The German philosopher Karl Marx pioneered Marxism in response to a period of severe industrialization that was changing the social climate of not only Paris and London, in which he spent most of his lifetime residing, but a great portion of Europe. His major works, The German Ideology (1846), The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), and Capital (1867) forged a philosophy for the nineteenth century that has survived into the present due to its open nature (as identified by Derrida) and still relevant criticisms of the historical and current capitalist climate that moves the Western world forward at such an unstoppable rate. In respect to the analysis of literature, Marxisms reliance upon notions of the dialectical (born from the work of G. W. F. Hegel) and its stipulation that literature and culture are "inseparable from the politics of class relations" have profound effects on how literature can be identified as an imperfect mirror reflecting society in such a way as to disseminate the ideological standpoint of capitalism's ruling powers. In doing so literature contributes to society's adherence to particular economic, social and political imperatives that have given birth to and maintain the existence of different classes within society.

Marx sees literature as "a social phenomenon, and as such, it cannot be studied independently of the social relations, the economic forms, and the political realities of the time in which it was written." It is this particular standpoint that contrasts Marxism with the other dominant standpoints for literary analysis that emerged in the nineteenth century - being the New Critics and the Russian Formalists. The New Critics conceived literature as being a medium in which universal or eternal ideas were expressed, which almost echoes the Platonic Theory of Forms. The New Critics belief that universal truths or fields exist that are captured in particular respects by the writing of an age, that despite its socio-political climate remains timeless and without material source, attempts to execute a perfect image of these essentialist truths or ideals without referring to the climate in which the work itself was written. Similarly, the school of Russian Formalism attempted to appeal to an "autonomous realm of aesthetic or formal devices and techniques that act independently of their natural setting in society and history." Marxism, conversely, identifies literature as being intrinsically linked to the material, in respect to the existence of particular class relations and their existence under the surface of the literature specifically.

Society as Portrayed in Marxist Philosophy.

Basically, those with wealth within capitalist society also control the means by which that wealth is accumulated (even actualized). At the risk of sounding trite or reductionist in providing an analogy, the wealthy are the 'puppetmasters'. They pull the strings of the various marionettes which people the various classes (farmer, industrial worker, etc.), who in turn willingly maintain a system which feeds wealth in the direction of those in control, simply in order for the lower classes to survive. There exists a profound distinction, manufactured and maintained by the regime of capitalist society, between the realms of mental and manual labor. Marxism aligns itself with the socialist viewpoint in that it serves as something akin to a counterpoint to the harsh realities and illusory ideological constructs of industrial capitalism - "individual freedom in economic matters, an intractable inequality in the distribution of wealth, severe class differentiation, and brutal poverty for those without property." But more than being delineated as existing specifically as a branch or depiction of socialism, Marxism is a method by which the distinction between the two sociological tenets of capitalism and socialism can be identified. Marxism becomes the lense through which the conflict between the two dogma is viewed, albeit capitalism is seen as being to a significant degree negative and socialism positive. This is achievable in Marxism's focus on the identification of the 'class struggle' and how it effectuates itself within society. Life's progression or continuity is eternally fissured by a contradiction between the existence of a particular ideology of freedom and individualism tempered by a distinction between those with wealth (and therefore power) and those without it. While capitalism and democracy has apparently freed men and women from the barbarity of the feudal society, there seems to be no real difference in that the monarchy or ruling class of nobles has been replaced by an almost Machievellian and enigmatical body of wealthy people with the means to control the new fractured, complex and specialized labor class. This distinction between those at the top and those 'working in the fields' is maintained as it is seemingly the only means by which we can exist in the current ideological climate of individualism and free will. The manner in which Marxism therefore perceives culture is as the modality by which the populace is effectively controlled. Not only this but, as history has proven, the questioning of the specific tenets of or resistance to the capitalist regime can often result in bloody massacre or assassination. The layout of class relations can never be challenged in the form of an armed insurrection without a similar knee-jerk reaction by the economic powers-that-be in the form of a military response to the overt political threat that such violence presents. It is for this reason that Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan identify Marxism as being a "fairly deadly game" in their introduction to Karl Marx's philosophy in Literary Theory: An Anthology. The Marxist critique of capitalism can be seen as the means by which the seeds of eventual revolution are sown, and therefore will not be perceived as being altogether favorable by economic powers, even today. One of the best examples of such reactions by the upper class is the "Red Scare" of the 1950s. Many US citizens lost their livelihood as a result of their actual or perceived affiliation with socialism/communism over capitalism. The lay-out of class relations is maintained by "a combination of police force, law, military power and, most importantly here, by culture.

