SOURCE: Birchall, Ian H. “Marxism and Literature.” In The Sociology of Literature: Theoretical Approaches, edited by Jane Routh and Janet Wolff, pp. 92-108. Keele, Staffordshire: University of Keele, 1977.

[In the following essay, Birchall sketches out a brief history of the Marxist theory of literature and its main deviants.]

Marxism is a body of ideas 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 of literature—or, for that matter, of music, 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 Lukács sees literature as a particularly suitable area for the ‘ideological clarification’ that precedes a ‘great crisis in social relations’ (Lukács 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 for 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 complains that Shakespeare dragged politics into literature just 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 of the 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 of society 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 of literature 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 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 of 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-contained—they can be understood as part of the total process of man's social being. What it decidedly does not say—contrary to the belief both of some ‘Marxists’ and of many critics of Marxism—is that the relation of literature 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 style is my property, my spiritual individuality. Le style, 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 of Taine. 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 of Louis 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 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 1970: 86). The way in which Marx, throughout Capital and the Grundrisse, draws on a wide range of literary sources—for example, the novels of Balzac—as a source of documentation and confirmation of his economic analysis testifies to his belief that 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.¹ The term ‘realism’ acquired wide currency in French literary circles in the 1850s, 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 of social milieu.

Perhaps because of the dangerous vagueness of the term, Marx scarcely ever uses it, even though the problem is at the heart of his work. Engels, however, discusses the term explicitly in a letter to the English novelist Margaret Harkness written in 1888 (Marx & Engels 1973: 115-7).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 1973: 114).

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 of Ms Harkness's novel City Girl is that it shows the working class as a ‘passive mass unable to help itself’ (Marx and Engels 1973: 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 1973: 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 of Surplus Value, that there is an even more fundamental antagonism between 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 of what art might be like after the overthrow of capitalism. 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 of Political 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 Crédit 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.

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 of literature; but there is a danger, manifested for example in the work of Lukàcs, 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 of literature 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 of literary 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 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, be 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 Lukács does, citing a long-unpublished letter of Krupskaya's that the article ‘was not concerned with literature as fine art’ (Lukács 1963: 7). Lenin recognised a distinction between literature and political writing—for example in his comment that aspects of Inessa 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).

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 of all 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 1917 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 of literature 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 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 of spreading 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 of Soviet 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 1970: 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 of regular self-criticism and self-analysis, in terms that recall the ‘Protestant ethic’ associated with the early phases of Western capitalism (Jdanov 1970: 31). And in a lecture on philosophy the following year the basic moralism of Zhdanovism comes out clearly in a stinging attack on Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes for publishing Genet's Thief's Journal which opens with the words: ‘Treachery, theft and homosexuality will be my fundamental themes’. For Zhdanov this is 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 of literature in the writings of Georg Lukàcs and Bertolt Brecht.

Lukács's work represents a major development in the treatment of the interrelation of form 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 Lukács'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 of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on modern music (Lukács 1964: 22).

This framework leads Lukács 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.

(Lukács 1972: 86)

And though his critique of modernism is more sophisticated than Zhdanov's, it is equally unsympathetic: ‘It is clear, I think, that modernism must deprive literature of a sense of perspective’ (Lukács 1963: 33).

Brecht's theoretical work is rather more fragmentary than Lukács'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 Lukács, his sympathies are with modernism,⁸ 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 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 1974: 140)

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 of redefining 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 Perse 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 1972: 253)

Garaudy here comes 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 1972: 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 enormous merit of systematising the methodological achievements of Marx and the early Lukács, 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, Lukács, 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 posed 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 CP. 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 criticism; 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 1972: 75)

It is the greatness and the tragedy of Sartre 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 itself with 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 of the 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.

Notes

1. 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 of Balzac in Capital. I see no grounds for alleging any fundamental division between Marx and Engels on this question.

3. Engels's low view of Zola, 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 City 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.

Works Cited

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

Baxandall, L. (ed) (1972), Radical perspectives in the arts, Penguin, Harmondsworth.

Brecht, B. (1974), ‘Against Georg Lukács’, New Left Review 84.

Cliff, T. (1974), State Capitalism in Russia, Pluto, London.

Demetz, P. (1967), Marx, Engels, and the Poets, transl. Samons, Jeffrey L. University of Chicago Press.

Easton, Lloyd D. and Guddat, Kurt, H. (1967), Writings of the Young Marx on philosophy and society, Doubleday Anchor, New York.

Fast, H. (1960), Literature and reality, International Publishers, New York.

Goldmann, L. (1959), Recherches dialectiques, Gallimard, Paris.

Goldmann, L. (1970), Marxisme et sciences humaines, Gallimard, Paris.

Hobsbawm, E. (1950), Introduction, J. Revai: Lukács and socialist realism. Fore Publications, London.

Jdanov, A. (1970), Sur la littérature, la philosophie et la musique, Norman Béthune, Paris.

Lenin, V. (1967), On literature and art, Progress, Moscow.

Lenin, V. and Gorky, M. (1973), Letters, reminiscences and articles, Progress, Moscow.

Lukács, G. (1963), The meaning of contemporary realism, Merlin, London.

Lukács, G. (1964), Essays on Thomas Mann, Merlin, London.

Lukács, G. (1972), 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 of alienation, Merlin, London.

Orwell, G. (1970), Collected essays, journalism and letters, IV, Penguin, Harmondsworth.

Sartre, J-P. (1964), Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, Gallimard, Paris.

Sartre, J-P. (1972), Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels (Lectures given in Japan 1965), Gallimard, Paris.

Slonim, M. (1967), Soviet Russian literature, Oxford University Press.

Taine, H. (1863), Histoire de la littérature 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 Pr. Inc., New York.

Vazquez, A. Sanchez (1974), Art and society, Monthly Review.

Notes 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), International 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 of Art 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. Craig (ed.) (1975), Marxists on Literature: An Anthology, Penguin, and L. Baxandall (ed.) (1972), Radical Perspectives in the Arts, Pelican. The major works of Lukács, Goldmann, Benjamin and Sartre, discussed elsewhere in this volume, are all of importance. A useful introduction to Brecht's work (1965) is The Messingkauf 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 Necessity of Art, Penguin; A. Sanchez Vasquez (1974), Art and Society, Monthly Review; and P. O'Flinn, (1975), Them and Us in Literature, Pluto.