My question is pretty surface-level because I see a lot of contemporary book reviews and pieces that discuss Marxist readings of a literary text and I’m wondering how we can define this kind of reading or lens when applied to literature. Marx himself references Robinson Crusoe, but today what are the limits and common features of a Marxist reading? What do these readings look like when an author identifies as a Marxist and claims to represent Marxist structures in their novels (like Sally Rooney) as opposed to one that doesn’t? Are there texts that are cornerstones when it comes to Marxist readings?
Is it ever possible for literature to NOT be a commodity? Is commodified literature all we have?
Does open access publication achieve the status of what a “socialist” (especially a Communist, in the Marxist sense) literature might look like? (This is rather speculative, but it seems that open access works, at least to some extent, get rid of SOME necessity to treat them as private property, even if public-facing.)
Has there ever been literature that has not alienated the laborer (i.e., the author) in the way that Marx’s 1844 manuscripts describe? Presumably so, but now a question arises about the “history of literature” and its (non-)relations to capitalism (especially a form where alienation is predominant, and maybe all forms of it are, necessarily so) from the Renaissance to today – that is, about whether “literature” “existed” prior to capitalism and, if it did, if we would still call that “literature” or, rather, something else. (Obviously, we can all point to certain forms of oral literature, Homer, medieval poetry, etc., but maybe, I mean to say, these are categorically different forms of “literature” than what today’s “literature” looks like – or, are they not, and in what way?) At any rate, in 2025, “literature” (itself still not a “stable” object “all of us” might point at and recognize with ease, however) might, I fear, be irrevocably alienated/alienating (and, might I add, this seems to be mostly a “bad” thing, but maybe there are some positives to draw from this, too?). This concern leads me to my final question below…
Is there something about literature that necessarily resists becoming alienated from its author (or resists alienating its author)?
Like Francesca, I was wondering about contemporary applications/implications of Marx, specifically about Sally Rooney’s novels, or similar authors (Rooney is a Marxist and her novels include overt references to Marxism). Haven’t her novels reached a sort of “fetishization” as objects (anticipation for the newest book to come out and then buying that book) and subsequently as TV shows? Is that perhaps an intentional move? Or is the commodification/fetishization of a Marxist-esque narrative necessary to spread the message?
Or, does Rooney’s awareness of the mechanisms Marx describes place her outside (above?) of them?
What are the limits of Marxist literary criticism? Besides more superficial observations about the artist as proletarian and the conditions of production for literary works, can cultural studies contribute much more to our understanding of how capitalism influences art? After works like Barthes’ Mythologies, inter alia, can literary criticism achieve any political end successfully, a la Eagleton?
“This fact expresses merely that the project which labour produces – labour’s product- confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour.” (657)
I chose this passage because it made me wonder how this would apply to works of art or music. Engels and Marx claim that since one’s labor is materialized, the process of alienation begins, which brings the producer further away from their product. Later on, they call the producer “slave” of that product. Obviously, some artists (of any type) produce art because that is their way of making money. However, others do it because it pleases them. How can art, something that is usually very personal, make its producer a slave? One could argue that the artists find themselves in their art- they don’t lose their sense of reality.
I was reading Jameson for a different class, and in his analysis of a book ( My Struggle, by Knausgaard) he contrasts the concept of “commodity” to the one of “item”, claiming that in postmodernity we have abandoned the attempt to “estrange” our daily lives and see it in new poetic, or nightmarish ways, adding that in a “situation in which everything by now is a commodity, we have abandoned the quest for new languages to describe the stream of the self-same or new psychologies to diagnose its distressingly unoriginal reactions and physic event. All that is left is to itemise them, list all the items that come by”.
( Jameson, Itemised, LRB, vol.40 N.21, 8 november 2018, p.6)
Is Jameson implying that a marxist reading of postmodernism is not possible anymore?What do we make of the difference between ‘commodity’ and ‘item’ in literature?
I’m also interested in contemporary applications of the passages from Marx, and just finished Intermezzo the other day, so very timely! Ivan’s observations on his work as a freelance data visualist and its worth. Anyway..
The line from 660 “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” seems to be the foundationt of Marxist literary criticism. If authors are inextricably bound by their social contexts, which are reflected into and throughout their works, we can pair in an offhand series of examples Zola with social realism, Beckett with fragmented alienation, and maybe Annie Ernaux or Karl Ove Knausguard with auto-fiction.
