Marxist vs Liberal Humanism

Ok so this is where I make an attempt to figure out what these two theories actually mean so if I ramble I apologize. I was trying to keep with the theme of my blog which is Theatre and Theory and was having a bit of trouble using a play comparison for the Liberal Humanist Theory. So I decided to come up with a really good one for the Marxist Critic one.
What Marxist Critics are saying about literary texts is that they are a product of economic social and political circumstances. It also says that people should belong as a whole rather then as an individual and that everyone should be on an “equal playing field”. The play that immediately came to my mind was the play A Streetcar Named Desire by Williams. The play was written in the 1950’s and is a play that directly affects the aftermath effects of the lower class struggling to survive after WWII. The 1940’s for a hard time economically because we were recovering from the war and the book clearly reflects that. One thing is that Stanly is clearing a working class man struggling to live meal to meal. He lives in a small house that barely has one bedroom and a kitchen. The refection of the history and the economy in this play proves that according to Marxist Criticism this is a literary text.
Marxist criticism very much differs from liberal humanism. Liberal Humanism says that literature teaches the reader the truth about life. It teachers the significance of timeless literature and art and that people are individuals. Overall I would say that would be the biggest and most important difference between the two theories. Marxist Critics think that in order to live in a perfect world everyone has to be part of a group and equal to the other. It is a communism rather than a Capitalist Society. Liberal Humanism says that you need to be an individual not part of a group. Also in Liberal Humanism things like historical and autobiographical information are not important. From what I can understand they should have no effect on how one reads or views the art. The reader should never consider who wrote the play, and how the time it was written would affect the writing. See I completely disagree with this theory. Considering who wrote the work of literature is very important to me. I mean you can’t read the Great Gatsby and not recognize that it is about the 1920’s and is a refection of that time period. Also you can’t read the diary of Anne Frank and not consider who was writing it and why she was writing it. I think its my theater background. When I read new things I always think about why they would write it or how does this reflect the time. To me the analysis is very important when considering what great literature really is.