Marxism and Literature

Ian H Birchall

Marxism is a body ofideas which sees all human history as the history of
class struggle. In particular, it is concerned to analyse the dynamics and
contradictions of the capitalist system, and to show how the working
class has the historical potential to overthrow capitalism and establish a
classless, socialist society. Marxism stands or falls by its ability to
interpret existing society, and to mobilise men and women to change it.
A Marxist theory ofliterature - or, for that matter, ofmusic, sexuality
or carpet-weaving - is conceivable only if situated within such a
framework. At first sight, it might not appear that the consideration of
so-called 'creative literature' has very much importance for Marxism. If
it had nothing to say on the matter, its validity as a revolutionary theory
would scarcely be challenged thereby.
In fact, Marxism has always had a great deal to say about literature
and to its practitioners. The major figures of Marxism from Marx and
Engels to Gramsci and Trotsky all wrote at length, if fragmentarily,
about literary questions. And many of the most important figures of
twentieth century literature - Sartre, Brecht, Gorky, Breton, Neruda,
Hikmet, to name only a handful - have been influenced by Marxism
and attempted to absorb its insights into their creative practice.
Many reasons have been given for this close interplay between
Marxism and literature. Meszaros attributes it to Marxism's
preoccupation with the question of alienation (Meszaros 1970: 190);
while Lukacs sees literature as a particularly suitable area for the
'ideological clarification' that precedes a 'great crisis in social relations'
(Lukacs 1972: 107).
Yet to many people the attempt to integrate a theory of literature
within a theory of politics seems to pose a threat to the integrity of
literature, indeed to its very essence. Most readers with anything like a
conventional literary education will suffer a momentary shock on
reading statements such as: 'No one ever wrote a good book in praise of
the Inquisition' (Orwell 1970: 92) or 'No one could imagine lor a
moment that it is possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-
Semitism' (Sartre 1964: 80). It is not that empirical refutations spring
immediately to mind (they are, indeed, remarkably hard to think of) ; it
is rather that the apparently self-evident autonomy of literary values
has been called into question.
But the problem of the relation between literature and politics is not
something that has existed unchanged from all eternity. Nobody

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complains that Shakespeare dragged politics into literaturejust because

a certain theory of kingship is an absolutely integral component of most
of his major tragedies. The idea of ' art for art's sake' - and its corollary,
that political or 'committed' literature could be seen as a specialised
genre - emerged only during the Romantic period, and got a firm grip
in Europe after the defeat ofthe revolutions of 1848. Nowadays the term
'political novel' probably suggests to most people a story of adultery in
the House of Commons; but that is an indictment of contemporary
notions of what 'politics' means.
We live in a period when many long-held assumptions about the
nature of our society and culture are being shaken. The future of
literature is inextricably bound up with the future ofsociety as a whole.
It is a realisation of this that lies behind the recent growth of interest in
the Sociology of Literature, a field in which much of the work done
draws on Marxism to some extent.
But Marxism is not simply a fixed body of doctrine, nor is it
coextensive with the work of Marx himself. It is a theory of history, but
it does not stand outside history; it is a living part of the historical
process. Marxism is a century and a quarter of polemics, sects, mass
parties and states. It is a movement which has contained deep and
fundamental divisions: Lenin against Kautsky, Stalin against Trotsky,
Krushchev against Mao - in each case both sides laid claim to the
orthodoxy of Marxism. What follows is an attempt to sketch - of
necessity briefly and with many omissions - the main themes and
problems confronted by a Marxist theory ofliterature and the evolution
of some of the main variants of that theory.

A. Marx and Engels

Neither Marx nor Engels ever wrote systematically or at length on
literary or aesthetic questions. Marx's project of a study of Balzac was
never fulfilled, and he never wrote the encyclopaedia article on
aesthetics that he was invited to contribute. This was not the result of
any lack of interest - on the contrary, fragmentary references
throughout Marx's work confirm the testimony of his friends that he
had a deep and wide-ranging interest in literature. But at any given
time in his life he found the demands of political activity and economic
analysis too pressing.
This incompleteness of Marx's work leaves us several alternatives.
We could restrict ourselves to listing the various specific literary
judgments made by Marx. But such a procedure, unless intended to
render Marx respectable by showing what a 'cultured' person he was, is

