As a result, the “Goblin Market” becomes a social commentary, rather than a mere child’s tale, and it allows the reader to better understand the purpose and times of the author. Criticism must be applicable to criticism itself, for Marxist criticism is at the same time scientific, and, in a way, artistic work. The critic as a commentator, as the person who warns of poison which may taste sweet, as the person who cracks a hard shell to reveal the pearl inside, as the person who discovers the treasure buried in the shadows, as the person who dots all the i’s, who makes generalisation on the basis of artistic material – this is the guide who is essential now, at a time when so many valuable but as yet inexperienced readers have appeared. Of course, publicistic literature which is brilliant in form is an excellent type of propaganda and literature in the broadest sense of the word, but on the contrary, artistic belles-lettres loaded with purely publicistic elements will leave the reader cold, no matter how brilliant the argument. One of the real limits of Western Marxism was that despite its best intentions to do other wise, it, too, tended to treat culture as in the end semi-autonomous from politics, and so as a space necessitating a careful mapping by those whose political commitments demanded a search for alternative social forms and imaginings. However we might assess the status of its activities — a distraction from real politics or a contribution to understanding the complexity of social signification and meaning-making without which there can be no politics — we are in new historical circumstances that have pushed Marxist criticism towards new objects of study and modes of intervention. The Marxist critic can begin modestly, he can even start off by making mistakes, but he mist remember that he will have to climb a long, steep staircase before he reaches the first landing, and even then he must look upon himself only as an apprentice. Marxism shifts towards philosophy, and becomes an “ever increasing academic emplacement”; its central focus is on culture and aesthetics, particularly of the bourgeois kind; and it becomes “Western,” which is to say, “utterly provincial and unin formed about the theoretical cultures of neighbouring countries.”16 For Anderson, this strain of Marxism is also characterized by a consistent pessimism as it develops “new themes absent from classical Marxism — mostly in a speculative manner.”17 “Where the founder of historical materialism moved progressively from philosophy to politics and then economics,” Anderson writes, “the successors of the tradition that emerged after 1920 turned back from economics and politics to philosophy.”18. Their ideas originally formed the basis for Marxism as it was practiced in the nineteenth century. Not that the Marxist critic must shout: “Be watchful!” This is not an appeal to government bodies; it is an objective assessment of the value for our construction of some work or other. There are, it seems to me, three primary forms or modes of intervention that Marxist literary criticism has taken, especially since the 1920s, begin ning with the early work of Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Lukács, and others. Often form is linked not just not just with a single work, but with a whole “school,” a whole epoch. For decades, Marxist theory has occupied a preeminent place in the field of literary criticism. In the second place, the form may simply be weak, i.e., with a new, interesting intention, the writer may not possess the vocabulary, construction of the phrase, of the entire story, chapter, novel, play, etc. What is needed here is what we call social sensitivity, otherwise mistakes are inevitable. Equally, the subsequent history of Marxist aesthetics has hardly comprised the cumulative unfolding of a coherent perspective. Precisely in this: the formal body of a given work should merge into one indivisible whole with its idea, with its content. Firstly, the Marxist critic must be a teacher in relation to the writer. The first mode is inadequate; the second, reduc tive; and the third, confused by the movement between the repudiation of culture as an ideological category and a belief in its potential redemptive and/or political possibilities — a politics grounded in older critical ontologies and epistemologies, even if these are troubled by Marxist categories. Not a single conscientious and honest Communist can deny the nature of the struggle in the question of present-day literature and its evaluation. since the 1960s, the abiding spirit of the crit. One of the only positive things that Anderson says about Western Marxism is that it proved to be unexpectedly immune to reformism. And what must this progress be? By using Marxist criticism and analysis, we can better understand the socioeconomic status and the role of class, race, and culture in society. A writer is valuable when he cultivates virgin soil, when he intuitively breaks into a sphere which logic and statistics would find hard to penetrate. A genuine work of art should, of course, be new in content. To a large degree, literary criticism has absorbed Marxism’s methodological pointers and grasps the implications of its larger critique of literary institutions, even if it hasn’t acted on them (here, the institutional instinct for self-preservation kicks in). A writer is able to greater or lesser extent to find for the thoughts, events and feelings of concern to him those modes of expression which reveal them with the greatest clarity