Marxist criticism has much in common with New Historicism: both make the claim
that a text cannot exist in a vacuum but that, in order to fully understand
a text in all it complexity and on all of its levels, one must take into account
the social, political, historical, and cultural implications of the society
from which the text comes and in which it
exists; the most prominent difference between Marxist Criticism and New Historicism
is that Marxist Criticism focuses on class struggle to a degree that New Historicism
does not. --Melissa
Marx - The German Ideology:
The ruling class not only controls the material force of society, but also the
intellectual force, making their ideas the dominate ideas of society; the key
to their success then is representing their interests as the common interest
of the society as a whole, for they must retain the support of the lower classes
in order to maintain their control. --Jerry
(Rivkin and Ryan, "Starting withZero")
Marx believed that culture is an instrument of social control among other instruments
such as police and
military force; in his work The German Ideology, he writes, "the
ideas of the ruling class are . . . the
ruling ideas"; however, this statement taken at face value would oversimplify
the issue of culture within
ideology; as Rivkin and Ryan propose, "culture can be critical"; literary
history presents multiple examples
of literature being reflective of the ruling regime: for instance, regarding
the subversive reaction to the demands of Russian Marxists that all the arts
conform to the single doctrine of Social Realism, a different kind of Soviet
literature emerged, which disagreed with the nature of human beings as presented
in official ideology, and attempted to subvert the communist reality by creating
anti-utopian novels (works by writers Zamyatin, Platonov, Bulgakov).