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essentially trivial. Or we could argue that since Marx did not provide us
with an aesthetic his work has to be complemented by an aesthetic
borrowed from elsewhere - say Kant or Aristotle. But since on other
questions Marx's thought is radically opposed to theirs, this would call
into question the whole coherence of his thought.
The third possibility is to attempt to deduce from Marx's general
comments on ideology how literature might fit into his scheme, and see
if the fragmentary remarks on literature do in fact fit.
In so doing, it is necessary to remember that the problematic relation
of literature to society was being widely discussed at the time Marx
wrote. In Germany a whole tradition from Herder and Lessing through
Hegel to Marx's friend Heine had attempted to develop a historical
approach to literature. In France the Romantic school had split
between those like George Sand who advocated a political literature
committed to social change and the emancipation of the working class,
and those like Gautier who argued for 'art for art's sake'. A little later
Taine was to attempt to create a sociology of literature on rigorously
deterministic foundations, seeing the factors of 'race, milieu and
moment' as sufficient to account for any literary work or school (Taine
1863).
The classic statement of Marx's view of the relation between society
and ideology comes in the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique if
Political Economy (1859):
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations
that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of
production which correspond to a definite state of the development of
their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of
production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to
which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of
production of material life conditions the social, political and
intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men
that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being
that determines their consciousness . . . a distinction should always be
made between the material transformation of the economic conditions
of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural
science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic - in
short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict
and fight it out (Marx & Engels 1973: 85).
This text is so central and so often quoted that it is important to be
quite clear what it does and does not say. It asserts, quite firmly, that
literature and other forms of ideology are not autonomous or self-

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contained - they can be understood as part ofthe total process of man's

social being. What it decidedly does not say - contrary to the beliefboth
ofsome 'Marxists' and of many critics of Marxism - is that the relation
ofliterature to the economic structure is one of passive dependence, or
that ideology is simply a 'reflection' of the economic foundations. On
the contrary, the essential feature of society is that conflict is central to
it, and literature, art, religion etc. are among the weapons that men
fabricate in order to 'fight it out'.
Indeed, Marx stresses the active nature of literary practice. In an
article on the Prussian press censorship written in 1842 he declared:
A sryle is my property, my spiritual individuality. Le sryle, c'est l'homme.
Indeed! The law permits me to write, only I am supposed to write in
a style different from my own (Easton & Guddat 1967: 71).
It is this stress on activity and conflict which distinguishes Marxism
from such sociological theories as that ofTaine. Taine is able to take an
author - Shakespeare, Racine, or Balzac - and, with a good deal of
insight, relate him to the social context he wrote in. What he fails to
explain is how radically different ideological productions - Descartes
and Pascal, Voltaire and Rousseau - come into existence in the same
society at more or less the same time.
Once again, Marx does not argue that a work of literature can be
simply reduced to the class position of the writer. Rather he argues that
the historical position of a particular class sets limits within which a
writer works. As he puts it in The Eighteenth Brumaire ifLouis Bonaparte:
Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are
indeed all shopkeepers or the enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers.
According to their education and their individual position they may
be as far apart as heaven from earth. What makes them
representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds
they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond
in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same
problems and solutions to which material interest and social position
drive the latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship
between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class
they represent (Marx & Engels 1973: 84-5).
As so often, Marx's statement of the problem is pregnant but brief
and cryptic. Much of the work of Lucien Goldmann on social groups
and 'world-views' can be seen as a development of the ideas expressed in
the above passage.
But if Marx insists that literature cannot be independent of society,
that it is related to the practice of a given social class, this does not mean

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that he takes a relativistic position. On the contrary Marx's insistence

