Bertolt Brecht and the Stage of Class Struggle

Dear Young Comrades!

To commemorate Bertolt Brecht on the seventieth anniversary of his death cannot be reduced to a romantic memorial ceremony or to a museumified nostalgia. The bourgeois culture industry, just as it does with every revolutionary thinker who threatens its order, tries to package Brecht for the masses as a defanged "aesthetic innovator," a harmless "theatre theorist."

Yet for a dialectical-materialist grasp, Brecht is a proletarian fighter who tore art out of its role as the ideological narcotic of the bourgeois class and turned it into a sharp weapon of consciousness in the hands of the oppressed.

The cultural mechanisms of the ruling class have for centuries marketed art as "above classes," as "the realm of eternal and everlasting human feelings," or as "a shelter of beauty taken only for pleasure." This idealist approach is the most refined instrument for rendering social contradictions invisible and for concealing relations of exploitation. In bourgeois theatre or cinema the spectator is torn from their own reality; before the fatalist narrative that flows across the stage they grow passive, weep, find relief, and leave the hall accepting the existing order of exploitation as an "unalterable law of nature."

Brecht’s entrance onto the historical stage is precisely a revolutionary intervention aimed at breaking this ideological spell. He treated art and literature as a reflection of social relations of production and, at the same time, as a superstructural instrument that would transform those relations.

Dialectical Reminder:

Art is not neutral. A play or a work either presents an illusion that reproduces existing class domination, or holds up a dialectical mirror that exposes the gears of that domination. Brecht’s legacy is the historical necessity of choosing the second path.

Historical and Class Context: Brecht’s Era and Materialist Transformation

To treat a thinker abstracted from the objective conditions of their age, from class relations, and from the crises of the mode of production is the most typical methodological error of bourgeois idealism. To understand Bertolt Brecht is to understand the dialectical storm of the imperialist wars of partition, the rise of fascism, and the age of proletarian revolutions in which he took shape.

Brecht’s youth and maturity coincide with the deepest crises of German capitalism:

• The First Imperialist War of Partition: This war, in which millions of laborers were driven to the front for the sharing of markets and raw materials, showed Brecht, while still young, the barbarous face of the bourgeois state apparatus and of militarism.

• The Weimar Republic and Workers’ Uprisings: The German Revolution of 1918, the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the Spartacist uprising… Germany was the scene of a life-and-death struggle between the order of capital and proletarian power.

• The Great Depression and the Rise of Fascism: The capitalist crisis of 1929, while dispossessing the petty bourgeoisie, drove big capital and finance capital to finance fascism (Nazism) in order to preserve their own domination.

Brecht grasped that fascism was not "the wickedness of a few madmen"; on the contrary, that it was the open terrorist dictatorship to which capitalism in a bind resorts in order to drown class struggle in blood. The anarchizing and pacifist reaction in his early works, toward the end of the 1920s, through his study of Karl Marx’s Capital and his theoretical work with the Marxist theorist Karl Korsch, gave way to a dialectical-materialist line. The more Brecht read Marx, the more he saw the insufficiency of moral reaction. The cause of war was not "human greed" but the capitalist regime of accumulation; the cause of fascism was not "ignorance" but the bourgeoisie’s class fear.

Stage of Development	Main Features and Line of Works	Class Consciousness and Methodology	Result Reached
Early Period	Instinctive reaction against bourgeois values, anarchizing revolt, abstract opposition to war.	Idealist / Humanist: The source of the problem is seen as "human nature" or "corrupted moral values."	A sense of individual anger and helplessness.
Transitional Period	Reading the Marxist classics, studies of Capital, theoretical work with Karl Korsch.	Entry into Materialism: Discovery of the link between the social base (relations of production) and the superstructure.	Grasping that art cannot be neutral.
Period of Maturity	Construction of epic-dialectical theatre, "Learning Plays" (Lehrstücke) for mass education, an anti-fascist line.	Dialectical Materialism: Proletarian class consciousness armed with the will to transform society.	The transformation of art into a sharp weapon of class struggle.

