eing, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. . . . Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what h thinks o himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production (Marx, Preface 775).
The logical extension of that analysis is that cultural artifacts are nothing so much as social constructions, having been conditioned by the inputs of social norms, and for that exact reason are subject to scrutiny through the prism of social analysis. Indeed, it follows that it is the critic who--like Marx--has abstracted from and identified the sociocultural inputs as decisive in the pattern of ideas and the narrative/poetical strategies for developing them who is uniquely positioned to explain meaning.
Marx's utopian advocacy of the coming dictatorship of the unchained proletariat as the solution to the problems explicated by an understanding of meaning is outside the scope of this research. What makes Marxist theory relevant to criticism is its highly structured approach to analysis, which is always and everywhere, in terms of the class warfare implicated by the skewed structure of bourgeois industrial society in particular, but also of the evolution of society, in particular as regards the clarification and solidification of its relations of power, through history more generally. Accordingly, in the Grundrisse, Marx analyzes the full artistic flowering of the ancient Greeks and the Shakespearean age as superior on account of their innovative and developmental character in a context of "unripe social conditions":
[C]ertain significant forms within the realm of the arts are possible only at an undeveloped stage of artistic development. . . . As soon as they have b...