Marxist criticism of Literature

    The sociology of literature concerns itself chiefly with what might be called the means of literary production, distribution, and exchange in a particular society... but taken by itself it is neither particularly Marxist nor particularly critical. It is, indeed, for the most part a suitably tamed, degutted version of Marxist criticism, appropriate for Western consumption. 

   Marxist criticism of literature aim to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its forms, styles, and meanings. But it also means grasping those forms, styles, and meanings as the products of a particular history. 

   Henri Matisse: all arts bears the imprint of its historical epoch. but the great art is that in which this imprint is most deeply marked. 

   Most students of literature are taught otherwise: the greatest art is that which timelessly transcends its historical conditions. 

    The production of ideas, concepts and consciousness is first of all directly interwoven with the material intercourse of man, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the spiritual intercourse of men, appear here as the direct efflux of men's material behavior .. we do not proceed from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as described, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at corporeal man; rather we proceed from the really active man... Consciousness does not determine life; life determine consciousness. 

                     ---- Marx and Engels: The German Ideology (1845-6) 


    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 stage of 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. 

                  ------   Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)


   From economic structure (-- say the capitalist who owns those means of production and the proletarian class whose labor-power the capitalist buys for profit) emerges a superstructure - certain forms of law and politics, a certain kind of a state, whose essential function is to legitimate the power of the social class which owns the means of economic production. But the superstructure contains more than this: it also consists of certain "definite forms of social consciousness" (political, religious, ethical, aesthetic, and so on), which is what Marxism designates as ideology. The function of ideology, also, is to legitimate the power of the ruling class in society; in the last analysis, the dominant ideas of a society are the ideas of its ruling class.

  Art, then, is for Marxism part of the "superstructure" of society. It is part of a society's ideology. 

   To understand literature, then, means understanding the total social process of which it is part. 

   Georgy Plekhanov: The social mentality of an age is conditioned by that age's social relations. This is nowhere quite as evident as in the history of art and literature. Literary works are not mysteriously inspired, or explicable simply in terms of their author's psychology. They are forms of perception, particular ways of seeing the world; and as such they have a relation to that dominant way of seeing the world which is the social mentality or ideology of an age.  That ideology, in turn, is the product of the concrete social relations into which men enter at a particular time and place; it is the way those class-relations are experienced, legitimized and perpetuated. Moreover, men are not free to choose their social relations; they are constrained into them by material necessity - by the nature and stage of development of their mode of economic production. 


   But we do not understand ideology either unless we grasp the part it plays in the society as a whole - how it consists of a definite, historically relative structure of perception which underpins the power of a particular social class. This is not an easy task, since an ideology is never a simple reflection of a ruling class's ideas; on the contrary, it is always a complex phenomenon, which may incorporate conflicting, even contradictory, views of the world.  

  Take, for example, the great Placido Gulf scene in Conrad's Nostromo.... the radical pessimism ... cannot simply be accounted for in terms of "psychological" factors in Conrad himself; for individual psychology is also a social product. The pessimism of Conrad's world view is rather a unique transformation into art of an ideological pessimism rife in his period - a sense of history as futile and cyclical, of individuals, as impenetrable and solitary, of human values as relativistic and irrational, which marks a drastic crisis in the ideology of the Western bourgeois class to which Conrad allied himself. ... his historical situation allows his to access to such insights. Whether those insights are in political terms "progressive" or "reactionary" (Conrad's are certainly the latter) is not the point - any more than it is to the point that most of the agreed major writers of the twentieth century - Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence - are political conservatives who each had truck with fascism. Marxist criticism, rather than apologizing for that fact, explains it - sees that, in the absence of genuinely revolutionary art, only a radical conservatism, hostile like Marxism to the withered values of liberal bourgeois society, could produce the most significant literature. 

   It would be a mistake to imply that Marxist criticism moves mechanically from "text" to "ideology" to "social relations" to "productive forces." It is concerned, rather, with the unity of these "levels" of society. Literature may be part of the superstructure, but it is not merely the passive reflection of the economic base. 

      According to the materialist conception of history, the determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction in real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. if therefore somebody twists this into a statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure - political forms of the class struggle and its consequence, constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc. - forms of law - and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the combatants: political, legal, and philosophical theories, religious ideas, and their further development into systems of dogma - also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggle and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. 

                     ---- Engels: Letter to Joseph Bloch (1890)