In order to forestall some objections to previous post:

Simply to name something a symptom rather than a cause is only a beginning, obviously; otherwise, we're just playing with words, setting up another supposed defensive barrier for our aestheticism.

Social conditions are in part the result of political platforms & programs, which themselves project from ideologies & worldviews. When you see suffering & injustice & social pathology, the moral thing is to seek the right name for the problem & take positive political steps to correct it.

The 20th century was, for one thing, a worldwide laboratory for testing policies and programs at all levels of government; for every problem there's a program (except in many cases the right idea & the right action have not been invented yet). If you believe in government control of the market, you can advocate for that; if you believe in dog-eat-dog Darwinism and the inevitable failure of all public problem-solving initiatives, you can advocate for that; if you believe in a symbiotic balance between government policy and private initiatives, you can work for that; if you see consistent oppression of the poor & exploitation by the rich, if you see multifarious attacks on public governmental authority on behalf of powerful private interests, if you see egregious fraud & greed in high places, you can take action, participate in the political process.

No one is inhibited from political activity of some kind. But it's not the same thing as artistic work. Again, in the last century, we witness the swings in critical (& artistic) attitudes, from attacking art (for its indifference to social problems) to defending art (for its unique values) - like a constant pendulum channeling the inherent outrage & frustration with exigent reality. The consequences range from blaming the victim (artists themselves) to defensive camouflage ("political" artists) to aggressive indifference ("art for art's sake").

"Political" artists make poetry out of theoretical-systemic solutions - verbal abstractions - applied to ornery, many-sided, complex, intractable problems. (cf. Ange Mlinko's comments about the tendency to interpret poems as paraphrases of political arguments.) For the ideological poet, everything is grist for the mill : there's such heroic poetry in Utopia!

But just as our experience is a many-layered reality of symptomatic fault lines & corrosive chaos (not always amenable to simple "translation" into verbal signs & systemic solutions) - so the complex pleasure/insight amalgam of the art work offers pathways to draw closer to it : offers an image of it which we recognize as authentic.

Digging around for more background on the Chicago critics, came upon this excerpt from Richard Ohmann (1976).

I can't pretend to be much of a lit historian, but this essay seems to appear toward the beginning of another generation of radical critique, based on a Marxist interpretation of culture. Ohmann seems even-handed & careful about New Critics, interesting overview here of the mid-century theories about nature & purpose of poetry.

Have trouble accepting the underlying premise, however, which seems to be: that social injustices are systemic in nature; that we understand what that system does; that the intellectual classes, the bourgeoisie in general, create their own self-protective ideologies which blind them to reality, etc. etc. [Here we note the parochial bias against business, entrepreneurialism, individual & family enterprise - all those economic activities which structure much of past & present world social economy.]

I don't deny the pervasive & insidious presence of injustice & evil. Nor the forces of conformity & exploitation which structure & process the social reality we inhabit. But I question whether the appropriate interpretation of this reality is a purely econo-political one. That is I think of injustice and inequality - & the seemingly entrenched patterns of oppression which they assume - as symptoms, rather than causes.

Taken as causes, the logic leads to the denunciation of bourgeois property rights, capitalism, the rule of law, democratic institutions, private enterprise, and so on; it leads to the moral disenfranchisement of independent cultural activity (academia, art, literature) - its chastisement for complicity in the "system" (cf. Ohmann's analysis).

If taken as symptoms, the entrenched injustices and inequalities of various nations & societies may have very different systemic shapes & developments; there may be no simple "answer" (Marxist, socialist, nationalist, ethnic, religious, etc.) which provides utopian solutions to the underlying causes : ie. the greed, selfishness, bigotry, aggression, malice, hatred, cowardice, fraudulence, intellectual/moral blindness of human beings, persons, individuals.

Understood this way, we might recognize the ethical value which sometimes accompanies (& enhances) those independent (semi-guilty) aesthetic pleasures & enjoyments (of various degrees of intellectual insight & innocence) which we give & take - in the midst of social corruption, injustice & cruelty. It's a value contained in the moral representation of realities for which we have no simple, abstract, systemic solution, no bureaucratic assignment of moral duties. This is a value in addition to the natural & inherent values offered by beauty in general.