Literature and Politics

There is an extensive tradition of Marxist interpretation of literature, so too Marxist analyses of the production, dissemination and reception of literary works and the formation of literary cultures. There has been notable analysis of the influence of literature upon Marx (namely his love of the Greco-Roman classics and of Shakespeare and Goethe) not only on his prose but on the very terminology of some his key ideas. Furthermore, whole critical domains have been opened up by the intersection of politics and literature provided by Marxism (for example, post-colonial studies, cultural studies and, mutatis mutandis, Feminism). There is, however, another dimension to this intersection which is rarely, if at all, grasped sufficiently, a dimension that is also deeper than the well-established idea of the literary or rhetorical element of any political utterance, or the political nature of any literary utterance: in the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels present capitalism at its very core as fictional. More specifically, the kind of world capitalism produces according to Marx and Engels is a comedic, satiric world: under capitalism, the world has become a parody of itself. Here, the intersection of politics (or in this case, political economy) and literature is presented in an entirely different manner than the usual articulation of these two domains — here, a political phenomenon is defined as a literary mode not described by one. This paper will investigate the consequences of this radically different approach to the understanding of non-fictional phenomena (an approach in fact more or less abandoned by Marx in favour of the objective, scientific understanding presented in Capital).