How does auto-fiction or any other current literary trend underline Marx’s binding together of context and content? What about pop culture as opposed to high culture? What place does alienation have in the assembly line production of mass media, i.e. Netflix? Can we understand literary or artistic production alongside the observation that as the value of the world of things increases, the value of the world of humans decreases?
A throughline of Marx’s excerpts appear to be the intentional, and often arbitrary, dislocations between the systems upholding the “superstructure” of society (666). There’s “the separation of labour, capital and landed property” (which “political economy does not disclose the source of”); the distance between objects and their derivation in human labor and in the very human itself; the removal of value, and interiority, from the value-producing worker (656).
Literature and language, although not exactly in the same terms as Marx, revolve around dislocations too, both in content and form. A text can evince Marx’s explicitly economic separations through its subject matter, while formally engaging in supra-textual dislocations between, for example, authors and readers; publishing houses and writers; signifiers and the signified; intention and reception; polisemia and equivocality. Where, in the literary world, can we see or apply Marx’s intentional, arbitrary “dislocations” within the systems that uphold existing structures of power?
In the Arcades project, Benjamin writes that “the autonomy of art has its origin in the concealment of labor.” The commodity of the art-object is totally alienated, or in Benjamin’s words, the “trace of its own production [disappears] from the object of consumption” (Arcades, 670). Yet the autonomy of art — its ability to outlive and speak back to different kinds of people — is perhaps its defining trait: art and the artist are alienated much the way a commodity is, though the use value be minimal.
In a socialist utopia, what is the function of art?
Is it possible to free art from individuality? Is non-autonomous art art?
At the top of page 666, Marx says that “Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development,” i.e., Greek art may seem autonomous or universal, but the economic and social conditions are concealed, giving the impression of an ever-present world that in reality will never return, if it even existed in the first place. Is there more to criticism than the peeling back of this curtain?
Another way of asking this question — is there any criticism after Marx?
I’m really interested in better understanding this passage:
“As a result, therefore, man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.” (659)
Obviously this comes from an older assumption that being human means actively rising above one’s animality. But what are his human functions? Work? Art?
Many people do not create things that outlast them. In other words, they do not put themselves, metonymically, into a meaningful object that carries some part of themselves into the future. They simply eat and procreate and make friends. Is this animality? Or are humans that invest in meaningful interpersonal relationships, that raise children, that clothe their family – are they also participating in that important human-forming activity? Must this human-forming activity have a quality of production, whether material or intellectual?
I became obsessed with the footnote about Adam Smith which is cut off in our abridged Chapter 2 of Capital on page 137. In reviewing the difference between his own theoretical insights regarding the labor theory of value, and those of Adam Smith, Marx notes that both he and Smith believed that the expenditure of labor-power manifests itself in the value of commodities. “[B]ut then again,” Marx added, Smith “views this expenditure merely as a sacrifice of rest, freedom and happiness, not as also man’s normal life-activity. Of course, he has the modern wage-labourer in mind.” At the end of the note, Engels creates a distinction between “work,” which creates use-values and is qualitatively determined, and “labour,” which creates value and is only measured quantitatively. I interpret from this note that for this early Marx, the socialist worker would not view work as a sacrifice of rest, freedom, or happiness; he whistles while he works, or something like that.
I was struck in the footnote by my identification with… Adam Smith. Within alienated regimes of production, there is a striking antagonism between managerial discipline and organization, on the one hand, and decadence, disorganization, and desire, on the other. Adam Smith’s notion that labor is “a sacrifice of rest, freedom and happiness” is best understood as a recognition of this antagonism. I guess here I have a question about cultural radicalism within the Marxist tradition. What is the role of culture in Marxism? If the cultural logic of capital is to organize people for productivity and require laborers to become self disciplined subjects so that they will work all by themselves, shouldn’t radical Marxist cultural politics be driven by a pursuit of abundance, pleasure, and freedom? What does this look like and how does it contend with this early Marx.