that consciousness is inseparable from social being means a clear
recognition of its cognitive role. As Trotsky was to put it: 'Art is one of
the ways in which man finds his bearings in the world. . . a form of
cognition' (Trotsky '970: 86). The way in which Marx, throughout
Capital and the Grundrisse, draws on a wide range ofliterary sources - for
example, the novels of Balzac - as a source of documentation and
confirmation ofhis economic analysis testifies to his beliefthat literature
can have a content of objective truth.
This, of course, leads us directly to the problem of realism, which has
been a central question throughout the Marxist tradition. l The term
'realism' acquired wide currency in French literary circles in the ,85os,
and was much discussed throughout the second half of the nineteenth
century. Often the term was given so broad and vague a sense that it
seemed to lack meaning altogether. The main features of literature
which bore the label were the depiction of middle and lower class life
and an attempt to give a carefully documented portrayal ofsocial milieu.
Perhaps because of the dangerous vagueness of the term, Marx
scarcely ever uses it, even though the problem is at the heart ofhis work.
Engels, however, discusses the term explicitly in a letter to the English
novelist Margaret Harkness written in ,888 (Marx & Engels, 973: , '5-
7).2 Here Engels makes clear that, for a Marxist, realism cannot simply
be a portrayal of the world as it is. On the contrary, simply to portray
the world as it is at present would mean, as Engels put it in another letter
a few years earlier, to reinforce the 'optimism of the bourgeois world'
and suggest the 'eternal validity of the existing order' (Marx & Engels
'973: ''4).
In Marxist terms realism must mean, not simply laying bare the class
antagonisms within society, but showing how these antagonisms make
society open to change. Engels's main criticism ofMs Harkness's novel
Ciry Girl is that it shows the working class as a 'passive mass unable to
help itself (Marx and Engels '973: 115), whereas Engels insists that
'the rebellious reaction of the working class against the oppressive
medium which surrounds them, their attempts - convulsive, half-
conscious or conscious - at recovering their status as human beings,
belong to history and must therefore lay claim to a place in the domain
of realism' (Marx & Engels '973: 116).
Realism in literature therefore necessarily comes into conflict with
the ideology of bourgeois society, which seeks to present existing social
relations as unchangeable. Indeed, Marx suggests, in Theories ojSurplus
Value, that there is an even more fundamental antagonism between

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capitalism and art. 'Capitalist production', he states quite simply, 'is

hostile to certain aspects of intellectual production, such as art and
poetry' (Marx & Engels 1973: 64). Capitalism reduces all human
productions to the level of a common measure, exchange value; it
degrades human beings by subordinating them to objects which they
themselves have created but which seem, in the mystified ideology of
capitalism, to acquire a life of their own.
Marx, who rarely engaged in Utopian speculation, offers little
indication ofwhat art might be like after the overthrow ofcapitalism. In
the German Ideology, however, there is the suggestion that under
communism the whole nature of art as a specialised activity separate
from the rest of social life would be radically transformed. 'In a
communist society there are no painters but at most people who engage
in painting among other activities' (Marx & Engels 1973: 71).
It is in the context of Marx's general critique of capitalist society that
we should look at two other problems that have been much discussed in
Marxist literary theory, progress and intention.
The standard bourgeois view of progress, a continuous upward
movement towards greater knowledge, control over nature and human
well-being (developed by the French Enlightenment and crystallised by
Comte) seemed to Marx to be nothing more than an apology for
capitalism. For Marx capitalism was both progressive - above all
because it created the conditions for its own overthrow, - and at the
same time regressive, because of its destruction of human and in
particular aesthetic values.
In 1857 Marx wrote an Introduction to the Critique ofPolitical Economy in
which he discussed the abiding aesthetic value of classical Greek art,
and stressed that capitalism's technological advances did not
automatically equip it to surpass the aesthetic achievements of the
Greeks. With sharp irony he wrote:
Is the view of nature and of social relations which shaped Greek
imagination and thus Greek (mythology) possible in the age of
automatic machinery and railways and locomotives and electric
telegraphs? Where does Vulcan come in as against Roberts & Co.,
Jupiter as against the lightning rod, and Hermes as against the Credit
Mobilier?' (Marx & Engels 1973: 136-7).

But, perhaps foreseeing that this passage would be seized up on by

subsequent commentators. not as a satire against capitalism, but as
proof of Marx's deep attachment to eternal aesthetic values, he put it
aside and it was published only after his death.

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Any writer who strives after realism and authentic aesthetic values
will, even if on the political level he is in no way revolutionary, find
himself becoming a critic of bourgeois society. This accounts for the
paradox of Balzac, which Engels drew attention to in his letter to Ms
Harkness (Marx & Engels 1973: 116-7).3 Balzac, though politically a
conservative diametrically opposed to the values of the French
Revolution becomes, through his realism and against his own personal
intentions, a valuable ally of the revolutionary cause.
The Balzac paradox is an important component of the Marxist
theory ofliterature; but there is a danger, manifested for example in the
work of Lukacs, of giving it too central a position. Marx and Engels
recognised that it was not necessary to be a socialist to be a good writer,
but they believed in the possibility of a literature consciously wedded to
the revolutionary practice of the proletariat. Marx was always
concerned with the proletariat, not as an abstraction, but as actual
living working men,4 and he had great faith in the capacity of working
men and women to develop their own culture:

The new literature in prose and in poetry which is coming from the
lower classes of England and France would prove to them that the
lower classes of the people are quite capable of rising spiritually
without the blessing of the Holy Spirit of critical criticism (Marx & Engels
1956: 181).5

