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Marxism & Literature Sarah Lanigan 20/01/03 Marx's primary insight is that our economic being has primacy over our cultural consciousness. Our ideas are neither innate nor revealed but are the product of our social economic activity. For Marx, history is not be understood as the progression of a series of ideas as Hegel argued, but as the record of class struggle. Class struggle pits different classes against each other to decide how surplus labour will be allocated. A simple Marxist analysis will attempt to read a literary text as a representation of an already existing class struggle. Thus one might read Hamlet as an account of the birth of the individual bourgeois consciousness which the transition from feudalism to capitalism was bringing into being. These forms of analysis suffer from a fundamental defect in Marx's analysis of society into forces of production and relations of production. Whenever you go to a force...

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