Evolution of Marxism

 

Marxism emerged from the 1848 collaboration between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who transformed the study of society into a materialist philosophy. Instead of seeking spiritual explanations, they argued that history is "motored" by the class struggle for economic and political power. This struggle is rooted in the Base, the material means of production, which inevitably determines the Superstructure, the cultural world of ideas, art, and law. This concept of economic determinism suggests that no cultural product is "innocent"; rather, all art is shaped by the economic forces of its time.

In a capitalist system, this drive for profit leads the bourgeoisie to exploit the proletariat by extracting surplus value from their labour. The human consequence of this system is alienation, where workers are separated from their own creativity and humanity. Marx identified this as reification, a process where people become things, viewed merely as "hands" or part of a "labour force" rather than human beings.

These economic realities created a divide in how literature was viewed. The "simplest" or "Vulgar" Marxism of the 1930s assumed a rigid, direct cause-effect relationship where a writer’s class status entirely dictated their work. In contrast, the Engelsian tradition remained more flexible, believing that great art could reflect the "truth of social life" without being overt propaganda. However, under Vladimir Lenin and the Soviet state, a "harder line" emerged known as Socialist Realism, which forced writers to produce idealized, pro-state content and stigmatized experimental authors like James Joyce as "bourgeois".

As the theory evolved, it intersected with Russian Formalism. Critics like Victor Shklovsky and Boris Tomashevsky emphasized literary technique, distinguishing between fabula (the raw sequence of events) and sjuzhet (the artistic plot). While the state eventually suppressed these Formalists, their focus on language influenced thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Roman Jakobson, leading to the idea that the form of a story is just as political as its content.

In the late twentieth century, Louis Althusser moved away from crude economic models toward overdeterminism, the idea that culture is shaped by many factors acting together. This allowed for relative autonomy, where literature has a degree of independence from the economy, only being determined by it "in the last instance". Althusser argued that we live within ideology, a system of myths and images that makes power structures feel "natural". He explained that the state maintains this order through the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA), which uses force like the police and army, and the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), which uses culture and schools to secure internal consent.

This process of securing consent is what Antonio Gramsci called hegemony, where the ruling class makes their world-view seem like "common sense". Althusser described the "trick" of this system as interpellation, where individuals are "hailed" to feel like free agents even as they are being socialized into the status quo. Later, Fredric Jameson expanded this by suggesting that literature possesses a "political unconscious," where the text attempts to repress historical truths that the critic must then uncover.

Today, Marxist critics apply these concepts by looking for the covert (hidden) class conflicts within a text and analyzing the politicisation of literary form. For example, a reading of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night reveals that the festive plot actually reinforces the existing social order: while the aristocracy enjoys romance, the lower-class Malvolio is punished for his social ambition, making the class hierarchy appear "natural and inevitable".