MARXIST LITERARY THEORY / MARXIST THEORY / MARXIST CRITICISM

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Marxist cultural theory locates all forms of art within existing social conditions of economics and
politics, even as it approaches the art-object as an important ‘element’ within social relations through
which particular meanings are standardized and held up as ‘good taste’ in order to marginalize and
ignore other meanings. Marxism sees this battle over meaning as reflecting a battle between
dominant and oppressed sections of society. As a result, Marxist theory pays attention to the modes
through which literature and art actively help maintain power relations at the cost of the weak.

Marxist thinking has been influential in cultural theory, anthropology, history and literary criticism. It
is one of the most political forms of cultural theory because (1) it links art with actual conditions
within a particular culture and (2) it sees forms of art not as some special realm but intimately linked
to the existing power relations within a particular culture. Marxist criticism, therefore, explores power
relations embedded and concealed in cultural texts.

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Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist and political thinker who wrote such works as Das
Kapital, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, The Grundrisse, and perhaps the most
famously for the casual viewers, The Communist’ Manifesto.

Marx argued that all societies throughout history could be viewed as a struggle between two different
groups with differing amounts of power. The examples given by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the
opening section of the Communist’ Manifesto are

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“Free man and slave, Patrician and Plebeian, Lord and Serf, Guild-Master and Journeyman, in a word,
Oppressor and Oppressed” (Marx and Engels, 1848).

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The argument here is that, in any given society, wherever it lies placed in space and time, there is an
imbalance of power. One group, usually smaller, tends to hold a lot more power than one other,
much larger group.

In an Industrial Society argued Marx, this manifest itself as a division between THE BOURGEOISIE (or
the ruling class) and THE PROLETARIAT (or the working class). the former have a much larger amount
of economic capital which, due to the way that our society is structured, tends to directly relate to
power. But what does any of this have to do with literature or culture more generally?

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Marx viewed these power relationships as as defining principle of any given society. He called these
underlying power structures, THE ECONOMIC BASE.

Everything else he referred to as that’s society’s superstructure. Elements of superstructure might

include the form of politics that that society’s politics takes, it might include its religious or spiritual
thinking, it might include its systems of law, but the thing that we’ll be focusing on mostly today, is its
culture.

Marx suggested that each of these superstructural elements tends to reflect, and in some cases
legitimate, the economic base or the power relationship lying beneath that society. The consideration
of how cultural texts might be influenced by the economic base of a society, those underlying power
relationship, is the central activity of any Marxist critique of literature or culture more generally.

In order to start thinking about how culture or, specifically, particular cultural texts might be
influenced by the economic base of a given society. I’d like to start by taking a little look at some of
the stories surrounding King Arthur (flip to slide 6)
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Which were popularized by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the Middle Ages. These narratives were born of
a society in which power was overwhelmingly in the hands of the Lords who had a considerable
amount of control over the Serfs who worked their land. The various tales of King Arthur depict a
chivalrous, benevolent nobility who live and fight not just for themselves but for the protection of all.
Thus, these literary works, (or perhaps most often at the time, verbally communicated) legitimize the
division between Lord and Serf. And they do so by overwhelmingly suggesting that Lord use their
power wisely, and rather than masters, are in fact benevolent protectors of their Serf.

Thus in this heavily simplified example, we can see how the culture of the Middle Ages, specifically in
the cultural texts surrounding King Arthur, might have legitimized the economic base of that time.
Through the communication of a certain ideology, again, is a term introduce by Karl Marx himself as a
way of explaining the narrative and ideas which serve, through the superstructure, to legitimate that
economic base.

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Throughout the religion, law and politics of the middle ages, we again find this similar ideology
propagated. This idea that lord worked for the Serfs in some way by protecting them and providing
for them. When in reality, the relationship between Lord and Serfs was incredibly inequitable and
oppressive. To fast-forward many hundred years, in a similar way there exist narratives within our
own society which legitimized that underlying economic base of neoliberal capitalism.

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The economic structure of neoliberal capitalism essentially revolves around heavily unregulated trade
both between individuals and, more often, between global corporations and incredibly low tax
systems. The fallout of this is being that redistributive systems, such as education and healthcare,
tend to be heavily underfunded. This economic is legitimized by an ideology which tells us of the well-
meaning, entrepreneur who goes on to make the technologies and the industry which will be forge
the future and serve the economic growth. At the same time , we’re often told that government and
states are bad things and that any regulation from those will lead to inefficiency and bloat.

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What we’re simply interested in when taking a Marxist approach to culture, then, is the ways in which
a specific cultural text takes ideas from the world around us, and presents them back to us. We’re
interested in the relationship between the cultural texts and the economic base.

We find the best ways to explaining this theory using an example. So we’d like to wrap up with a piece
of culture which we hope to most people would have seen or read,

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and that is HARRY POTTER. Particularly we wanted to choose Harry Potter because we think it’s a
cultural text which no one can really accuse of being in any way indoctrinary. Although in later books
and films, there are many allusions of War on Terror in the response to Voldemort coming back, in the
early books they come across as fairly politically disengaged. Despite this, we can still undertake a
Marxist reading of Harry Potter in order to interrogate how that particular cultural texts reflects the
economic base of early 1990s neoliberalism.

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So, we might begin very obliquely with the Dursleys. Harry’s uncle, aunt and cousin who take him in
after the death of his parents. Living in the middle class, suburban Privet Drive, they are not
ridiculously wealthy family yet they are comfortably well-off. The Dursleys are portrayed as
destructively self-interested particularly in their hatred for Harry. The Dursleys typify this view of
society: they despise the fact that they have to look after Harry who, ultimately, they see as not their,
responsibility and a drain on their resources.
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However, when Harry leave for Hogwarts. In doing so he becomes a part of an exclusive community
which most prominently, we think, has access to a certain kind of knowledge (magic) that the
Dursleys and their like do not. And, in this, we think we can suggest there is the presence of an
opposing ideology that existed at that time and exists to this day; that is, a certain prejudice towards
vast swathes of society, who they consider through their disagreement with them, to be many times
less clever than themselves. Throughout the books and films, the muggles are portrayed as being
fairly simple in contrast to the Wizarding World. In fact, they can’t even be trusted to know that the
Wizarding World exists, something we’ve never particularly given reason for to my knowledge.

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Thus, even in trying to critique early 1990s, Harry Potter supports a different ideology, namely a sort
of intellectual elitism. In this, we can see how a Marxist Literary Criticism approach to understanding
culture can allow us to explore the relationship between that economic base and particular piece of
culture. It allows us to look beyond the ideas of semiotic or phenomenology, which very much looked
at how a cultural makes meaning, to look at what the meaning its communicating are and how those
relate to the world around them. Marxist Literary Criticism allows us to acknowledge the existence of
ideology within a cultural text, whether its placed there intentionally or not, and, by extension, allows
us to to posit what that cultural text might say about the society that produced it.

Marx saw much of a society’s superstructure as a reflection of that underlying economic base. When
we undertake a Marxist Literary Criticism approach to a piece of culture, the, we’re fundamentally
viewing a piece of culture as a piece of evidence about the society that produced it, and we’re taking
apart that piece of evidence to explore what the power relationships in a given society might have
been.