And Marx's contacts and discussions with Heine, Herwegh and

Freiligrath show clearly that he saw the future ofliterature as bound up
with the growth of the working-class movement. 6

B. Lenin and the Russian Revolution

The approach to literature developed by Marx and Engels was taken
up and systematised by a younger generation of Marxists, notably
Plekhanov. But the most important new development for the Marxist
tradition was the emergence of Bolshevism in Russia leading to the
seizure of power in 1917.
As an individual Lenin was far more single-minded in his devotion to
organisational tasks than Marx or Engels, and his work does not contain
anything like the same wealth ofliterary references. His wife Krupskaya
tells us that he usually walked out of the theatre after the first act of a
play (Lenin 1967: 236), and Gorky relates that although he was so
moved by Beethoven's music that he wanted to pat people on the head,
he quickly added: 'But today we musn't pat anyone on the head or we'll
get our hand bitten off; we've got to hit them on the heads, hit them

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without mercy, though in the ideal we are against doing any violence to
people' (Lenin 1967: 247).
In his articles on Tolstoy, Lenin (1967: 28-33, 48-62), follows in the
tradition of Engels's treatment of Balzac by trying to 'identify the great
artist with the revolution which he has obviously failed to understand'
(Lenin 1967: 28). But historically Lenin's most important contribution
to the debate was an article, written in 1905, on Party Organisation and
Party Literature, in which he argues that literature must be subordinated
to the political work of the revolutionary party:

What is this principle of party literature? It is not simply that, for the
socialist proletariat, literature cannot be a means of enriching
individuals or groups; it cannot, in fact, b« an individual undertaking,
independent of the common cause of the proletariat. Down with non-
partisan writers! Down with literary supermen! Literature must
become part of the common cause of the proletariat, a 'cog and screw'
of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism set in motion by the
entire politically-conscious vanguard of the entire working class.
Literature must become a component of organised, planned and
integrated Social-Democratic Party work (Lenin 1967: 23)'

As with all Lenin's writings, this must be put in context. The party
Lenin was thinking of was a small voluntary association of persecuted
revolutionaries, not one with its grip firmly on the state machine. He
was above all polemicising against the practice, common in many
socialist parties, of individuals pursuing private journalistic activity
independent of any party discipline. But it is too simple to argue, as
Lukacs does, citing a long-unpublished letter of Krupskaya's that the
article 'was not concerned with literature as fine art' (Lukacs 1963: 7).
Lenin recognised a distinction between literature and political writing-
for example in his comment that aspects oflnessa Armand's pamphlet
on free love would be better treated in a novel (Lenin 1967: 200) - but
at the same time he was anxious to involve creative writers such as
Gorky in the work of the party press (Lenin & Gorky 1973: 25)'
The whole tortuous history of Lenin's relationship with Gorky brings
out Lenin's sensitivity to the relationship between art and the political
struggle and the tension between the demands of the political struggle
and the recognition of artistic autonomy. Lenin hailed Gorky's work as
an integral part of the socialist movement: 'Gorky is undoubtedly the
greatest representative of proletarian art. . . Any faction of the Social-
Democratic Party would be justly proud of having Gorky as a member'
(Lenin & Gorky 1973: 219).

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Even when Gorky became involved with the ideas of Bogdanov,

whom Lenin was to attack violently, there is a tolerant recognition of
the independence of the artist: 'I believe that an artist can glean much
that is useful to him from philosophy ofall kinds' (Lenin & Gorky 1973:
33). But when Gorky went so far as to sign, at the outbreak of war in
1914, a nationalistic protest against German 'barbarity', Lenin's
tolerance was exhausted. Whereas he accepted that the singer
Chaliapin could be seen as 'an artist and nothing more' (Lenin & Gorky
1973: 220), the nature of Gorky's work did not allow such leniency.
'Why should Gorky meddle in politics?' (Lenin & Gorky 1973: 225).
After the seizure of state power by the proletariat in 1917, the
emphasis in Lenin's work shifts. The need is now for the working class to
appropriate the culture of the dispossessed bourgeoisie.
We must take the entire culture that capitalism left behind and build
socialism with it. We must take all its science, technology, knowledge
and art. Without these we shall be unable to build communist society
(Lenin 1967: 123).
Once again, the historical context must be recalled if Lenin is not to
appear guilty of a certain conservatism. The Russian working class in
19 17 was small and culturally deprived; even literacy had been largely
withheld from it. The first need was to take over the basic cultural tools
with which the bourgeoisie had ruled.
As a result Lenin showed some impatience, mixed with a grudging
respect, towards writers like Mayakovsky (Lenin 1967: 158,214,237,
248) who wanted to transform literature radically in the light of the
revolutionary achievement:
As I see it, the fine poetical work would be one written to the social
command of the Comintern, taking for its purpose the victory of the
proletariat, making its points in a new vocabulary, striking and
comprehensible to all . . . and sent to the publisher by plane
(Mayakovsky 1970: 21).
Perhaps the most sensitive account of the problems ofliterature in the
immediate post-revolutionary period is given in Trotsky's Literature and
Revolution. Trotsky is sympathetic to some at least of the literary
innovators without making any compromises with the notion of a
'proletarian culture', which he believes to be impossible. He tries to
steer a middle path between party control and total independence:
Art must make its own way and by its own means. The Marxian
methods are not the same as the artistic. The party leads the
proletariat but not the historic processes of history. There are domains

