Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) Quote 1
The sum total of […] relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary their social being that determines their consciousness.
How you earn a living determines how you think—and not vice-versa. Besides putting career counselors out of work, this theory also tries to put literature in its place. According to Marx and Engels, the way you write literature is also determined by your socioeconomic status, because it's your socioeconomic status that determines how you think.
Literature, in this model, is an expression of the author's social and economic conditioning, and it reflects back on the big social and economic forces Marx and Engels think shape history. Even Harry Potter, for these guys, is something that has been shaped by class struggle and the means of production.
Quote :A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) Quote 2
With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.
One thing you've got to know about capitalism: it's always changing. When those changes come (like the Civil Rights Act or the iPhone 7), ideology changes with them. And when ideology changes, guess what else changes? That's right: literature.
Except: according to Marx and Engels, economic changes can be studied precisely, because economics is a science. (That's what they say, anyway.) But changes in literature? That's tougher. Studying changes is literature is more of an art than a science, because the variables are hard to pin down. It can get pretty subjective, because that's just how literature rolls.
And that's why there are so many literary theories, right? Well, Marxism has a theory about that, too. Read on…