ABSTRACT
I HAVE SPOKEN SO far of literature in terms of form, politics, ideology, consciousness. But all this overlooks a simple fact which is obvious to everyone, and not least to a Marxist. Literature may be an artefact, a product of social consciousness, a world vision; but it is also an industry. Books are not just structures of meaning, they are also commodities produced by publishers and sold on the market at a profit. Drama is not just a collection of literary texts; it is a capitalist business which employs certain men (authors, directors, actors, stagehands) to produce a commodity to be consumed by an audience at a profit. Critics are not just analysts of texts; they are also (usually) academics hired by the state to prepare students ideologically for their functions within capitalist society. Writers are not just transposers of trans-individual mental structures, they are also workers hired by publishing houses to produce commodities which will sell. ‘A writer’, Marx comments in Theories of Surplus Value, ‘is a worker not in so far as he produces ideas, but in so far as he enriches the publisher, in so far as he is working for a wage.’ It is a salutary reminder. Art may be, as Engels remarks, the most highly ‘mediated’ of social products in its relation to the economic base, but in another sense it is also part of that economic base – one kind of economic practice, one type of commodity production, among many. It is easy enough for critics, even Marxist critics, to forget this fact, since literature deals with human consciousness and tempts those of us who are students of it to rest content within that realm. The Marxist critics I shall discuss in this chapter are those who have grasped the fact that art is a form of social production – grasped it not as an external fact about it to be delegated to the sociologist of literature, but as a fact which closely determines the nature of art itself. For these critics – I have in mind mainly Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht – art is first of all a social practice rather than an object to be academically dissected. We may see literature as a text, but we may also see it as a social activity, a form of social and economic production which exists alongside, and interrelates with, other such forms.