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in which the Party leads, directly and imperatively. There are

domains in which it only co-operates. There are, finally, domains in
which it only orientates itself. The domain of art is not one in which
the Party is called upon to command. It can and must protect and
help it, but it can only lead it indirectly (Trotsky 1960: 218).

C. The Age of Stalin

But Trotsky's hopes were not to be fulfilled. By the end of the twenties
all hope ofspreading the Russian revolution had gone; Stalin's doctrine
of 'socialism in one country' had triumphed and Trotsky and the Left
Opposition had been hounded out of Party and country. With the Five
Year Plans the last remnants of working class power were eradicated. A
massive effort to develop Russia's industrial strength was accompanied
by an ever-tightening ideological grip of the Party over the state
machine, culminating in the show trials of the late thirties. 7
In Stalin's Russia the ideological control of the Party and state over
literature was given considerable importance. (One result of this is the
way in which the 'literary' opposition has played a much greater role
than dissident writers could in Western society). The front man for
laying down literary orthodoxy was Andrey Zhdanov, whose various
speeches offer the most systematic exposition of Stalinist literary
doctrine.
In his speech to the First Congress ofSoviet Writers in 1934, Zhdanov
laid down the main ideological tasks of Russian writers:

To eradicate the survivals of capitalism in the consciousness of people

means to struggle against all the remnants of bourgeois influence on
the proletariat, against laxity, frivolity, idleness, petty-bourgeois
indiscipline and individualism, greed and the lack of conscientiousness
with regard to collective property (Zhdanov 197 0 : 5).

In simple terms, this was a plain indication that literature was to be

subordinated to the economic goals of the regime, to the
encouragement of productivity and labour discipline.
In a speech of 1946, Zhdanov stresses the importance for Soviet
citizens ofregular self-criticism and self-analysis, in terms that recall the
'Protestant ethic' associated with the early phases ofWestern capitalism
Udanov 1970: 3 I). And in a lecture on philosophy the following year
the basic moralism ofZhdanovism comes out clearly in a stinging attack
on Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes for publishing Genet's Thiifs
Journal which opens with the words: 'Treachery, theft and
homosexuality will be my fundamental themes'. For Zhdanov this is

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enough to indicate the bankruptcy of bourgeois culture (Zdanov 1970:

64)·
In contrast to bourgeois culture, the official literary doctrine
advocated was 'socialist realism', defined as follows:
Socialist realism, being the basic method of Soviet literature and
literary criticism, requires from the artist a truthful, historically
concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development.
Moreover, truth and historical completeness .of artistic representation
must be combined with the task of ideological transformation and
education of the working man in the spirit of Socialism (Slonim 1967:
160-1).
The doctrine was not, of course, confined to Russia. Wherever there
were Communist Parties, there were party intellectuals arguing for
seeing 'the re-creation of literature as a consciously and collectively
planned piece of work under the leadership of the Communist Party'
(Hobsbawm 1950: ii).
But the Stalin period produced at least two major contributions to the
Marxist theory ofliterature in the writings ofGeorg Lukacs and Bertolt
Brecht.
Lukacs's work represents a major development in the treatment of
the interrelation ofform and content in works of literature. His use of
the category of 'totality' and the distinction between 'realism' and
'naturalism' represent important methodological advances, even if one
does not always ,accept the particular applications made of them.
But Lukacs's work remains confined within the framework of
Stalinist orthodoxy as he occasionally reveals with unusual frankness for
example, calling Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus the 'fullest artistic and
intellectual confirmation' of the decree ofthe Central Committee of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union on modern music (Lukacs 1964:
22).
This framework leads Lukacs to be unduly fatalistic about the
possibilities for art under capitalism. After 1848 there seems little
possibility offered to writers:
Balzac and Stendhal could dig down to the very roots of the sharpest
contradictions inherent in bourgeois society while the writers who lived
after 1848 could not do so: such merciless candour, such sharp
criticism would have necessarily driven them to break the link with
their own class. Even the sincerely progressive Zola was incapable of
such a rupture (Lukacs 1972: 86).
And though his critique of modernism is more sophisticated than
Zhdanov's, it is equally unsympathetic: 'It is clear, I think, that