and which make the strongest impression on the readers for whom the work is intended. Here the basic criterion is the same as that of the nascent proletarian ethics: everything that aids the development and victory of the proletariat is good: everything that harms it is evil. This has wormed its way deeply into the everyday attitudes of the proletariat itself, of many Communists even. The main features of the Marxist model are outlined and subjected to criticism. A writer can be enthralled by previously used forms, and although his content is new, it is poured into old wine-skins. The intervening thirty years and the end of state socialism have brought about new geopolitical configurations within which Marxisms circulate, and, as such, new criteria with which to assess their political possibilities. Viewed from the Marxist perspect… In most cases writers possess neither a special talent for nor a special interest in abstract and scientific thinking: it is for this reason, of course, that they sometimes impatiently refuse any offer of help from the publicist-critic. It is these circumstances which make the weapons of art – particularly literature – extremely important at the present time. Marx and Engels used their theory to challenge the dominant ideology of the time by providing another lens through which people could view reality, society, and self.… If literature and culture were simply the space of ideological expression, if ideology was simply false consciousness or a blunt substitute for religion, they wouldn’t create such headaches and problems for Marxist criticism. It can be said that there is only one optimal form which corresponds to a given content. Nor does culture hold the attention of Marxist criticism as it once did, and, where it does capture critical attention, the focus is certainly not bourgeois culture alone. More interestingly, other forms of Marxist criticism have imagined that it is “possible to find the material history which produces a work of art somehow inscribed in its very texture and structure, in the shape of its sentences or its play of narrative viewpoints, in its choice of a metrical scheme or its rhetorical device.”11 This is to use symbolic responses to an objective historical situation as a way to read back through to those circum stances, whether in a direct, unmediated form, or perhaps with the added bonus that inscribed in symbolic forms is some hint of the Real or the social unconscious of a given historical period. The second particular criterion, which proceeds from the general one as defined above, concerns the originality of the form. Yet it is, in fact, precisely as a result of co-operation between important writers and gifted literary critics that truly great literature has always arisen and will continue to arise. As the reader can see, these formal elements, which contradict a direct formula – in every masterpiece the form is determined wholly by the content, and every literary work aspires to become a masterpiece – are by no means divorced from social life. Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976): 29. The form must correspond to the content as closely as possible, giving it maximum expressiveness and assuring the strongest possible impact on the readers for whom the work is intended. The Marxist critic must try to find the fundamental social trend in a given work; he must find out where it is heading, whether this process is arbitrary or not. These are reminders of what to do or not to do — to “Always historicize,” for example, or to remember the centrality of class struggle and the determining role of the forces and relations of production to social life and to literary and cultural production. This is obvious. These points are, of course, directed at Marxist criticism in general and not just at Marxist literary critics, who were in relatively short supply before Lukács (despite Plekhanov and Lenin and Trotsky’s writings on art and literature). It states that only to an extremely insignificant extent do artistic works depend directly upon the forms of production in a given society. “Traditional” Marxism, if “untrue” during this period of a proliferation of new subjects of history, must necessarily become true again when the dreary realities of exploitation, extraction of surplus value, proletarianization, and the resistance to it in the form of class struggle, all slowly reassert themselves on a new and expanded world scale, as they seem currently in the process of doing. The task of the Marxist critic becomes, perhaps, even more complicated, when he turns from evaluation of content to evaluation of form. It should, however, be noted that we have gone too far the other way, our writers concentrating their attention on an easier task – writing, for a cultured circle of readers at a time when, I repeat, literature for the good of the workers and peasants, provided it is talented and successful literature, must be especially valued. They can often lead us to profound conclusions, and, in any case, greatly enrich the treasure-store of our knowledge of life’s phenomena. Economics, the underlying cause of history, was thus the base, and culture, including literature and the other arts, the superstructure. In addition, the martial spirit of the Marxist critic as a revolutionary leads him to express his thoughts sharply, but at the same time it should be mentioned that to camouflage the weakness of his arguments with polemical brilliance is one of the critic’s greatest sins. To judge whether a writer