Marxist School Research Articles

Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory

take up once again the unresolved dispute between the Marxist and formalist schools. My attempt to bridge the gap between literature and history, between historical and aesthetic approaches, begins at the point at which both schools stop. Their methods understand the literary fact in terms of the circular aesthetic system of production and of representation. In doing so, they deprive literature of a dimension which unalterably belongs to its aesthetic character as well as to its social function: its reception and impact. Reader, listener and spectator-in short, the audience-play an extremely limited role in both literary theories. Orthodox Marxist aesthetics treats the readerif at all-the same way as it does the author; it inquires about his social position or describes his place within the structure of the society. The formalist school needs the reader only as a perceiving subject who follows the directions in the text in order to perceive its form or discover its techniques of procedure. It assumes that the reader has the theoretical knowledge of a philologist sufficiently versed in the tools of literature to be able to reflect on them. The Marxist school, on the other hand, actually equates the spontaneous experience of the reader with the scholarly interest of historical materialism, which seeks to discover relationships between the economic basis of production and the literary work as part of the intellectual superstructure. However, as Walther Bulst has stated, no text was ever written to be read and interpreted philologically by philologists, 1 nor, may I add, historically by his-

The Political and Social Prerequisites for a Soviet-Type Economy

Very many will be rendered obsolete, and knowledge shall be multiple. Now while the first part of this is a cliche it is less common, in the deplorably specialised state of the social sciences, that any contribution should be multiple. For what I have to say this afternoon belongs to no particular discipline as the learned world defines them, but lies upon the borderlines of many. It is not so located for fun or for display, but in order to answer the question posed. It is methodologically very backward since it contains no algebraical symbols and probably could not have contained any, even had a more skilled hand than mine been at work. Suitable stuff, then, for an inaugural, and moreover doubly apposite, since my appointment is joint between a school of humanities and a school of social science, and since it concerns the Soviet Five Year Plans, and like them is delivered twelve months late. Practising politicians are by definition political economists, and political sociologists too. Them apart, almost the only modern students of this art are Marxists. Marx's own interest in it was no greater than, say, Mill's, for political economy was a central part of 19th century thought. But notoriously Mill left no successors,2 and the art degenerated in the West from, as it were, the Royal Academy portrait to the political poster. In reviving political economy, then, we have to take a stance vis-a-vis the only modern school of it, the Marxist school. It is not particularly appropriate, it may indeed be merely confusing, that I should be forced by my specialised ignorance to do so in the context of the Soviet-type economy. For Marxists know little about that type of economy, and have contributed almost nothing to its elucidation.:

Political Ideology as a Tool of Functional Analysis in Socio-Political Dynamics: An Hypothesis

There is so little agreement concerning theories of political ideology that it may be appropriate to devote some preliminary remarks to the main orientations of recent research. I shall then state the approach to political ideology which is adopted in this paper.“Political ideology” has different meanings in the two principal fields of knowledge in which it is used: sociology and political theory. The ambiguity which results is the greater because neither of these disciplines has as yet integrated this notion into the main body of its operational concepts. If the Marxist school of thought be excepted, one may well state that the notion of political ideology plays only a secondary and marginal role as a tool of sociopolitical analysis.Political theorists and philosophers generally view political ideologies as a part of the complex of forces which sustains the political structure or tends to its overthrow. For them, political ideologies are one of the means to power, or, as stated recently by Anthony Downs, of getting votes. This approach is adequate so far as it goes, but in my view it narrows the notion of political ideology to one of its most manifest functions in democracies. Furthermore, most such treatments of political ideology assimilate it to a pseudo-philosophy. When this pseudo-philosophy is considered good, it is said to uplift and educate the people; when it is considered bad, it is held to mystify and corrupt them.

Isolationism in Economic Method

I. The isolationism of the orthodox, Marxist, and historical schools in their concepts of economic science, 439; in their distribution theory, 441. — IL Problems of definition and classification, 442; distinction between and working problem, 444. — III. Formulation of the ultimate problem of distribution theory, 445. — IV. The working problem of the orthodox or maximization school, 447; of the Marxist school, 451; of the historical school, 457. — V. Components of isolationism, 465. — VI. Origins of isolationism, 468. — VII. Conclusion, 471.

Poverty and the Marxist School

Marxist revolution, Bebel tells us, differs from all its predecessors in this, that it does not seek for new forms of religion, but denies religion altogether. ‘The first word of religion,’ wrote Friedrich Engels, ‘is a lie’. ‘The idea of God’, said Marx, ‘must be destroyed; it is the keystone of perverted civilisation’. ‘It is useless’, adds Bax, ‘blinking the fact that the Christian doctrine is more revolting to the higher moral sense of today than the Saturnalia of the cult of Proserpina could have been to the conscience of the early Christians’; and elsewhere: ‘In what sense socialism is not religion will now be clear. It utterly despises “the other world”, with all its stage properties—that is, the present objects of religion’.The only claim, in short, that the Revolution of Karl Marx has ever made to religious recognition is that it ‘brings religion from Heaven to earth’. But its major prophets have never been so rash as to promise the translation of Heaven itself to earth. On the contrary the convert to Marx’s materialist dialectic has been heard to put it to the latter’s credit that it has no dope to offer the faithful, no pie whether in the shy or on earth. Herein lies the appeal of the revolution to asceticism. And we cannot deny that the revolution has had an abundance of witnesses, in men and women singularly devoid of self-gratification. The old inevitable gibe about communists foregathering at the sea-side like lords’ and having cars, as other men,