Marxism and Literary Theory

BY NASRULLAH MAMBROL ON APRIL 12, 2016 • ( 27 )

Marxism is a materialist philosophy which tried to interpret the world
based on the concrete, natural world around us and the society we live
in. It is opposed to idealist philosophy which conceptualizes a spiritual
world elsewhere that influences and controls the material world. In one
sense it tried to put people’s thought into reverse gear as it was a total
deviation from the philosophies that came before it. Karl Marx himself
has commented on this revolutionary nature of Marxism, “The
philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point
is to change it.” It is true that while other philosophies tried to
understand the world, Marxism tried to change it.

Classical Marxism: Basic Principles

According to Marxism, society progresses through the struggle between

opposing forces. It is this struggle between opposing classes that result in
social transformation. History progresses through this class struggle.
Class struggle originates out of the exploitation of one class by another
throughout history. During the feudal period the tension was between the
feudal lords and the peasants, and in the Industrial age the struggle was
between the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) and the industrial working
class (the proletariat). Classes have common interests. In a capitalist
system the proletariat is always in conflict with the capitalist class. This
confrontation, according to Marx, will finally result in replacing the
system by socialism.
Another important concept used by Marx was the dialectic which was
originally developed by the 18th century German philosopher Hegel.
Hegel was an idealist philosopher who used this term to refer to the
process of emergence of new ideas through the confrontation of
opposing ideas. He believed that the world is governed by thought and
material existence is the expression of an immaterial spiritual essence.
But Marx used the same concept to interpret the progress of the material
world. According to him Hegel put the world upside down by giving
primacy to ideas whereas Marx’s attempt was to reverse it. So Marx’s
dialectic is known as dialectical materialism. Marx argued that all
mental( ideological) systems are products of real social and economic
existence. For example, the legal system reflects the interests of the
dominant class in particular historical periods rather than the
manifestation of divine reason. Marxist dialectic can be understood as
the science of the general and abstract laws of development of nature,
society and thoughts. It considers the universe as an integral whole in
which things are interdependent, rather than a mixture of things isolated
from each other. All things contain within themselves internal dialectical
contradictions, which are the primary cause of motion, change and
development in the world. Dialectical materialism was an effective tool
in the hands of Marxists, in revealing the secrets behind the social
processes and their future course of development.

One of the fundamental concepts of classical Marxist thought is the

concept of base and superstructure which refers to the relationship
between the material means of production and the cultural world of art
and ideas. It is essentially a symbolic concept which employed the
structure of a building to explain this relationship. The foundation or the
base stands for the socio-economic relations and the mode of production
and the superstructure stands for art, law, politics, religion and, above
all, ideology. Broadly speaking it refers to the idea that culture is
governed by historical conditions and the relations of dominance and
subordination prevalent in a particular society. Morality, religion, art and
philosophy are seen as echoes of real life processes. In Marx’s own
words, they are “phantoms formed in the brains of men.” From this point
of view all cultural products are directly related to the economic base in
a given society.
Take the case of the novels of Mulk Raj Anand which address the life of
the untouchables, coolies and ordinary workers struggling for their rights
and self esteem. It is true that they can be traced back to the class
conflict prevalent in the Indian society M.T. Vasudevan Nair, a noted
Malayalam novelist wrote about the breaking up of the feudal tharavads
in Kerala. But in the final analysis his stories reveal the filtering of the
bourgeois modernity in Kerala society and how it enters into a
conflictual relationship with the values of feudalism. Thus traces of this
connection can be identified in various forms of cultural production.