Culture is perceived within Marxism as being the means by which the 'wool' is effectively 'pulled over our eyes'. It relies upon the specific ideologies that have been ingrained within us since our birth into the world of capitalism. While the term 'ideology' has been refined since Marx's day, the class struggle he identified has been a persistent component of society which relies on particular credos or beliefs that effectively do their best to conceal the true nature of the struggle. The Feudalists believed in notions of "fealty" and "duty" that served as the ideology which maintained the existence of a ruling class and those who served them. Knights, workers, average serfs - everyone was loyal to the ruling class, principally as a result of the Church's insistence that nobles were something akin to the personification of God on Earth. His chosen few given a biological advantage over the rest. Subordination in those times was intrinsically linked with the conception that if you did the work required of you, you'd receive unimaginable rewards in the after-life for your dedication and servitude. Karl Marx identifies a change in the social climate and ideology that's not altogether different from the old feudal process of ensuring production by workers thanks to ideology.

In a capitalist society we are trained "...that it is a gift to be free, to seek one's rewards in a more or less open economy, to strive to get ahead, to compete, to be part of a team, to knuckle under to corporate authority for the sake of a raise, to obey one's boss, etc." Marx used ideology to describe these beliefs and our adherence to them in order to appeal to notions of "liberty", "individualism" and "freedom". Already we notice the paradox emerging. We are identified as being part of a group working under a corporate authority in order to maintain a world in which we possess identity and a sense of autonomy. This is part of the duality to our existence which renders an eternal fissure in the perceived unity of our lives under the banner of capitalism. It is in applying Hegel's "dialectic" that this duality may be understood, and indeed, it was the most influential philosophy in terms of shaping Karl Marx's thinking.

The Hegelian Dialectical.

Basically Hegel's dialectic is a "mode of philosophical analysis that [sees] the world as operating logically in that it [moves] from one premise to another, one idea to its negation or contradiction, and back again, to form a new whole which [contains] both." It is this perception that allows the Marxist to identify both the ideological stance of capitalism and the contradictory existence of its simultaneous paradoxical correlative in society both back then and currently. The main difference being that today's cultural theory identifies a historical development of culture which distinguishes it as sometimes being the site in which one can pause, dislocate and perform an analysis and/or criticism of the system it apparently maintains. What it is important to realize at this stage, however, is an understanding of the relevance of Hegel's dialectic, which even today remains as a persistent means of analyzing the world within literature - a phenomenon or component of contemporary popular (or not so popular) culture.

Dialectic is derived from the Greek word for dialog, that is, "something whose identity contains at least two parts, two interlocutors who depend on each other to maintain the dialog" . In The Science of Logic, Hegel proposes that the main conclusion to be drawn from the dialectic logic is a contradiction or nullification of any assertion made, before an eventually unification of both the opposing constituents. One particular standpoint is posited by one of the dialog's interlocutors, and then it's negation is presented by the other and a mutual composite eventually obtained. It is this model which forms the basis for my earlier assertion that Marxism is a medium by which the contradictions of socialism in comparison with capitalism are made. While Marxism can be identified as allying itself with Socialism in that it casts it positively by performing an often times negative analysis of the various constituents of the capitalist regime, it is more a result of its use of the dialectic that identifies it as a window into the conflict between the two forces. In casting Socialism in a positive light, and capitalism in the negative, Marxism adheres to the essence of the dialectical in that two opposing views are mediated by the existence of the other:

"Taken quite generally, this determination can be taken to mean that what is at first immediate now appears as mediated, related to an other, or that the universal appears as a particular."

According to Hegel, it is through a reciprocal relationship with the other, the opposite or negating concept, that everything is mediated. All things, whether universal or particular, material or spiritual, exist only in contrast and intertwining existence with the negating viewpoint. Obviously we can trace this view to its origins within the Christian ideological standpoint that a realm of the spirit exists apart from the world of nature and of materiality. Not surprisingly, Marx rejected the spiritual component of Hegel's dialectic but preserved the basic methodology. Seeing as the Christian religion maintained the notion of rewards in the after-life for those who lived a life of feudal servitude, Marx could hardly accept nor condone the notion of a transcendent spiritual realm without appealing to the very same ideology maintaining capitalism that he was attempting to critically identify.

Marx felt that dialectics could instead be applied to the movement of history and construction of the capitalist (and therefore socialist as its opposite) regime from the feudal society. As stated earlier, Karl Marx was writing at a time in which the feudal society had been thwarted by a series of democratic revolutions across Europe. Part of capitalism's growth was the increasing specification and segmentation of the labor class. Everything was becoming particularized but still fed the basic lay-out of class relations, albeit a more complex version than that which existed previously. Marx applies Hegelianism to identify the opposition or underlying components of the capitalist regime. Why did the powers that be not recognize the class struggle when describing the population in economic review? It's much more likely that rather than not recognizing the class struggle they conveniently chose not to acknowledge it overtly. Marx realized that those with the power where the ones privileged enough to describe the world exactly how they wished for it to be described, and thus capitalism becomes a self-monitoring system in that it is constantly embodying its own point of view in stipulating the very mode by which it is described.