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12 Comments
Francesca
My question is pretty surface-level because I see a lot of contemporary book reviews and pieces that discuss Marxist readings of a literary text and I’m wondering how we can define this kind of reading or lens when applied to literature. Marx himself references Robinson Crusoe, but today what are the limits and common features of a Marxist reading? What do these readings look like when an author identifies as a Marxist and claims to represent Marxist structures in their novels (like Sally Rooney) as opposed to one that doesn’t? Are there texts that are cornerstones when it comes to Marxist readings?
Alex Riedel
Is it ever possible for literature to NOT be a commodity? Is commodified literature all we have?
Does open access publication achieve the status of what a “socialist” (especially a Communist, in the Marxist sense) literature might look like? (This is rather speculative, but it seems that open access works, at least to some extent, get rid of SOME necessity to treat them as private property, even if public-facing.)
Has there ever been literature that has not alienated the laborer (i.e., the author) in the way that Marx’s 1844 manuscripts describe? Presumably so, but now a question arises about the “history of literature” and its (non-)relations to capitalism (especially a form where alienation is predominant, and maybe all forms of it are, necessarily so) from the Renaissance to today – that is, about whether “literature” “existed” prior to capitalism and, if it did, if we would still call that “literature” or, rather, something else. (Obviously, we can all point to certain forms of oral literature, Homer, medieval poetry, etc., but maybe, I mean to say, these are categorically different forms of “literature” than what today’s “literature” looks like – or, are they not, and in what way?) At any rate, in 2025, “literature” (itself still not a “stable” object “all of us” might point at and recognize with ease, however) might, I fear, be irrevocably alienated/alienating (and, might I add, this seems to be mostly a “bad” thing, but maybe there are some positives to draw from this, too?). This concern leads me to my final question below…
Is there something about literature that necessarily resists becoming alienated from its author (or resists alienating its author)?
Joanna Ligon
Like Francesca, I was wondering about contemporary applications/implications of Marx, specifically about Sally Rooney’s novels, or similar authors (Rooney is a Marxist and her novels include overt references to Marxism). Haven’t her novels reached a sort of “fetishization” as objects (anticipation for the newest book to come out and then buying that book) and subsequently as TV shows? Is that perhaps an intentional move? Or is the commodification/fetishization of a Marxist-esque narrative necessary to spread the message?
Or, does Rooney’s awareness of the mechanisms Marx describes place her outside (above?) of them?
Alex Lleras
What are the limits of Marxist literary criticism? Besides more superficial observations about the artist as proletarian and the conditions of production for literary works, can cultural studies contribute much more to our understanding of how capitalism influences art? After works like Barthes’ Mythologies, inter alia, can literary criticism achieve any political end successfully, a la Eagleton?
Paraskevi Gkana-Alberico (She/Her)
“This fact expresses merely that the project which labour produces – labour’s product- confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour.” (657)
I chose this passage because it made me wonder how this would apply to works of art or music. Engels and Marx claim that since one’s labor is materialized, the process of alienation begins, which brings the producer further away from their product. Later on, they call the producer “slave” of that product. Obviously, some artists (of any type) produce art because that is their way of making money. However, others do it because it pleases them. How can art, something that is usually very personal, make its producer a slave? One could argue that the artists find themselves in their art- they don’t lose their sense of reality.
Irene
I was reading Jameson for a different class, and in his analysis of a book ( My Struggle, by Knausgaard) he contrasts the concept of “commodity” to the one of “item”, claiming that in postmodernity we have abandoned the attempt to “estrange” our daily lives and see it in new poetic, or nightmarish ways, adding that in a “situation in which everything by now is a commodity, we have abandoned the quest for new languages to describe the stream of the self-same or new psychologies to diagnose its distressingly unoriginal reactions and physic event. All that is left is to itemise them, list all the items that come by”.
( Jameson, Itemised, LRB, vol.40 N.21, 8 november 2018, p.6)
Is Jameson implying that a marxist reading of postmodernism is not possible anymore?What do we make of the difference between ‘commodity’ and ‘item’ in literature?
Peter
I’m also interested in contemporary applications of the passages from Marx, and just finished Intermezzo the other day, so very timely! Ivan’s observations on his work as a freelance data visualist and its worth. Anyway..
The line from 660 “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” seems to be the foundationt of Marxist literary criticism. If authors are inextricably bound by their social contexts, which are reflected into and throughout their works, we can pair in an offhand series of examples Zola with social realism, Beckett with fragmented alienation, and maybe Annie Ernaux or Karl Ove Knausguard with auto-fiction.