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modernism must deprive literature of a sense of perspective' (Lukacs

196 3: 33)·
Brecht's theoretical work is rather more fragmentary than Lukacs's
and is directly related to the problems of a practising dramatist and
poet. Brecht never broke politically with Stalinism; indeed, the
treatment of the theme of means and ends in many of his poems and
plays must be seen as a direct apology for Stalinist brutality. But unlike
Lukacs, his sympathies are with modernism,s and literary innovation.
His main contribution to a Marxist aesthetic lies in his stress on
changeability; he is concerned above all to stress that any account of
reality is deceptive if it does not show how that reality can be changed
by human practice.

D. The Present Period

In 1956 Stalin's successor, Krushchev, made his celebrated 'secret
speech' in which he denounced the crimes of the Stalinist era; The
speech can be criticised for not explaining how, in Marxist terms, such
crimes were possible in a 'socialist' society; and the subsequent tortuous
process of 'destalinisation' confirms this inadequacy. Nonetheless,
within Russia and in and around the international Communist
movement the new period of ,liberalisation' offered the possibility of
more adventurous work in literary theory.
The official review Communist interpreted the new line as follows in
1956 :
The task of Soviet writers and artists is to take over all the wealth in
the field of artistic skill that humanity has accumulated and to boldly
increase this wealth by new creative discoveries. Socialist realism
imposes no limits in this respect (Arvon 1970: 91).
In the following years debate about literature in Communist circles
was able to take a more positive attitude to the problems of modernism.
The blanket category of decadence was no longer seen as adequate. As
the veteran Communist Ernst Fischer put it: 'We must have the
courage to say: if writers describe decadence in all its nakedness and if
they denounce it morally, this is not decadence' (Baxandall 1972: 233).
The Stalinist tradition had assigned such a writer as Kafka to the
'cultural dung heap of reaction' (Fast 1960: 7). More recently a variety
of Marxist critics have tried to show how the Marxist framework can
accommodate his work. Thus Adolfo Sanchez Vasquez:
Some Marxists, however, have seen in Kafka only an expression of a
decadent bourgeois world and, in condemning that world, have also
 Jan H Birchall

condemned Kafka. They have fallen into the trap of abandoning

Kafka's work to the bourgeoisie, as if Kafka belonged within the
narrow framework of the bourgeois world. Kafka certainly expresses,
in a brilliant and unique way, the decomposition of the bourgeois
world, but his expression is such that the characters in his works seem
to be saying to us: behold what men have made of themselves, how
they dehumanise and degrade themselves (Vazquez [974: [40).
The weight of Stalinist dogmatism has been so great that much
Marxist criticism of the last two decades has been little more than a
protest against such dogmatism. But the rejection of dogmatism is not
an end in itself, and easily degenerates into pure eclecticism. Take, for
example, the case of Roger Garaudy, for many years an intellectual
hatchet-man for the French Communist Party, but expelled therefrom
in 1970. Garaudy has concerned himself with the problem ofredefining
realism:
From Stendhal and Balzac, Courbet and Repin, Tolstoy and Martin
du Gard, Gorky and Mayakovsky we can take and analyse the criteria
of 'great realism'. And what do we do if the works of Kafka, Saint-
John Persc or Picasso do not correspond to these criteria? Do we have
to exclude them from realism or from art? Or do we, on the contrary,
have to open up and extend the definition of realism, and discover
new dimensions of realism in the light of works characteristic of our
century, thus enabling us to attach these new contributions to the
heritage of the past (Baxandall [972: 253).
Garaudy hlfrecomes dangerously close to saying that 'realism' means
whatever you want it to mean.
Ernst Fischer, likewise a long-serving Communist who was expelled
from the Austrian CP in 1969 for persistent criticism of the Russian
invasion of Czechoslovakia, takes a somewhat similar position, though
his work reveals a far more thorough and honest attempt to think
through the lessons of the Stalinist experience. When Fischer writes:

