ABSTRACT
Marxist theory rejects the idea that the social class into which we are born determines our superiority or inferiority as human beings. For Marxist theory the socioeconomic systems in which we live do much more than determine who has the most power. Marxist theory suggests that unregulated business profits tend to promote what might be called an ethics of greed, according to which the only virtue, or the only virtue anyone really wants to cultivate, is the virtue of making the most money. Marxist understanding of socioeconomic oppression can be useful even when our primary goal is to use feminist, gay or lesbian, African American, or postcolonial concepts to understand literature. One of the reasons why Marxist theory wants us to reject socioeconomic ideologies that pit individual against individual is that people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder suffer the most damage from those ideologies.
