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).