We must not abandon Proust, nor Joyce, nor Beckett and even less
Kafka to the bourgeois class. If we allow them, they will turn these
writers against us. Otherwise, these writers will no longer aid the
bourgeoisie - it will be us that they aid (Baxandall [972: 233),
one gets the impression that he is taking as given, on the basis of criteria
derived from outside Marxism, the fact that these are 'great writers'.
One wonders just what the working class is going to do with Proust.
But those Marxists who remained outside the Communist Parties
were not more successful in integrating Marxist literary theory with
revolutionary practice. Lucien Goldmann, for example, has the

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enormous merit of systematising the methodological achievements of

Marx and the early Lukacs, and his concrete studies remain as a
testimony to the comprehensive power of his method. But for
Goldmann Marxism became a method and nothing else. He could
write: 'Dialectical materialism is a working hypothesis which, in the
works of Marx, Engels, Lukacs, and even of several other authors of
lesser scope, has proved itself extremely fertile and fruitful' (Goldmann
1959: 44)· Goldmann's position seems to have been that, since there
were no prospects of revolutionary politics in the foreseeable future, the
job of Marxist intellectuals was to keep the method alive by competing
with bourgeois scholarship on its own ground. 9
For Sartre, on the other hand, practice came first. The great merit of
his What is Literature? is its stress on literature as action. But Sartre (not
wholly through his own fault) was never able to resolve the problem he
poser! in What is Literature? - how does a bourgeois intellectual,
committed in principle to the working class, actually reach it without
making intolerable concessions to Stalinist politics:
The majority of the proletariat, wrapped round by a single party,
encircled by an isolating propaganda, forms a closed society, without
doors or windows. One means of access, and a narrow one at that, is
the CPo Is it desirable that the writer should commit himself to it? If
he does so out of conviction as a citizen and out of disgust with
literature, then very good, he's chosen. But can he become a
communist and remain a writer? (Sartre 1964: 304).
Eighteen years later Sartre's only solution was for some kind of
division of labour among intellectuals:
All we can say on this subject is that it is necessary for there to be in
parties or popular organisations intellectuals associated with political
power, which represents the maximum possible degree of discipline
and the minimum of cri ticism; and it is also necessary that there
should be non-party intellectuals, individually linked to the movements
but outside them, which represents the minimum possible discipline
and the maximum criticism (Sartre 197 2 : 75).
It is the greatness and the tragedy ofSartre that he could never have
decided which group he would be in.
If the battle between dogmatism and anti-dogmatism can finally
come to an end, it is time for Marxist literary theory to start returning to
the problems it was preoccupied with before the rise of Stalinism - the
relation of artistic practice to political organisation, the relation
between ideology and culture. To conclude, I suggest one or two
questions which Marxist literary theory should be concerning itselfwith

10 5
 Ian H Birchall

over the next few years.

(i) To what extent is the 'literary heritage' as embodied in the
educational system class-bound, and to what extent should it be
revalued (for example, why is Jane Austen part of 'English Literature'
and Robert Tressell not?).
(ii) Are the arguments used by Lenin and Trotsky against 'proletarian
culture' still valid for Western Europe in the seventies, or does the very
different nature ofthe proletariat, and the fact that the existing 'culture'
consists far more of ideology than basic techniques, call for
reconsideration?
(iii) How should politically oriented literary practitioners (e.g. theatre
groups) relate to political organisations? How can they get orientation
from them without unnecessary constraints?
If Marxists can come up with some interesting answers to these
questions, they will show that Marxism is still very much a living body
of thought.
Middlesex Polytechnic

FOOTNOTES
I. The one apparent exception, the Surrealists, reject realism above all in the sense of a
passive acceptance of the world as it is.
2. Engels's discussion of Balzac here seems to me to make explicit what is implicit in
Marx's use ofBalzac in Capital. I see no grounds for alleging any fundamental division
between Marx and Engels on this question.
3. Engels's low view ofZola, as contrasted with Balzac, should not be taken too seriously.
There is little evidence that he had any wide acquaintance with Zola; and if
L'Assommoir could be subjected to some of the same criticisms as Ciry Girl, Germinal is in
fact a brilliant fulfilment of Engels's criteria for a working-claSs novel.
4. See, for example, his letter to Feuerbach of 1844, where he urges Feuerbach to see the
socialist implications of his philosophy, and adduces in evidence the high theoretical
level of the discussions in the Paris workmen's meetings (Cited in Goldmann 1970:
157)·
5. The 'them' refers to Bauer and followers.
6. For details, see Demetz (1967: 74-101).
7. The present writer (following Cliff 1974) believes that the view that Russia under
Stalin became 'state capitalist' gives the most adequate framework for understanding
the use of Marxism as an ideology in Russia.
8. Cf. for example Brecht, 1974.
9. This was the position I heard Goldmann argue at a meeting in the LSE in 1969.

