Ah! there's nothing like a little Marxism in the morning!

I've come to the conclusion that I am Marxist-illiterate. It's the only possible explanation for my seeming inability to understand anything that a Marxist critic says.

Okay, maybe I should qualify that: I can't seem to follow the arguments of Marxist literary critics. I'll be reading and find myself thinking 'he's talking about the author here...but I thought we were talking about books. Where did that change?' and other such moments of disorientation. It's as if my brain takes a vacation each time there's a change in example, attention, or focus within a given section.

With other theorists, I can usually see (at least vaguely) where they are going, and can connect what I'm reading at the moment to what came earlier. But with Marxists, I find myself repeatedly unable to follow the shifts. It feels like a series of unconnected paragraphs strung together - I can usually understand what's going on within a given paragraph, but it's relationship to the previous one is a complete mystery.

Hence I take these long, huge pages of notes, hoping to make sense of it in the end.

But it rarely happens.

I always feel like there's something I'm missing - that I've simplified things too much and I'm missing a more subtle argument somehow. Everything I write down feels like soundbites, or just random bits of information that don't cohere around a single (or even multiple) unifying points in the work. Even whole books (and I read two whole books by Marxist theorists last year) seem to evade my intelletual grasp.

Perhaps I'm too deeply indoctrinated into the fascist ideology of capitalism to ever understand!