Human Liberalism vs. Marxism

This past week, it has been interesting reading about Marxism right after the lectures and readings on Liberal Humanism. The two theories most definitely differ in many ways. A liberal humanist perspective says that we should not look at the text from any angle, but we should just look into the text itself to find its meanings. A Marxist view says that we should look at a text by understanding where the author ranks in society, and what is going on in society at the time the text was written. This distinct definition between the two theories shows how Marxism challenges Liberal Humanism. The idea that we should look at literature this way, comes from the tenants of Liberal Humanism. The second tenant says that the literary text contains meaning within itself. Liberal humanist believe that the reader should not be looking to any outside source to find the meaning of the text. When reading a text, you should not even try to figure out what the author was trying to convey, you should just look at what the actual text is saying.
In Marxism, you should investigate many things before trying to understand the text. Marxists look at the world around them and try to relate the text to the society that they live in. They look for class structures and how they affect the society. Also, they find out the social status of the actual author. If the author is a poor man, and in a lower class in society, the Marxist view will look at the text much differently than if the author was a rich man. They try to understand the text by understanding what was going on in the authors’ life and the society around him or her. Then, once that has been evaluated, they look to themselves and try to relate the text to their own society.
Another tenant I found that interested me was the fourth tenant: human nature does not change; it is constant. In Marxism, the point of most of the literature is to change the way that humans tend to act. The view shows humans changing for the better of the society. Change from the norm would be good in a Marxist view because then the infrastructure of society would be changed. Liberal Humanists say that human nature cannot change, and therefore neither could social classes. There will always be the rich, and there will always be the poor. In an ideal communist society, there would be no classes; everyone would get as much out of society as they put into society.
I found that overall, Liberal Humanism is much more concrete than Marxism. You do not need a society to look at a text through the Liberal Humanist view, and you do not need anything other than the text to support your opinions on the text. With Marxism, the ideas are much more abstract. The reader needs to be able to understand the social classes and the society that they live in and what the author lived in. As I go on in my studies, I am interested to find if any other theories will be able to relate themselves to Liberal Humanism instead of conflicting with it as Marxism does.