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REFERENCES CITED

Arvon, H. (1970), L'esthetique marxiste, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.

Baxandall, L. (ed) (1972), Radical perspectives in the arts, Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Brecht, B. (1974), 'Against Georg Lukacs', New Left Review 84.
Cliff, T. (1974), State Capitalism in Russia, Pluto, London.
Demetz, P. (1967), Marx, Engels, and the Poets, trans!. Samons,jeffrey L. University of
Chicago Press.
Easton, Lloyd D. and Guddat, Kurt, H. (1967), Writings qfthe roung Marx on philosophy and
sociery, Doubleday Anchor, New York.
Fast, H. (1960), Literature and realiry, International Publishers, New York.
Goldmann, L. (1959), Recherches dialectiques, Gallimard, Paris.
Goldmann, L. (1970), Marxisme et sciences humaines, Gallimard, Paris.
Hobsbawm, E. ([950), Introduction, j. Revai: Lukacs and socialist realism. Fore
Publications, London.
jdanov, A. (1970), Sur la litterature, la philosophie et la musique, Norman Bethune, Paris.
Lenin, V. (1967), On literature and art, Progress, Moscow.
Lenin, V. and Gorky, M. ([973), Letters, reminiscences and articles, Progress, Moscow.
Lukacs, G. (1963), The meaning qf contemporary realism, Merlin, London.
Lukacs, G. ([964), Essays on Thomas Mann, Merlin, London.
Lukacs, G. ([972), Studies in European realism, Merlin, London.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1956), The holy family, Lawrence & Wishart, London.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1973), On literature and art, ed. Lee Baxandall and Stefan
Morawski, International General, New York.
Mayakovsky, V. (1970), How are verses made?, Cape, London.
Meszaros, I. (1970), Marx's theory qf alienation, Merlin, London.
Orwell, G. (1970), Collected essays, journalism and letters, IV, Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Sartre, j-P. ([964), Qu'est-ce que la litterature?, Gallimard, Paris.
Sartre, j-P. ([972), Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels (Lectures given in japan 1965),
Gallimard, Paris.
Slonim, M. ([ 967), Soviet Russian literature, Oxford University Press.
Taine, H. (1863), Histoire de la litterature anglaise, Hachette, Paris.
Trotsky, L. (1960), Literature and revolution, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Trotsky, L. (1970), On literature and art, ed. Paul N. Siegel, Pathfinder Pro Inc., New York.
Vazquez, A. Sanchez (1974), Art and sociery, Monthly Review.

1°7
 Ian H. Birchall

.iVates on further reading

While there is no substitute for wide reading of the works of Marx and Engels the
compilation, Marx, Engels on Literature and Art, ed. Baxandall and Morawski (1974),
Inlernational General, New York, is a useful introduction to some seminal passages; it
also contains an extensive bibliography of Marxist writing on aesthetics. Useful
commentaries are M. Lifschitz, \ 1973), The Philosophy ojArt of Karl Marx, Pluto, and the
rather more anecdotal P. Demetz, (1967), Marx, Engels and the Poets, University of
Chicago. Lenin's contribution (1967) can be studied in Lenin on Art and Literature, Moscow
and Lenin and Gorky, (1973), Letters, Reminiscences and Articles, Moscow; Trotsky's (1960)
in L. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, Ann Arbor, and (1970) Leon Trotsky on Literature and
Art, Pathfinder.
Two useful anthologies of Marxist writing are D. Crai,~ (ed.) (1975), MarxistIon
Literature: An Anthology, Penguin, and L. Baxandall (ed.) (1972), Radical Penpectives in the
ArtI, Pelican. The major works of Lukacs, Goldmann, Benjamin and Sartre, discussed
elsewhere in this volume, are all of importance. A useful introduction to Brecht's work
(1965) is The Mmingkauj Dialogues translated by John Willet, Methuen. Among a rich
literature of Marxist criticism from the more recent period it is worth noting E. Fischer,
(1963), The NecmityojArt, Penguin; A. Sanchez Vasquez (1974), Art and Socie!)', Monthly
Review; and P. O'Flinn, (1975), Them and Cs in Literature, Pluto.

108