Socialist Realism
Socialist Realism took shape as the official aesthetic principle of the new
communist society. It was mainly informed by the 19th century
aesthetics and revolutionary politics. Raymond Williams identifies three
principles as the founding principles of Socialist realism. They are
Partinost or commitment to the working class cause of the
party, Narodnost of popularity and Klassovost or writer’s commitment to
the class interests. The idea of Partinost is based onVladmir Lenin‘s
essay, Party Organisation and Party Literature (1905) which reiterates
the commitment of the writer to the aim of the party to liberate the
working class from exploitation. Narodnost refers to the popular
simplicity of the work of art. Marx, in Paris Manuscripts, refers to the
alienation that originates out of the separation of the mental and manual
in the capitalist society. Earlier under feudalism the workers engaged in
cottage industries produced various items on their own, all activities
related to the production happening at the same place under the
supervision of the same people. But under capitalism the workers lost
control over their products they were engaged in the production of
various parts and were alienated from their own work. So, only folk art
survived as people’s art. The concept Narodnost reiterates this quality of
popular art which is accessible to the masses and wanted to restore their
lost wholeness of being. Klassovost refers to the commitment of the
writer to the interests of the working class. It is not related to the explicit
allegiance of a writer to a particular class but the writer’s inherent ability
to portray the social transformation.
For example, Balzac, a supporter of Bourbon dynasty, provides a
penetrating account of the French society than all the historians.
Though Tolstoy, the Russian novelist, was an aristocrat by birth and had
no affiliation to the revolutionary movements in Russia, Lenin called
Tolstoy the “mirror of Russian revolution” as he was successful in
revealing the transformation in Russian society that led to the revolution
through his novels. Lenin’s position regarding art and literature was
harder than that of Marx and Friedrich Engels. He argued that literature
must become an instrument of the party. In the 1934 congress of Soviet
Writers, Socialist Realism was accepted as the official aesthetic principle
of Soviet Union. It was accepted as a dogma by communists all over the
world.
Thus with the declaration of official literary policy by Soviet Union the
“Moscow Line” was popularized and got international acceptance among
communists. As a result, a direct cause-effect relationship between
literature and economics was assumed, with all writers seen as trapped
within the intellectual limit of their class position. One of the examples
of this rigid Marxist literary criticism is Illusion and Reality
by Christopher Caudwell. However establishing a one to one relationship
between base and superstructure as some “vulgar Marxists” may attempt,
is opposed by the Marxist critic, Terry Eagleton. According to him,
“each element of a society’s superstructure, art, law, politics, and
religion has its own tempo of development, its own internal evolution,
which is not reducible to a mere expression of the class struggle or the
state of the economy.” Yet classical Marxists claim that in the last
analysis the superstructure is determined by that mode of production.
The Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukacs represented this type of
political orthodoxy. Lukacs considered the 19th century realist fiction as
a model and believed that a realist work must reveal the underlying
pattern of contradictions in a social order. His debate with Bertolt
Brecht on the whole questions of realism and expressionism discussed in
detail the importance of form and the concept of form in Marxisi
criticism. The debate was handed over to the Formalists who developed
new directions in the development of Marxist criticism.

Further developments in Marxist Aesthetics

Marxist criticism flourished outside the official line in various European
countries. Russian Formalism emerged as a new perspective informed by
Marxism in the 1920s. It was disbanded by the Communist party as it
did not conform to the official theoretical perspective of the party. The
prominent members of this group were Victor Shklovsky, Boris
Tomashevsky and Boris Eichenbaum, who published their ideas
originally in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited by Lee T.
Lemon and Marion J Reis.
Though suppressed in Soviet Union, the Formalists emerged in various
forms in the USA, Germany and Prague. One of the members of this
group, Mikhail Bakhtin remained in Soviet Union and continued his
critical practice. His concept of Dialogism affirmed plurality and variety.
It was an argument against the hegemony of absolute authorial control.
He affirmed the need to take others and otherness into account. In one
sense, it was an argument against the increasing homogenization of
cultural and political life in Soviet Union.
Many others belonging to the same perspective went into exile and
continued their work abroad. It was the beginning of a new form of
Marxist criticism. Roman Jakobson founded the Prague Linguistic
Circle along with Rene Wellek and a few others. In Germany
the Frankfurt School of Marxist aesthetics was founded in 1923 as a
political research institute attached to the University of Frankfurt. Walter
Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse were some of the
important figures attached with this school. They tried to combine
aspects of Formalism with the theories of Marx and Freud. They
produced for the first time studies on mass culture and communication
and their role in social reproduction and domination. The Frankfurt
School also generated one of the first models of a critical cultural studies
that analyzes the processes of cultural production and political economy,
the politics of cultural texts, and audience reception and use of cultural
artifacts.
Marxist scholars like Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht considered art
as a social production. Walter Benjamin’s essay, The Author as
Producer (1934) addresses the question, “What is the literary work’s
position within the relations of production of its time?” Benjamin tries to
argue that artistic production depends upon certain techniques of
production which are part of the productive forces of art like the
publishing, theatrical presentation and so on. A revolutionary artist
should not uncritically accept the existing forces of artistic production,
but should develop and revolutionize those forces. It helps in the creation
of new social relations between artist and audience. In this process,
authors, readers and spectators become collaborators. The experimental
theatre developed by Brecht is a realization of Benjamin’s concept.

