The Literary Importance of E. P. Thompson's Marxism

Abstract

Marxism is one of the many paths not taken by contemporary literary criticism. There are a few widely read Marxist critics (Fredric Jameson comes most immediately to mind). And nearly everyone agrees that Marxism has something to contribute to our understanding of literature. But most contemporary critics tend to tolerate Marxism rather than embrace it. Marxist ideas, it seems, are useful so long as they stay marginal. To readers who approach Marxism through the thicket of (mostly negative) commentary that still keeps it peripheral, it may come as a surprise that E. P. Thompson, a self-described Marxist, makes many of the same points against Marxism found, say, in the work of Northrop Frye and J. Hillis Miller. Thompson's work has its limitations, as I shall point out later in this paper. Nevertheless, he remains an important, if neglected, figure in current thinking about literary criticism. At a time when the attack on Marxism has become a dubious apology for despair, Thompson corrects Marxism without surrendering its trust in historical understanding and political action. He challenges contemporary critics to earn their confidence-really their fear-that history is a flux which we can neither understand nor control. In what follows, after reviewing recent criticisms of Marxism, I show that Thompson, too, is critical of the political cruelty and philosophical naivete of some Marxists. Even so, he remains a Marxist, for reasons I go on to explain in part three. After discussing in the next section what I see-as the shortcomings of his work, I conclude by defending his importance for contemporary literary criticism.