Hegemony, Marxism, and all that fun stuff.

I just want to start off by saying: After having read the Marxist perspective on Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, I'm wondering when all of the exploited proletariat elves and reindeer are going to throw off the greedy, oppressive yoke of that fat capitalist and establish a truly egalitarian system for redistribution of labor and presents.
I Kid.

Gramsci's idea of Hegemony is an interesting one. A group's hegemony doesn't necessarily mean it is tangibly in power, but it's actions define reality. I think American political pandering gives the perfect example of Gramsci's hegemony, whichever voting block is the biggest and most desirable has the power. Today, we have a baby boomer hegemony, tomorrow, Gen X or our generation. Since the baby boomer hegemony is so pronounced, government policy and social action is based on their beliefs. In recent years, the boomer hegemony has made issues such as social security and health care the biggest domestic issues as a result of the aging of this hegemonic voting block.

I think the pattern of hegemonic change is what keeps capitalism alive. Marx predicted that capitalism would die out quickly (150 years ago), but it's still going strong (sort of) in most of the western world. The explanation for this is as hegemonies shift, so do class alliances and interactions. As the worker's flex their hegemonic muscle, they morph into something other than the working class (think of the Orwellian pigs). Class interested change with power, and soon enough a group that was typically working class is now middle class or capitalists.

So what does a Marxist approach have to do with literature? I think to answer that, I have to consider what we've been talking about regarding genres. The way we classify and interpret something is what it becomes (remember? poem v. assignment). Post-Karl, literature has undergone a Marxist revolution, associating this new system of belief, or creating a response. To say that Marx was an important figure in history, but has nothing to do with anything else is shortsighted, because believers in the Marxist theory took that ideology into everything else they did.