The Chronological Course of Brecht’s Life with Its Material Dynamics

Bertolt Brecht’s biography is not a chronicle of an artist’s "searches in their inner world," but of the class struggles, wars, and revolutions of the twentieth century. Every point of rupture is the result of historical and economic causes.

Year	Historical Event and Rupture in His Life	Material and Class Causes / Dialectical Analysis
1898	Born into a bourgeois family in Augsburg (his father was a factory manager).	Growing up in an industrialized city, in the comfort of a property-owning class, prepared the ground for him in later years to expose class contradictions from within.
1914–1918	Served as a medical orderly in a military hospital in the First World War.	He witnessed directly the human devastation of imperialist slaughter. His first qualitative hatred of bourgeois militarism and of "nation-homeland" discourses took shape here.
1918–1923	In the milieu of the German Revolution of 1918 he wrote Baal and Drums in the Night.	In the chaotic atmosphere of the Weimar Republic he rebelled against bourgeois morality; yet because he had not yet encountered Marxist theory, his reaction remained anarchizing and individual.
1924–1928	Moved to Berlin. Began studying Karl Marx’s Capital. Worked with Karl Korsch. In 1928 The Threepenny Opera was staged.	Berlin, the center of industry and of the proletarian movement, confronted him with class reality. Idealist reactivity gave way to a capacity for dialectical-materialist analysis.
1929–1933	The Great Depression. He wrote the "Learning Plays" (Lehrstücke) and The Mother.	Faced with capitalism’s global collapse, he turned art directly into an instrument for organizing and educating the working class. He took a direct side in class struggle.
1933	He fled Germany the day after the Reichstag Fire. The Nazis stripped him of citizenship and burned his books.	With finance capital’s elevation of fascism to power, he was targeted directly as a communist artist. The years of exile (Prague, Vienna, Zurich, Denmark) began.
1939–1945	Exile in Scandinavia and the United States. He wrote masterpieces such as Mother Courage, Galileo, The Good Person of Szechwan, and Mr Puntila.	Isolation from the stage and from his country drove him to deepen his theory. He produced the mature works in which he anatomized war, fascism, and capitalist property relations.
1947	Interrogated in the US by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and left the United States.	The "Cold War" and the hunt for communism (McCarthyism) launched by US imperialism after the Second World War proved that a revolutionary artist could not find shelter in US bourgeois democracy.
1949	Settled in East Berlin (the German Democratic Republic) and, with his wife Helene Weigel, founded the Berliner Ensemble.	He found the chance to put his revolutionary theatre theory (Dialectical Theatre) into practice within the institutional structure of a state theatre and on the ground of working-class power.
1956	Died of a heart attack in East Berlin on 14 August.	As his physical existence ended, he left behind for the world proletariat an immortal methodology that turns art into a device of class war.

Epic and Dialectical Theatre: Consciousness-Raising against Enchantment

Marx’s principle "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it" became, in Brecht’s hands, the fundamental constitutive law of theatre and of aesthetics. Traditional bourgeois theatre rests on the "dramatic" model that takes its origin from Aristotle’s Poetics. That model has two main pillars: Identification (Empathy) and Catharsis (Emotional Purgation).

When the spectator fully identifies with the character on stage and at the end of the play undergoes an emotional discharge (catharsis), they leave their accumulated anger in the hall and return home lightened. When the poverty, war, or disaster presented on stage is shown as an "unalterable contradiction of human nature" or an "inevitable fate," the spectator becomes unable to question the relations of production and class domination behind that disaster.

To tear the spectator away from this illusion flowing across the stage, Brecht developed the Alienation Effect (Verfremdungseffekt). Alienation is the method of showing that social relations taken for granted in daily life as "natural" and "unchangeable" are in fact historical, temporary, and alterable.

• The Shattering of Illusion: Actors from time to time step out of role and speak directly to the audience. Stage lights are not hidden; the artificiality of the set is not concealed.