is right, whether he has correctly combined the truth and the basic aspirations of communism, is by no means easy; here, too, perhaps, the correct judgment can be worked out only in the clash of opinions between critics and readers. Not only is the non-proletarian writer they often merely a child in his social attitudes, committing the crudest of errors as a result of his primitive ideas about the laws of social life and his failure to understand the fundamentals of the epoch, etc., but this also happens only too often with a Marxist, proletarian writer. An extremely important factor in the evaluation of the social content of literary works is a second judgment on a work, which, at first analysis, seemed to belong to a range of phenomena alien, sometimes hostile to us. “Culture for Marxism is at once absolutely vital and distinctly secondary: the place where power is crystallized and submission bred, but also somehow ‘superstructural’, something which in its more narrow sense of specialized artistic institutions can only be fashioned out of a certain economic surplus and division of labour, and which even in its more generous anthropological sense of a ‘form of life’ risks papering over certain important conflicts and distinctions.”7 This tension lies at the heart of most forms of Marxist criticism that deal with culture as opposed to economics, politics, or the social. In what should this originality consist? More by this author Follow AndrewM . Since neither Karl Marx nor his collaborator Friedrich Engels ever developed a specific form of cultural criticism themselves, Marxist Criticism has been extrapolated from their writings. It is for the writer himself to draw conclusions, to correct his line. A new life is being built in our country, and literature is learning more and more to reflect this life in its as yet undefined and unstable forms; evidently, too, it will be able to pass to a problem of a still higher order – to the political and, in particular, the moral influence on the very process of construction. To get a sense of why this might be the case — and what might come next — we need to think about the historical conditions of Marxist criticism itself. For Jameson, the phenomenon called “globalization” seems to have eliminated this possible political opening in the gap between formal and real, so that now what we read in his work and that of other Marxist critics is an insistence on the fact that everything is now cultural — an assertion whose implications have been difficult to ascertain or to properly make sense of, perhaps especially so when it comes to the question of what it is one imagines one is doing in engaging with this or that literary text from a Marxist perspective. It used to be widely held that we need no Belinskys, for our writers no longer need guidance. This article is more than 6 years old. Learn More. In every work of art the connection with the psychology of this or that class or of large groups of a broad social nature is determined chiefly by the content. He writes that “the hidden hallmark of Western Marxism as a whole is that it is a product of defeat.”19 This criticism comes at a moment in which actually-existing socialisms — even given their very real flaws and their distance from Marxist theory — presented a viable alternative to forms of liberal democratic capitalism and unionism remained a strong movement across the world. It is indeed quite dangerous now to say about a writer that he entertains “unconscious” or even “semi-conscious,” counter-revolutionary ideas. Above all, the most important formal criterion, which Plekhanov also advocated, should be mentioned here: that is, that literature is the art of images and every invasion of naked ideas or propaganda is always detrimental to the given work. See Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, translated by Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT P, 1997) 17-34. When one single writer or work is being discussed, there is no essential need for an analysis of the basic economic conditions, for here the ever – valid principle, which may be called Plekhanov’s principle, comes into its own with particular force. This includes general criticism about a lack of internal consistency, criticism related to historical materialism, that it is a type of historical determinism, the necessity of suppression of individual rights, issues with the implementation of communism and economic issues such as the distortion or absence of price … Marxist criticism, like other historical critical methods in the nineteenth century, treated literature as a passive product of the culture, specifically of the economic aspect, and, therefore, of class warfare. Marxism represents the philosophy of Karl Marx, a famous German Philosopher of nineteenth century. All this does not make the critic’s work any less important or necessary. ", Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, Volume 24, No. He maintained that the Marxist is distinguished from the “enlightener” assigns to literature specific aims and specific demands; whereas the “enlightener” judges it from the point of view of specific ideals, the Marxist elucidates the natural causes of the appearance of this or that work. Rather, culture is also imagined within Marxism as a space of political possibilities and alternative imaginings — not “politics by other means” in any simple and direct way, but also not ultimately separable from politics. In perhaps its most simple and basic form, Marxist criticism has taken the