Excerpt from Stephen Bonnycastles In Search of Authority

Marxist criticism, like feminist criticism, is essentially political. Karl Marx was keenly
interested in how certain groups or classes in society acquire and keep power, and Marxist
criticism pays a lot of attention to the social structures that allocate power to different groups in
society. Marxist critics often judge literature by how it represents the main struggles for power
going on at the time it was written, and by how it may influence those struggles, through
changing readers minds about key issues. Marxists often applaud works of literature that seem
likely to have the social or political results they desire.
Marxism: The Basic Theory
Marxism is fundamentally concerned with human freedom and solidarity; its main theme
can be expressed as how we can wrest a realm of freedom from a realm of necessity. Marx said
that the achievement of freedom is a restoration of the human world to man himself. The
meaning of these statements is that in most social and economic situations the majority of people
find themselves oppressed, and forced to behave in ways that they dont like, for not very good
reasons. Some of these oppressing necessities (such as the need to work at alienating jobs) can,
through honesty, reasonableness, and cooperation, be transformed into freedoms (for example,
the opportunity to work at satisfying jobs), and groups of people can choose to make their
communal life as rewarding and productive as possible. Marxs hope for a good society can be
seen in the famous formula about how to decide how much individuals will work and how much
they will be paid: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
Marxism is built on a theory about progress in history. Marx believed that economic
factors determine the important values and practices in a culture, and that most economic systems
divert huge amounts of wealth from an exploited class to a privileged group of people. In the
feudal system of the Middle Ages, the aristocracy owned the land that was the basis for
agricultural production, and that class was thus able to take and use much of the wealth produced
by the work of the farm laborers. During the industrial revolution, the new class of town- and
city-based (or bourgeois) capitalists became ablethough it was a slow processto dominate
the aristocracy because the main basis for creating wealth was no longer land, but industrial
production. Bourgeois capitalists caused a new exploited class to come into being: the industrial
laborers, or proletariat. Marx predicted in the 19th century that, because of inexorable economic
processes, the capitalists would become fewer and fewer, while the proletariat became larger and
larger. Eventually, he said, this would lead to open conflict between the two classes, which the
proletariat, because of their overwhelming numbers, would win. Following their victory, the
proletariat would take control of the means of production, and use those means to create a good
society, in which justice and fairness would replace privilege and exploitation. In this society,
which looks quite like the Christian idea of the new Jerusalem or the just city, there would be
economic and social cooperation, and, as much as possible, individuals would feel free and
fulfillednot only in their work, but also in their families and friendships.
With the spread of socialism after Marxs death, a split developed between those who
believed that socialism could be achieved through peaceful, evolutionary means, and those who
thought that violent revolution was essential to creating the new society. The latter group
triumphed in Russia in 1917 and established communism as one form of Marxist socialism; but
Marxist influence is also clear and strong in the creation of the welfare state (with socialized
medicine and unemployment insurance, for instance) and in the trade union movement.
Although Marxs aspirations have borne valuable fruit in actual social changes, a number
of his key theories have been disconfirmed or discredited by historical developments. In the
West, capitalists have not become fewer and fewer, and driven more and more of their
competitors into the proletariat, thus paving the way to revolution. Instead, a substantial and
materially well-rewarded middle class has prospered, and the actual living conditions of workers
in many capitalist countries have improved over the last fifty years. In the 1980s the centrally

planned economies f the Soviet Union and the communist east-bloc countries in Europe have
done poorly at meeting the real needs of their peoples, and rule by one-party systems have been
massively rejected. Finally, Marxist revolutionary socialism has not led to the abolishment of
privilege or the withering away of the state, as Marx predicted; on the contrary, most
communist countries have fostered privileged elites and sprawling, inefficient government
bureaucracies.
In the West, most people familiar with Marxism are critical of it because (1) in the past
forty years, communist countries have been seen as the enemy; (2) the results of Marxism in
Russia, China, and elsewhere do not look attractive (although it is difficult to make reliable
comparisons between life in the East and the West), and (3) the unfulfilled predictions
mentioned in the previous paragraph make Marxism seem flawed. Still, if we want to discover
what is best in Marxist literary criticism, we do need to appreciate Marxs fundamental devotion
to humane values and to the development of community life.
Why Marxist Literary Criticism is Worth Our Attention
For Marxists a work of literature does not have its meaning on its own. The work is
seen as an expression of existing ideologies and class conflicts, and those conflicts form part of
an enormous historical process emerging in feudal times and reaching far into the future. So to
understand Hamlet in Marxist terms, you have to know about Shakespeares times, the class
conflicts present then, and how that period fits into the slow process of cultural and economic
development over the past thousand years. While these questions are too big for most people,
they are also intriguing and, in their scale, awe-inspiring.
Another aspect of the large scale of Marxist literary criticism is that it places the study of
literature in the context of important social questions. The feeling of this context may be
suggested by some of the following issues: What do you think of a world in which some people
become rich by manufacturing hydrogen bombs and other instruments of war, while one-fifth of
the worlds population (one billion people) have no proper access to clean water and have a life
expectancy of less than 45 years? Or, Every work of culture is also a work of barbarism
meaning that for every person who is able to spend five hours a day reading literature there are
another ten who are illiterate and twenty more who never read anything more complicated than a
comic book or a newspaper article. Given the existence of pressing social issues as well as class
systems that tend to restrict the availability of high culture to members of the upper-middle
class, we need to ask hard questions about why we should pay attention to literature at all. Any
particular individual might conclude that he or she did not feel justified in spending a lot of time
on literature, or, on the other hand, it might seem a socially responsible activity because it makes
us more aware of how our actual social practices contribute to creating the kind of society we live
in. How, we might ask, does giving grades for literature courses create a class system within the
university?
There is an unconscious hostility to some Marxist ideas in most students, especially if
they are conscious of trying to improve themselves. One way to measure how much you are
improving is to see how you are rising on the social scale; and if you feel you have moved
yourself up to a new level, that is a clear indication of success. But this measuring stick entails a
class system, with many of the unattractive features inherent in such a system, such as
competition, and the victory of the winner being paid for by the suffering of the loser.