For more recent Marxist critics, however, such “vulgar”` insistence that literature is absolutely determined by the economic base is abandoned in favor of a more complicated idea of how literature relates to economic formations. Rather than simply “reflecting” the values that support capitalism, Marxist critics argue, literature does something more complicated. According to Pierre Macheray, literature doesn’t reflect either the economic base or other ideology, but rather it works on existing ideologies and transforms them, giving these ideologies new shape and structure; literature in Macheray’s view is thus distinct from, distant from, other forms of ideology (like religious ideology), and thus can provide insights into how ideologies are structured, and what their limits are. This view is also followed by Georg Lukacs, who argues that Marxist literary criticism should look at a work of literature in terms of the ideological structure(s) of which it is a part, but which it transforms in its art.
For other Marxists, including Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Louis Althusser, literature works the way any ideology does, by signifying the imaginary ways in which people perceive the real world; literature uses language to signify what it feels like to live in particular conditions, rather than using language to give a rational analysis of those conditions. Thus literature helps to create experience, not just reflect it. As a kind of ideology, literature for these critics is relatively autonomous, both of other ideological forms and of the economic base. You can’t trace one-to-one direct ties between literature and any particular ideology, or between literature and the economic base. (When you can, we call it bad literature; literature directly linked to an ideology we call “propaganda,” for instance).