With the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite East European countries and the establishment of state capitalism in China and Vietnam in the name of socialism, it has been widely assumed that Marxism as a method of studying social, economic, ideological and cultural structures and their production has also become irrelevant and obsolete. Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in the German town of Trier and the world is celebrating bicentenary of his birth. It is obvious that everything he wrote in the 19th Century cannot pass the test of time. At the same time it is also true that he was among those few who very deeply and profoundly influenced the way the last century shaped itself up – Darwin, Einstein and Freud being the others.
Marx was primarily a philosopher and a political economist who, as his followers claim, discovered the laws of motion of capitalism and predicted that when the forces of production became so developed that there was dissonance between them and the relations of production, a revolutionary rupture would take place under the leadership of the working class. Yet, his method of analysis influenced people who worked in diverse fields like history, economics, sociology, anthropology, literature, theatre, art, aesthetics and even psychology. The Marxian method was effectively used to study culture and all the activities associated with it.
Although literature, art or aesthetics were never central to Marx’s stupendous research into the dynamics of social and economic evolution, it is also a fact that twice he made plans to write systematically on aesthetics. As he was greatly influenced by Hegelian dialectical method before he “turned it upside down” to make a materialist analysis, he along with Bruno Bauer worked in the winter of 1842 on a critique of Hegel’s views on art and religion. Later in 1857, he sought to comply with a bid from the “New American Cyclopaedia” for an article on “Aesthetics”, but neither project was ever realised.
Yet, he continued to grapple with questions related to art. “What makes art an eternal value despite its historicity?” was the question he posed in his introduction to “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859). Those critics who even now accuse him of economic determinism and try to confine him in the closed box of base-superstructure metaphor must pay attention to Marx’s deep concern to show that art by its very nature is not “historically determined” because then it will not have any permanent meaning or any absolute value as art per se .
The origins of the base-superstructure model, which Marx used in a metaphorical or figurative sense but which was later turned into rigid schema both by his followers as well as critics, can be traced to this passage in the above-mentioned work. “In the social production of life,” wrote Marx, “men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite state of the 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.” He further said, “With the change of the economic foundation, the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict.”
However, Marx, contrary to what his critics claimed, never espoused economic determinism and was careful to observe: “It is well known that certain periods of highest development of art stand in no direct connection with the general development of society, nor with the material basis and the skeleton structure of its organisation. Witness the example of the Greeks as compared with modern art or even Shakespeare.”
Analysing social realities
Marx, and later Lenin who led the Russian Revolution, analysed Balzac and Tolstoy respectively to show how a great writer can shed his or her class sympathies and depict the hidden social reality. Lenin in fact described Tolstoy, a highly placed member of the aristocracy, as the “mirror of the Russian revolution” because of his deep understanding and realistic portrayal of the peasantry.
Marx’s cultural theory gave rise to a large number of literary writers, cultural theorists and critics including Antonio Gramsci, George Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, T. W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch and Raymond Williams and influenced even Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical thinking.
Book cover
Had it not been the influence of Marxist theory of art and culture, India would not have witnessed the great cultural movements spearheaded by Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) and Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) that made deep inroads into almost every region and language. Although Premchand, the tallest Hindi fiction writer of his time, was by no stretch of imagination a Marxist, yet his Presidential Address at the PWA’s inaugural session at Lucknow on April 9, 1936 clearly spelt out the progressive, leftist agenda by calling for a new definition of Beauty. The PWA initially received goodwill messages and blessings from literary stalwarts who ranged from Rabindranath Tagore, Allama Iqbal, Maulvi Abdul Haq, Maulana Hasrat Mohani, Acharya Narendra Dev, Tara Chand and Sarojini Naidu. Sajjad Zaheer, Mulkaraj Anand, Mahmuduzzafar and his wife Rashid Jahan, who had turned Marxist while studying in England, were the main organisers of this momentous event.
Besides them, well known Urdu and Hindi writers like Ali Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Ismat Chughtai, Krishan Chandar, Sahir Ludhiyanvi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Nagarjun, Amrit Rai, Rahul Sankrityayan, Narendra Sharma, Ram Vilas Sharma, Prakash Chandra Gupta, Shivdan Singh Chauhan, Namwar Singh, Bhairav Prasad Gupta, Muktibodh and so many others gradually became associated with the movement and a new kind of poetry, fiction and literary criticism took roots.
Similarly, IPTA too attracted emerging talents like Ravi Shankar, Bimal Roy, Ritwik Ghatak, Bijon Bhattacharya, Salil Chaudhury, Shailendra, Prem Dhawan, Shambhu Mitra and others who creatively contributed to the creation of a pro-people cultural movement in the world of performing arts under the ideological influence of the Marxian vision.
The writer is a seasoned literary critic
