ABSTRACT
Social conditions are determined by conditions of production. And when materialist criticism approached a work, it was accustomed to ask how this work stood in relation to the social relations of productions of its time. For the transformation of the forms and instruments of production in the way desired by a progressive intelligentsia - that is, one interested in freeing the means of production and serving the class struggle - Brecht coined the term Umfunktionierung. He was the first to make of intellectuals the far-reaching demand: not to supply the apparatus of production without, to the utmost extent possible, changing it in accordance with socialism. The author as producer discovers - in discovering his solidarity with the proletariat - that simultaneity with certain other producers who earlier seemed scarcely to concern him. The transformation of the political struggle from a compulsion to decide into an object of contemplative enjoyment is the defining characteristic of this literature.