• The Function of Music and Songs: Songs are used not to reinforce emotional atmosphere, but to interrupt the action and give the spectator a conceptual pause.

• Banners and Titles: What will happen is written in advance at the start of scenes. The aim is to kill curiosity and to focus attention on the question "Why did it happen this way?"

Criterion of Analysis	Bourgeois / Dramatic Theatre	Brechtian / Dialectical Theatre
Social Assumption	Society is static; "Human nature is the same in every age."	Society is dynamic; the human being is the ensemble of social relations and changes.
Spectator’s Mental State	Emotionally carried along, enchanted, rendered passive.	A critical observer; analyzes; becomes active.
Reading of Process	Contradictions are mystified; taken for fate or chance.	The class and economic causes behind contradictions are exposed.
Ultimate Aim	To give the spectator a "purgation" reconciled with the existing order.	To awaken in the spectator the will to change the order and class consciousness.

Concrete Forms of Class Struggle in His Works

In his plays Brecht demolishes the myths of individual heroism and bourgeois tragedy. What clashes on stage is not the abstract concepts of "good" and "evil," but class interests shaped within definite historical conditions and the dialectical contradictions those interests produce.

Mother Courage and Her Children: War and Capital

Amid the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, Mother Courage, trading with a cart, tries to feed on war while sacrificing her three children to that war machine. War is for capital a vast regime of capital accumulation. Petty-bourgeois conformism and the hunger for property prevent her from seeing the very wheel that causes her children’s deaths.

The Threepenny Opera: Bourgeois Morality and Crime

Through the relation between Macheath, gangster of the underworld, and Peachum, boss of the beggars, the makeup of capitalist society is stripped away. The bourgeois state and finance capital share the same class logic as the apparatus of organized crime. Macheath’s historic question is emblematic: "What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?"

The Mother (After Gorky): The Leap of Consciousness

Pelageya Vlasova, a poor working-class mother, transforms her own consciousness by witnessing her son’s revolutionary struggle. A woman who sets out with individual worries becomes, through practical struggle and dialectical grasp, the mother and agitator of an entire class. It proves that class consciousness is not innate, but built within practical struggle.

Life of Galileo: The Class Character of Science

The play treats Galileo’s withdrawal of science under Inquisition pressure after proving that the earth turns. Science and technology are not neutral; whether they serve the ruling classes or the emancipation of the people is a matter of class struggle. Galileo spurned the chance to make scientific truth a weapon of emancipation in the people’s hands.

Work	Bourgeois Illusion Exposed	Material/Class Essence Deciphered	Main Takeaway for Young Comrades
Mother Courage	"War is a national duty; in crisis everyone must look out for themselves."	War is capital’s instrument of profit; petty-bourgeois conformism brings ruin.	Raise class war against the wars of the rulers.
The Threepenny Opera	"The bourgeois state and law are the guarantors of honesty and justice."	The bourgeois state and finance capital share the same class logic as organized crime.	Reject bourgeois moralism and question property relations.
The Mother	"Ordinary masses and women cannot understand revolutionary politics."	The practice of struggle transforms consciousness; the most oppressed can become the leaders of revolution.	Carry class consciousness patiently to the masses and weave practical organization.
Life of Galileo	"Science and intellectual production are neutral."	Science and technology are a field of class struggle and of capital accumulation.	Intellectuals and scientists must clarify their side in class struggle.

Today’s Culture Industry, Digital Pacification, and Brecht’s Currency

The qualitative stage capital accumulation has reached today—digital platforms, algorithm-driven content production, and a media structure that passivizes the masses through constant stimulation—makes the dangers Brecht pointed to more vital than ever. Today the bourgeois media and digital apparatuses work to monetize the masses’ free time and to build an ideological mechanism of pacification that will prevent class consciousness from taking root.

Social-media algorithms and streaming platforms feed the individual a constant stream of short, intense content and sever the bonds of causality. To grow angry at an injustice in the digital medium, to like a post, or to write a comment is the digital catharsis of modern humanity. Instead of entering a practical-legitimate organized struggle that would change the system, the individual undergoes an emotional discharge in the digital field and returns to a passive position.