form of a series of methodological criticisms and challenges to existing forms of criticism. Here, generally speaking, everything is clear. In our constructive effort there must be as little malice as possible. See Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Social Text 1 (1979): 130-48. While political reflections on the category of literature and culture itself have contributed to the practice of literary criticism, they have just as frequently pushed critical analysis in other directions — towards sociological approaches to literature and culture (the latest of which is exemplified by the work of Franco Moretti) or to the study of numerous other modes of cultural expression and practice. It is a heedless and shallow critic who, without thinking or weighing the matter, hurls such accusations. In other words, it studies the Marxist approach to literature. For Anderson, the “first and most fundamental of its characteristics has been the structural divorce of this Marxism from political practice.”15 In Western Marxism, the divide of theory and practice isn’t something to be actively engaged, but has become affirmed as a given, with energies thus devoted entirely to theory at the expense of practice. Drew Milne, “Introduction Part II: Reading Marxist Literary Theory,” in Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader, edited by Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne (New York: Blackwell, 1996) 27. 301 certified writers online. Even if its slow marginalization as a social practice has made it tempting to insist more strongly on its class basis and social untruth, it would be a mistake for Marxism to think that it is done with it once and for all. By and large, the Marxist critic, without falling into cheerful indulgence, which would be very wrong on his part, must be a priori benevolent. The Marxist critic must, on the other hand, be a teacher to the writer in the social sense. It originally consisted of three related ideas: a philosophical anthropology, a theory of history, and an economic and political program. Marxism has at the core of its theory and practice the analysis of history and of the shifts that take place within it; it assumes that the economic is (“in the last instance”) of prime importance in how human social life is organized. He determines its connection with this or that social group and the influence which the impact of the work can have on social life; and then he turns to the form, primarily from the point of view of explaining how this form fulfils its aims, that is, serves to make the work as expressive and convincing as possible. What, then, is the general criterion for evaluation here? Hopefully, spelling out these three modes can help to show us where Marxist literary criticism stands today and what might be on the horizon. With what can we contrast this genuine originality of form? Pope says he is not a Marxist, but defends criticism of capitalism. Even in the field of evaluating the social content of a work, however, everything is far from simple. They depend on them through such intermediate links as the class structure of society and the class psychology which has formed as a result of class interests. Marxism, a body of doctrine developed by Karl Marx and, to a lesser extent, by Friedrich Engels in the mid-19th century. From this point of view, new content in every new work demands new form. It is self-evident that this criterion of Plekhanov’s is not an absolute. But the man who distorts the very essence of Marxist criticism because he is afraid to declare aloud the results of his objective social analysis, must be labeled as careless and politically passive. With respect to literature, some forms of criticism have sought to separate out reified forms of culture from other, more revolutionary forms; in many cases this has reflected existing taxonomies, with (say) mass culture being seen as the most ideological, and forms of experimental or explicitly political literature being seen as having escaped instrumentalization and so having special significance (Jameson speaks of modernism in this fashion, even if at other points he insists on the opposite point). Marx viewed history as a series of struggles between … By this is meant not only specific Marxist training but also specific talent, without which there can be no criticism. Inadequacies of this kind cannot fail to be noticed. Excursions of that kind into tangible realities turn philosophy into the refuse of history, with the subject-matter of which it is confused, in the manner of a fethisistic belief in culture per se. 17. The influence of Europe, of the past, of the remnants of the old ruling classes, of the new bourgeoisie which is to a certain extent flourishing under the New Economic Policy – all these are making themselves felt. 2: Marxism and Literature Revisited. According to Marxists, even literature itself is a social institution and has a specific ideological function, based on the background and ideology of the author. Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Free Association Books, 1988) 109 and 110. We have hitherto confined our attention mainly to the sphere of Marxist criticism as a function of literary scholarship. This spatial move is also a temporal one — it suggests (questionably) that literature and other cultural forms once lived out the political promise of their semi-autonomy from social life, before collapsing into the undifferentiated murk of instrumentality. 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