Empiricism and Ideology.

Marx identifies the process of analysis within political economy as an example of one of the persistent methodologies of our time - empiricism. Empiricism is basically the interpretation of data at face value and is appropriate to the scientific rationalism that emerged as a fundamental component of capitalism. The attraction of Empiricism in the late Renaissance and for those reacting to Romanticism and the Enlightenment, was its concrete perception of the world without appealing to transcendent or theological principles. The Church's authority was now in question with the fall of feudal society. However, to conceive of a concrete reality as self-evident is to ignore the fundamental assertions of the dialectical which so appealed to Karl Marx. For example, he identifies the nature of the concrete in Grundrisse:

"The concrete is concrete because it is a combination of many determinations; i.e.. a unity of diverse elements. In our thought it therefore appears as a process of synthesis, as a result, and not as a starting-point, although it is the real starting-point and, therefore, also the starting-point of observation and conception."

Marx's standpoint is that empiricism serves to conceal what are basically "non-evident relations between things and people" . There are particular things which can be readily witnessed about production and capitalism, such as the generation of wealth by the exchange of goods in a market. This is the beauty of empiricism in that it is basically the superficial examination of appearances and relative "sense data" that maintains capitalism in that it conceals the real, non-evident operations of the regime from view. Marxism focuses on the social aspect of things in that it appeals to a facet of the non-evident components of capitalist functioning - the relationships between people (i.e., the class struggle). Essentially, as stated by Rivkin and Ryan:

"Capitalist wealth, according to Marx, is nothing more than the transmutation of human lives into monetary form."

The truly amazing thing that strikes a reader making an examination of Marxist literature is that once acknowledging the reality of his philosophy, in understanding what he's trying to say, you're struck by the fact that as a society we adhere to this system. People are not only transmuted but their labor is rewarded at the most basic level, which in itself is hardly sufficient in terms of the relative value of human labor time. The means by which we are subjected to or integrated into such a system boggles the mind and exists as a result of what Marx, as stated, identifies as "ideology"; those ruling ideas which are taught to us through a process which "...consists of training in certain practices of self-discipline or certain modes of self-identification."

Slavoj Zizek, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, makes a point of stressing that the nature of the ideology is not simply as a vague notion of underlying truth to a system that sits in place. The danger in making such a false distinction is to identify the ideology in place as being something almost transcendental in quality and so by its very nature immaterial and intangible, when this is in fact almost the opposite of its nature. Remember that Marx dismissed the spiritual and theological for the very reason that it served the ideology in retaining an otherworldliness, an immateriality to something composed of real components - of actions and relations between people. For ideology is particular acts. It is the very act of performing and yet not being aware that you are doing so. It is that very system in place rather than what underlies the system:

"This is probably the fundamental dimension of "ideology": ideology is not simply a "false consciousness," an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as "ideological" - "ideological" is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence - that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals "do not know what they are doing."

It would be erroneous to assume that there was something deeper to capitalism when in fact, more often than not, it's all about the surface of things. The sad reality is that ideology is almost in plain view. Zizek also talks of cynicism as being a recognition of the fact that we are almost laboring under some kind of lie, but in recognizing this we still do nothing to change the situation. Cynicism itself is in fact the observation of the banality and superficiality of the very system in which we find ourselves doing something that we usually are not aware that we are doing. Sadly, cynicism is a recognition that there is a particular ideological system in place but a recognition that does not involve the cynic renouncing such an ideology. The cynic is still retaining the mask of the particular ideology, cynicism itself being an answer by the ruling class to the cynical subversion of the capitalist illusion or depressing awareness of the acts that we perform. Cynicism is an extremely sad form of the very ideology it has come to recognize.

Ideology is a slight-of-hand magic act that we may find particularly wondrous if we were to realize the manner in which it was actually carried out. The trick is for capitalism to have us perform the labor required to maintain it as a system in contradiction to our particular interests or desires. Yet we end up feeling as it were an execution of our own will or sense of self that lead to our carrying out the necessary tasks. The fact is that this free self is an imaginary in that it is a social construct, a product of capitalism's attempts to conceal the class struggle by dictating the means of signification. How can one hope to criticize a system that maintains itself by providing the means by which we perform such an analysis? Even creativity and human subjectivity are swallowed by the monstrous and encapsulating size of the capitalist machine. We are subject to the thoughts and actions programmed into us since our birth and subsequent development within a capitalist Western society. In this manner, as Karl Marx asserts, culture is then a result of capitalism's attempts to instill this program of illusory free will and the creation of an autonomous self into its subjects. Literature, as a component of culture, is therefore a synthesis of ideology resulting from the socio-political machinations of the larger capitalist regime.