Ruling ideology also tries to strip the Brechtian method of its anticapitalist core and turn it into an "emptied formalism." They exhibit Brecht as a museum "genius" in theatre history and hide his readings of Capital and his proletarian revolutionary passion.

Historical Moment	Illusion-Instrument of Ruling Ideology	Mental/Social Condition of the Masses	Brechtian Dialectical Intervention
Early Twentieth Century (Classical Theatre)	Fatalism on stage, Emotional Identification, Catharsis.	Enchanted, emotionally satiated, passive spectator.	Break the illusion on stage, take acting out of role, make people think.
Twenty-First Century (Digital Culture Industry)	Algorithmic Flow, Surface Consumption, Digital Reactivity (Pseudo-Action).	Isolated individual with fragmented attention span, passivized.	Break the spell: decipher the labor exploitation and the algorithm behind the screen.
Future (Synthetic Content / AI)	Total Severance from Reality, Human Doubles and Emotional Manipulation.	Objectified masses whose ties to social reality are wholly cut.	Turn art into a dialectical laboratory that exposes social relations of production.

A Call to Young Comrades: Use Art as an Instrument of Struggle

The legacy Bertolt Brecht left behind is a dialectical arsenal placed in the hands of proletarian class struggle. Art, depending on whose hand holds the pen, the brush, the stage, or the camera, is either the ruling class’s mechanism for producing consent or a revolutionary weapon that sharpens the consciousness of the oppressed.

The bourgeoisie and its ideological apparatuses constantly pump the individual the illusion that they can be saved alone: "Build your own career, create your own digital space, scrape by as an individual!" This is the greatest lie the order of capital uses to atomize the masses and paralyze organized class power. In those dark years when fascism and the dictatorship of capital settled over us like a nightmare, Brecht answered this bourgeois individualism with the plainest class reply in his Einheitsfrontlied (United Front Song):

"There is no salvation alone; either all of us together or none of us!"

This cry is not merely an aesthetic line of verse; it is the most concrete summary of dialectical-materialist social analysis. Amid capitalist crises, deepening exploitation, imperialist wars, and fascist escalations, to seek salvation as isolated individuals runs against objective reality. Outside the collective organization of the working class and of the oppressed masses there is no shelter.

Parameter of Analysis	Bourgeois Cultural Policy and Passiveive Art	Brechtian Revolutionary / Proletarian Art
Input (Material Ground)	Capital’s profit drive, market relations, and ideological hegemony.	The historical-class interests of the working class and dialectical materialism.
Method and Means	Enchantment, emotional narcosis, individual identification, catharsis.	Alienation (V-Effekt), bringing contradictions into the open, historicization.
Social Function	Keep the masses within the limits of the order, produce consent, passivize.	Give the masses class consciousness, organize them, move them to action.
Horizon of the Future	The eternalization of the capitalist status quo ("There is no alternative").	The destruction of the order of exploitation and the building of a classless world.

Young Comrades!

To commemorate Bertolt Brecht is not to imprison his plays under stage lights and applaud them, but to reproduce his revolutionary method in the streets, in the factories, in university lecture halls, in strike tents, and in the fields of ideological struggle.

As the darkness of the order of capital deepens, the illusions used to narcotize the masses grow more complex. Yet no digital narcotic will suffice to hide the hunger of the working class, the futurelessness of the youth, and the death-throes crises of capitalism.

Let us listen to the question Brecht asks in those immortal lines, and to the answer he gives:

"In the dark times, will there also be singing?"

"Yes, there will also be singing about the dark times."

We will not merely sing those songs; we will sharpen them with the light of dialectical materialism and turn them into banners that will overthrow the dictatorship of capital. We will not surrender to fairy tales of individual salvation! The stage is set, the scenery is drawn: The world was made by human hands, and it will again be changed by human hands, through class struggle!