How the works of Marx influenced modern and postmodern theory of literary criticism?

In literary theory, a Marxist interpretation reads the text as an expression of contemporary class struggle. Literature is not simply a matter of personal expression or taste. It somehow relates to the social and political conditions of the time.

How it relates is of course up for debate. Is the text a mirror of social values? Is it a form of propaganda for the ruling classes? Can literature challenge social norms? These are the questions that preoccupy Marxist literary critics.

In what follows we’ll first sketch out some broad principles of Marxist analysis before turning to one possible reading of Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”

Marx called the economic conditions of life the base or infrastructure. The base includes everything from technology and raw materials to the social organization of the workplace.

This economic base has a powerful effect on the superstructure, Marx’s term for society, culture, and the world of ideas.

Marx sometimes referred to the superstructure as consciousness, the way we think and look at reality. Marx famously said, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Our ability to think for ourselves is limited: our ideas are shaped by the material conditions of life.

Literature, for Marx, belongs to the superstructure (along with law, theology, politics, etc.). The challenge, then, is to see how it is influenced by the economic base.

More recently, the cultural critic Raymond Williams suggested in Marxism and Literature (1977) that every historical time period has competing hegemonies. The dominant hegemony promotes the interests of the ruling classes, the residual hegemony defends the culture and belief system of the previous era, and the emergent hegemony shares revolutionary ideas that may later become the dominant hegemony.

Literature thus reveals to us the spirit of the times, the issues that mattered to people. Literature (and entertainment) is about much more than enjoyment or escapism: it is a manifestation of class struggle.

LABOR-POWER (Marx) 

The abstraction of human labor into something that can be exchanged for money. The relation of labor-power to the actual labor of a private individual is analogous the relation of exchange-value to use-value. The system of labor-power relies on the belief that the laborer chooses freely to enter into a contractual relationship with an employer, who purchases that worker's labor power as a commodity and then owns the goods produced by that worker. However, the worker is exploited insofar as he has no other option: the capitalist owns all the means of production. Also, the capitalist seeks to achieve the highest possible rate of surplus-value, which "depends, in the first place, on the degree of exploitation of labour-power" (747). The capitalist seeks to provide the laborer only enough money to subsist and to produce more laborers (through child-bearing).

MARXIST THEORY 

Marxist theory or Marxist criticism is one of the theories that can be used in literary criticism. This theory is based on the ideologies of Karl Marx, a German philosopher who criticized the inherent injustice in the European class/capitalist system of economics operating in the 19th Century.  Marx viewed history as a series of struggles between classes, in other words, the oppressed and the oppressors.

Class, oppression, power, economy and politics are some of the main elements that should be considered in a Marxist literary criticism. Asking the following questions and analyzing the information that is found from answering these questions will help you to apply the Marxist theory to literature.

· What role does class play in the literary work?

· How does the author analyze class relations?

· What does the author say about oppression?

· Are class conflicts ignored or blamed?

· How do characters overcome oppression?

· Does the work support the economic and social status quo, or does it advocate change?

· Does the work serve as propaganda for the status quo? If so, in what way does it attempt to serve as propaganda?

· Does the work propose some form of utopian vision as a solution to the problems encountered in the work?

· How has the author’s ideologies and background affect the way he views the economy, politics or society?

· How do the time period, social background and culture in which the work was written affect the portrayal of the political, economic, and social forces?

·       The Marxist theory is more concerned with social and political elements of a work than its aesthetic value.

·       Marxist theory can be applied to literature by analyzing the social, economic and political elements such as class division, class struggle, and oppression.