The Essence of Marxist ThoughtThere is no scope in the present context to expound Marxist theory adequately. All that can be done is to stress the aspects of it, the essential concepts, which are relevant to understanding a Marxist approach to the study of literature. For Karl Marx, and those closest to his way ofthinking, all those modes of thought, including literary creativity, are ideological and are products of social and economic existence. Basically Man’s social being determines his consciousness and the material interests of the dominant social class determine how all classes perceive their existence. All forms of culture, therefore, do not exist in an ideal, abstract form but are inseparable from the historical determining social conditions. They exist, in other words, as a superstructure to the basic economic structure of a society. This view was the exact reverse of the Hegelian belief that the world was governed by thought and the application of reason, whether it be human or divine. Philosophising about the world alone was insufficient for Marx; the most important thing was to change it. In The German Ideology (1846), Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote of religion, morality and philosophy as ‘phantoms found in the brains of men’. But in letters which he wrote in the 1890s Engels acknowledged that both he and Marx recognised that art, philosophy and other forms of human consciousness could alter the human condition and had a degree of autonomy. The special status of literature was also recognised by Marx in the Grundrisse . Greek tragedy was for him an anomaly because it seemed to represent a timeless, universal achievement but was actually produced within a society with a structure and ideology which he could no longerconsider valid. How could such a phenomenon continue to give aesthetic pleasure and be regarded as expressing universal truths?