Modes of Marxist Literary Criticism.

It is therefore fundamental that Marxist literary criticism attend to the historical, social and economic landscape which constitutes the context of each particular piece of literature which comes under scrutiny. As a particular method for interpretation we find that Marxist criticism argues that literature is in fact a means by which the values of the dominant class are disseminated into popular culture. Literature reflects society and is therefore subject to the fundamental economic reality of that society and those who capitalize on it. In essence, there exists a material basis that dictates the world which literature will be reflecting, and it is thereby predetermined from the offset exactly what literature can realistically say about the culture in which it appears.

Marxist literary criticism is divided into three particular streams, being:

1) Reflectionist, which holds a mirror to the historical world and therefore depicts the realities of a particular moment in history;

2) Cultural Materialism, which focuses on the "sociological dynamics of culture" and what has been identified as "structures of feeling". It basically traces the transformations of focus in respect to particular aspects of the dominant ideology at any given time; and

3) Structuralist Marxist criticism, which seeks to identify the underlying structural principle that is being disseminated beneath the superficial appearance of the literature under scrutiny. In identifying contradictions between the illusion of free will and the realities depicted and their accurate reflection of capitalism, Structural Marxist criticism adheres to Marx's version of the Hegelian dialectic methodology.

The basic weakness inherent in literature and exposed by a Marxist analysis of a particular work is that it seeks to apply a particular ideological coherence and structure to a "contradiction-riven world [it aspires] to represent accurately." Rivkin and Ryan, in concluding their chapter on the basic principles of Marxism, provide an excellent summary of the fundamental aim of a Marxist literary critic in attempting to expose the ideology being disseminated in order to further the capitalist agenda:

"As exercises in coherence, they are incapable of taking into account their own conditions of production in a contradictory class society which cannot be represented coherently or without contradiction. Social contradictions of the kind capitalist culture and ideology conceal are not absorbable into a literary vision of thematic unity, ideological reconciliation, and formal completeness."

This is in itself one of the leading characteristics of Marxist theory in terms of its contribution to the appreciation of literature in contributing to life as it is. While being reflections of the society in which they find themselves, literary works are in themselves imperfect mirrors which cannot reflect the true nature of the object being represented on its surface. The person standing before the mirror is of three dimensions and has a back, and yet, when he faces the mirror he sees a two dimensional reflection that has no obvious back. Similarly, the literary work may not reveal the back, the underlying ideological principle that it is attempting to disseminate, yet the back is a fundamental part of the complete unit. It is not unreachable, it just cannot be immediately perceived. In fact, without the back, there is no person to be reflected just as capitalism cannot exist without ideology, for they are one and the same. The superficial, two-dimensional representation looks like us and may be an exact image of the person looking into it if it is of the height and quality to contain the full human creature, yet it is not the three-dimensional, living, breathing social being that stands before it. How can the mirror hope to reflect the true complexity of the human? In the same manner, literature can only provide the image, the resonating ideological principles are there, the third dimension is somehow represented to a degree, but there are limitations in the modality by which the image of the world is represented. There is no world 'beyond the looking glass' in the philosophy of Karl Marx, just the world and its reflection. The task of Marxist literary criticism is to take the reflection and recognize the world seen within it. Notions of the duality of things can oversimplify this exchange between object and image, and lead to notions of transdimensionality where none exist. It is a wondrous illusion of the real world, but nevertheless, if we reach out to touch it, it is cold, flat and lifeless rather than being a true opposite. Hegelianism results in the final recognition of unity between two logical components of the whole, and in the same light we must recognize that while it seems that there is two, there is only one upon which the other is reflected and reproduced. We are mediated through the image provided by the literary work, but at times we may fail to recognize that what we are seeing is in fact the opposite. Our right becomes left, our left right, and yet we function using the reflection regardless of the true nature of things, and this is the plight of the common man without the power and wealth to move beyond the reflection. He serves the exchange and willingly submits to a cultural construction of who he is. Even if he recognizes that he exists outside the reflected image, what can he do about it? How can he function and acknowledge himself, his identity, his own movements as an exercise of will without seeing them reflected before his own eyes? The true realization of self comes with the knowledge that the mirror has been built by those possessing the wealth, those in power who seek to maintain a distinction between classes that serves their own agenda in gaining the privilege to create the means by which the world is signified and therefore, apparently, realized. There is so much besides what is reflected in the mirror, no matter how large or grand such a surface seems. It is a construction of identity, not the true witness to it.

Bibliography

Rivkin, J., & Ryan, M. (1998). Literary Theory: An Anthology. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Inc, pp. 231-329.

NOTE: All quotes are taken from Rivkin and Ryan and page numbers are therefore identified as being of said volume. Anyone wishing to read further should refer to the anthology's copyright acknowledgments for their source for each paper referred to in this piece.