How does auto-fiction or any other current literary trend underline Marx’s binding together of context and content? What about pop culture as opposed to high culture? What place does alienation have in the assembly line production of mass media, i.e. Netflix? Can we understand literary or artistic production alongside the observation that as the value of the world of things increases, the value of the world of humans decreases?
Alice Ascoli
A throughline of Marx’s excerpts appear to be the intentional, and often arbitrary, dislocations between the systems upholding the “superstructure” of society (666). There’s “the separation of labour, capital and landed property” (which “political economy does not disclose the source of”); the distance between objects and their derivation in human labor and in the very human itself; the removal of value, and interiority, from the value-producing worker (656).
Literature and language, although not exactly in the same terms as Marx, revolve around dislocations too, both in content and form. A text can evince Marx’s explicitly economic separations through its subject matter, while formally engaging in supra-textual dislocations between, for example, authors and readers; publishing houses and writers; signifiers and the signified; intention and reception; polisemia and equivocality. Where, in the literary world, can we see or apply Marx’s intentional, arbitrary “dislocations” within the systems that uphold existing structures of power?
Serena
In the Arcades project, Benjamin writes that “the autonomy of art has its origin in the concealment of labor.” The commodity of the art-object is totally alienated, or in Benjamin’s words, the “trace of its own production [disappears] from the object of consumption” (Arcades, 670). Yet the autonomy of art — its ability to outlive and speak back to different kinds of people — is perhaps its defining trait: art and the artist are alienated much the way a commodity is, though the use value be minimal.
In a socialist utopia, what is the function of art?
Is it possible to free art from individuality? Is non-autonomous art art?
At the top of page 666, Marx says that “Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development,” i.e., Greek art may seem autonomous or universal, but the economic and social conditions are concealed, giving the impression of an ever-present world that in reality will never return, if it even existed in the first place. Is there more to criticism than the peeling back of this curtain?
Another way of asking this question — is there any criticism after Marx?
Dana Burns
I’m really interested in better understanding this passage:
“As a result, therefore, man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.” (659)
Obviously this comes from an older assumption that being human means actively rising above one’s animality. But what are his human functions? Work? Art?
Many people do not create things that outlast them. In other words, they do not put themselves, metonymically, into a meaningful object that carries some part of themselves into the future. They simply eat and procreate and make friends. Is this animality? Or are humans that invest in meaningful interpersonal relationships, that raise children, that clothe their family – are they also participating in that important human-forming activity? Must this human-forming activity have a quality of production, whether material or intellectual?
Jodie Kahan (she/her)
[sorry i am so late!]
I became obsessed with the footnote about Adam Smith which is cut off in our abridged Chapter 2 of Capital on page 137. In reviewing the difference between his own theoretical insights regarding the labor theory of value, and those of Adam Smith, Marx notes that both he and Smith believed that the expenditure of labor-power manifests itself in the value of commodities. “[B]ut then again,” Marx added, Smith “views this expenditure merely as a sacrifice of rest, freedom and happiness, not as also man’s normal life-activity. Of course, he has the modern wage-labourer in mind.” At the end of the note, Engels creates a distinction between “work,” which creates use-values and is qualitatively determined, and “labour,” which creates value and is only measured quantitatively. I interpret from this note that for this early Marx, the socialist worker would not view work as a sacrifice of rest, freedom, or happiness; he whistles while he works, or something like that.
I was struck in the footnote by my identification with… Adam Smith. Within alienated regimes of production, there is a striking antagonism between managerial discipline and organization, on the one hand, and decadence, disorganization, and desire, on the other. Adam Smith’s notion that labor is “a sacrifice of rest, freedom and happiness” is best understood as a recognition of this antagonism. I guess here I have a question about cultural radicalism within the Marxist tradition. What is the role of culture in Marxism? If the cultural logic of capital is to organize people for productivity and require laborers to become self disciplined subjects so that they will work all by themselves, shouldn’t radical Marxist cultural politics be driven by a pursuit of abundance, pleasure, and freedom? What does this look like and how does it contend with this early Marx.
Coco Fitterman
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16iypU8VgRxwa4h6fyGh-0DvePb42fRoYIMMINoGfuYQ/edit?usp=sharing