Does anyone still read this stuff?
When the Soviet Union—the world's first Marxist state—fell in 1991, Marxism was deader than disco. But when the world economy hit the fan in 2008, Marxism as a political program came back from the grave. Marxists like David Harvey made headlines explaining how capitalism had always been a bad thing. And anybody remember a little thing called Occupy Wall Street?
There's a difference between Marxism as a critique (what are the world's socioeconomic problems?) and Marxism as a program (how should the world be run?). These days, Marxist literary theory—which is on the critique side—pretty much tries to keep its louder, older brother—Marxism as a program—out of sight. In the work of contemporary critics like Frederic Jameson and Franco Moretti, Marxism actually looks pretty respectable—even (gasp) bourgeois. 21st-century Marxist professors don't talk too much about workers, or even about class struggle.
In fact, some of the best Marxist literary theory often has very little to do with Marxism as an explicit political program. Marx's ideas have influenced a lot of other kinds of theory: check out the attention to society and power structures in feminism, post-colonialism, and queer theory, for example. Or, for something a little different, check out the connection between Marxism and psychoanalysis in in Frederic Jameson or Slavoj Žižek.
These days, even the creaky old 19th-century theory has got with the times. Scholars like Franco Moretti are now using computer visualizations to do "distance reading"—that is, looking at big patterns across hundreds of texts. That's what Marx wanted all along: to see literature as part of much bigger historical phenomena.
Now, to be sure, most Marxists will still argue that to get the most out of Marxist literary theory, you have to believe in Communism, even if it's not exactly a requirement.
We'll let you make your own minds up.