Bertolt Brecht, a close friend of Benjamin, developed the concept of Epic

Theatre which dismantled the traditional naturalistic theatre and produced a new kind of
theatre altering the functional relations between stage and audience, text and producer, and
producer and actor. Bourgeois theatre is based on illusionism. The audience is the passive
consumer. The play does not stimulate them to think constructively. According to Brecht
this is based on the assumption that the world is fixed, given and unchangeable and the duty
of art is to provide escapist entertainment. Brecht’s famous contribution is alienation effect.
The technique is to alienate the spectators from the performance and to prevent them from
emotionally identifying with the play. It presents the familiar experience in unfamiliar light
forcing the audience to question the attitudes which was considered to be natural and
unchanging. He employed techniques like back projection, song choreography cutting and
disrupting the action rather than blending it smoothly.
The French Marxist thinker, Louis Althusser further developed the
Marxist approach through the introduction of various concepts
like overdetermination, Ideology etc. Overdetermination refers to an
effect which arises from various causes rather than from a single factor.
This concept undercuts simplistic notions of one to one correspondence
between base and superstructure. Ideology is another term modified by
Althusser. According to him “ideology is a system of representations
endowed with an existence and an historical role at the heart of a given
society.” It obscures social reality by naturalizing beliefs and by
promoting values that support it. The civil society spreads ideology
through the law, textbooks, religious rituals and norms so that the people
imbibe them even without their knowledge. Ideology is instituted by the
state through two apparatuses, Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA)
and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA). The RSA includes law courts,
prison, police, army etc and the ISA include political parties, schools,
media, churches, family, art etc. Althusser imported structuralism to
Marxism. In his view, society is a structural whole which consists of
relatively autonomous levels: legal, political and cultural whose mode of
articulation is only determined by the economy.
The founder of Italian communist Party, Antonio Gramsci was a
politician, political theorist, linguist and philosopher. Known as an
original thinker among Marxist scholars, Gramsci introduced the
concepts like Hegemony and the Subaltern. Hegemony is the domination
of particular section of the society by the powerful classes. Most often it
works through consent rather than by power. It is the moral and
intellectual leadership of the upper class in a particular society. The term
subaltern was originally used by Gramsci as a collective description for a
variety of different and exploited groups who lack class consciousness.
But now it is being used to represent all marginalized sections like
Dalits, women, minorities etc.
An influential figure among the New Left was Raymond Williams. His
writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a
significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts.
Williams was interested in the relationship between language, literature
and society. He coined the critical method, Cultural Materialism which
has four characteristics, Historical context, Theoretical method,
Political /commitment and Textual analysis. Cultural materialism gives
us different perspectives based on what we choose to suppress or reveal
in reading from the past.
Cultural Materialism argues that culture is a constitutive s social
progress which actively creates different ways of life. Similarly creation
of meaning is viewed as a practical material activity which cannot be
consigned to a secondary level. Another important concept in Williams
thought is Structures of feeling. They are values that are changing and
being formed as we live and react to the material world around us. They
subject to change. Williams contributed much for the development of
Marxist aesthetics through his studies on culture. His most important
works include The Country and the City (1973), in which chapters about
literature alternate with chapters on social history. His tightly
written Marxism and Literature (1977) is mainly for specialists, but it
also sets out his own approach to cultural studies which he called
cultural materialism.
Fredric Jameson, an American Marxist intellectual focused on critical
theory and was influence by Kenneth Burke, Gyorgy Lukacs, Ernst
Bloch, Theodor Adorno , Frankfurt School, Louis Althusser and Sartre.
He viewed cultural criticism as an integral feature of Marxist theory.
This position represented a break with more orthodox Marxism, which
held a narrow view of historical materialism. In some ways Jameson has
been concerned, along with other Marxist cultural critics such as Terry
Eagleton to articulate Marxism’s relevance in respect to current
philosophical and literary trends. In 1969, Jameson co-founded
the Marxist Literary Group with a number of his graduate students at the
University of California. His major works include Marxism and Form:
Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971) and The
Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and
Russian Formalism (1972). History came to play an increasingly  central
role in Jameson’s interpretation of both the reading (consumption) and
writing (production) of literary texts. Jameson marked his full-fledged
commitment to Hegelian-Marxist philosophy with the publication of The
Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), the
opening slogan of which is “always historicize” .
Apart from Jameson, contemporary Marxist critics like Terry Eagleton,
Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster, England
and Aijaz Ahmad, a well known Marxist thinker and political
commentator from India have significant contributions in the field of
Marxist theory and aesthetics. Aijaz Ahmad’s famous work, In Theory:
Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992) contained Marxist analysis of the
concepts like Third World Literature and Orientalism. Eagleton on the
other hand published more than 40 books which include Literary Theory:
An Introduction (1983), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), and The
Illusions of Postmodernism (1996). Marxist thought have undergone
huge transformation over the years befitting to the claim of Marx that
change is the only unchanging phenomena in this world. It has been the
backbone of almost all modern theories of culture and criticism. It may
be a paradox that while Marxist practices have received set backs in
recent years Marxist theory has been widely accepted all over the world.