modes of production and the laws of economics, is open to innovation, transformation, and self-invention. (For Saussure’s linguistic theory, see under linguistics in literary criticism and semiotics. For post-Marxist theory in general, refer to Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity, 2002, pp. 70–141.)
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 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 solely 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 Marxist critics. In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), Jameson expressly adapts to his 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 a mode similar to Macherey, Jameson affirms that 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.”
From- A Glossary of Literary Terms - M. H. Abrams
MARXISM
(From Norton Anthology)
From ancient times, literature and the arts have portrayed, and criticism and
theory have discussed, differences in people's social class and history. But
with the spread and maturation of capitalism through its various stages, economic and other disparities have more visibly polarized wealthy and poor
classes, city residents and ghetto dwellers, inhabitants of the first and third
worlds, whites and people of color, men and women. Class formations, class
consciousness, and class tensions form part of the historical experience of
modernization, and theory and criticism have been grappling with them and
related issues for several centuries now.
Many of the current concepts, terms, and issues related to social class
derive from Marxist criticism, a diverse and influential source for literary and
cultural theory that stems from the work of the nineteenth-century German
philosopher and economist Karl Marx. One of its grounding concepts is
Marx's theory of "modes of production." According to Marx, human history
is divided into seven successive historical modes of production-tribal
hordes, Neolithic kinship societies, oriental despotism, ancient slave holding
societies, feudalism, capitalism, and communism. Class conflict within a
specific mode of production follows a basic overall pattern. The capitalist or
bourgeois mode of our time has been characterized mainly by the conflict
between the industrial working class (the proletariat, or labor) and the owners
and manipulators of the means of production (the bourgeoisie). Other
classes, including the unemployed and criminals (the lumpenproletariat) as
well as the dwindling aristocracy, watch this conflict from the historical side lines. Sooner or later, Marx predicted, international labor· will win and the
communist mode of production will emerge triumphant, eventually leading
to a society free from rampant inequalities, exploitation, and class struggle.
According to Marxist theory, the socioeconomic elements of society constitute
its base (or foundation), while its cultural spheres---":specifically its
politics, law, religion, philosophy; and arts~compose its superstructure. Ideology
consists of the ideas, beliefs, forms, and values of the ruling class that
circulate through all the cultural spheres. Members of the working class who
ascribe to bourgeois ideas 'and':values exhibit "false· consciousness," since
such values ignore the socioeconomic realities of their. own working-class
lives. Hegemony designates· the continuous ·ideological domination· of all
classes by the ruling class through . such nonviolent . stabilizing " and
consensus-building institutions as' church, school, family, the media, the
mainstream arts, trade unions, business interests, and techno-scientific establishments.
These institutions are what the celebrated Marxist theorist Louis
Althusser calls "Ideological State' Apparatuses" (ISAs): they manage social
instability and conflict to ·impose and maintain hegemonic order; working
for the most part outside of official state power.
Culture and the arts ,in the Marxist view are neither· innocent entertainment
nor independent of social forces; they play a.significant role in transmitting
ideology and shoring up the hegemonic order. This is not to say that
artists and intellectuals are merely mouthpieces of the dominant social class,
because many explicitly protest the ruling systems' and implicitly address
their contradictions and shortcomings. The ideological orientations of a literary
work can be quite complicated: a text often contains mixed and contradictory
messages that reflect its broad social milieu rather than its author's
personal philosophy. From a Marxist perspective, artistic works frequently
present fugitive, alternative, and counter-hegemonic images sometimes suggesting liberatory possibilities and lending them a socially critical undertone.
Viewed from the vantage point of stylistics (the branch of linguistics that
analyzes literary style),· the conflicts of classes and groups in society produce
what Bakhtin famously called' "heteroglossia"-that is; the complex stratification
of a language like English into different dialects; generational slangs,
professional argots, speech genres', group codes, literary genres,.and class
mannerisms. Many novels (for example, James Joyce's· Ulysses) ..incorporate
such social conflicts in the form of heteroglot discourse, a carnivalization of
different languages that revolt against official style. '.
With the rise of consumer and multinational capitalism,- many have found
Karl Marx's concepts of the commodity, Commodity fetishism, and commodification
increasingly useful for understanding culture and society, and thus
the·terms often appear in the' writings of contemporary critics and theorists.
Commodities are goods' '·or services produced· primarily for monetary
exchange and 'profit-a carpenter may, for example,' build a· table ta sell, not
to use. For him, or her, this commodity has exchange value; 'not, use value.
Labor itself has come to' be bought· and sold in a money economy; rather
than being applied by isolated.workers to the production of goods J~r personal
use, it is more typically used in the service of an'other to 'earn and then
exchange money for items necessary for subsistence. The fetishism' of the
commodity' describes both our fascination' as we· stand before a glittering
array of products in a store and our forgetting the paid labor of workers that went into the products. This displacement of use value from the commodity-its
transformation into cash exchange-results 'in the alienation of
workers from their own labor: carpenters in the factory care' little about the
tables they assemble. Moreover, the extraction of profit· by owners from their
workers' labor results in exploitation, which is a key element of all commodity
exchange. The term commodification names this whole accelerating phenomenon
of producing goods and services not· for their use value but their
exchange value, a phenomenon that threatens to permeate every sphere of
life in our time. Marxist critics complain that commodification promotes
reification, the tendency to view people and human' relations as things or
objects with price tags. In the arts, for instance, commodification leads artists
to hawk their works anxiously to gain profits in an impersonal, competitive
market, and it has positioned critics as the hired advisers to moneyed collectors.
Observing this process, theorists have begun to wonder if criticism
and the arts can any longer possess a socially critical dimension.
Indeed, contemporary Marxist critics and cultural studies scholars (who
are indebted to Marxism) increasingly worry about the co-optation by the
market (and the media) of every form of resistance, ranging across the arts
and popular culture. If outrageous radical vanguard movements such as surrealism
and punk can become profitable commodities, is opposition to
hegemony possible? The agencies of commodification and hegemonic incorporation
threaten to defuse the radical force of all subversive artistic practices,
transforming them into hot news stories and merchandise destined for
the market economy. Marxist criticism and cultural studies frequently aim
their critical inquiries at this system and its dynamics.
Base and Superstructure
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces.
The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite form of social consciousness.
The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general.
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
At a certain stage in their development the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto.
From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.
With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.
In considering such transformations, a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the material conditions of production, which can be determined with
the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical – in short ideological – forms in which men become conscious of the conflict and fight it out.
... We do not judge a period of transformation by its consciousness; on the contrary this consciousness must itself be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflicts between the social productive forces and the relations of production.
In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic foundation of society
[Karl Marx: from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy].
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