Karl Marx was the founder of the thought behind Marxism, hence the name. venerable founder of Marx U. Marx was a 19th-century bourgeois academic. Marx was exiled from Germany and he progressed his philosophy and ideas out of Britain and France.
Marxism explores the the power struggle: rich versus poor, owners versus workers. And when we say it's all about the power struggle, we mean it's all about the power struggle. Marx included Literature in this as well; the power struggle plays out in every novel, poem, movie, song, whatever.
That means, according to Marxists, that anytime you write, you're advancing your cause.
According to Marxists, every story tells us something about the world—and about which side the author is on. The goal of the Marxist critic is to figure out what that is.
Why Should Readers Care?
Ever wondered why a rhyme scheme is ABBA ABBA? That the image of a rose appears three times? That the hero gets rich, or the heroine gets married? Marx says that literature is directly connected to real life and it can be proven. More than any other literary theory, Marxism tries to explain exactly what that book has to do with the real world.
Marxism takes the text out of a vacuum. If New Criticism is all about the text and nothing but the text, Marxism is all about the context.
Marxists are interested in money, food, and material goods above all else. That means that they read texts to see how those texts depict material and socioeconomic reality; it also means that they read texts to see how material and socioeconomic reality of the author and the author's time actually shaped those texts in the first place.
What does is really have to do with literature?
You have to understand a big, basic distinction first.
Marxists call the read world… the Real.
They call the world of ideas… Ideology. (They're trying to keep it simple, we guess.)
The novel you're holding isn't a free play of ideas, or an inspired vision from on high, or a… well, you get the idea. It's an ideological reflection of the real world.
Boom. Knowledge Bomb! THEORY.
Simple as this may seem, Marxists will tell you it's totally deep when you get into it. For example: ever hear of a little thing called the realist novel? Marxists are here to tell you that it's totally a bourgeois genre.
It's a recent invention that reflects the world we live in, a world that came about only after the French and Industrial Revolutions. Marxism suggests that a big defining feature of the realist novel is its focus on an individual hero or heroine. It's the novelist's way of showing the triumph of the individual—and that just happens to be a basic belief of capitalism.
We're used to thinking of a book-length story focusing on an interesting character or two as just something totally natural, but Marxists are here to show us that it's actually a recent invention. Think Twilight would exist if the French king hadn't been beheaded, and the English hadn't built factories? Not so, say the Marxists.
Shmoop Editorial Team. (2008, November 11). Marxism. Retrieved August 2, 2018, from https://www.shmoop.com/marxism/