Is a term, employed by the British neo-Marxist critic Raymond Williams, which has been adopted by a number of other British scholars, especially those concerned with the literature of the Renaissance, to indicate the Marxist orientation of their mode of new historicism - Marxist in that they retain a version of Marx's view of cultural phenomena as a "superstructure" which in the last analysis, is determined by the "material" (that is, economic) "base". They insist that, whatever the "textuality" of history, a culture and its literary products are always to an important degree conditioned by the material forces and relations of production in their historical era. They are particularly interested in the political significance, and especially the subversive aspects and effects, of a literary text, not only in its own time, but also in later versions that have been revised for the theatre and the cinema. Cultural materialists stress that their criticism is itself oriented toward political "intervention" in their own era, in an express "commitment", as Jonathan Dollimore and Allan Sinfield have put it, "to the transformation of a social order which exploits people on grounds of race, gender and class". (Foreword to Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Criticism).'
Similar views are expressed by those American exponents of the new literary history who are political activists: indeed, some of them claim that if new historicists limit themselves to analysing examples of class dominance and exploitation in literary texts, but stop short of a commitment to remake the present social order, they have been co-opted into "complicity" with the formalist literary criticism that they set out to displace.
