Productive Poets...problems?

                The past two or three times I’ve encountered some form of Marxist theory, I’ve been struck by the same question. Benjamin’s essay “The Author as Producer” may have given me a way to articulate it. He emphasizes the importance of productive literature, one in which the author “takes sides”. Everything he makes has to serve a purpose; he cannot align with the cause of the proletariat simply by sympathizing. Observing is not enough. “His mission is not to report but to struggle.” In other words, everything which the author creates must have tangible value in relation to the cause. The author must be productive. Now, this kind of obsession with maximizing useful output, minimizing waste, and quantifying everything …doesn’t that sound like capitalist values under the proletariat’s name?

                Perhaps this is an obvious statement. It makes sense socialism would be influenced by capitalism…it came from a society dominated by the bourgeoisie. Either way, I would be interested to hear someone else’s thoughts. Do these similarities exist? What kind of problems do they create? Does it reduce artists, and especially writers, to wage workers, producing uninteresting, but politically ‘correct’ works? If it does reduce writers to propagandists, would Benjamin think that was a bad thing? If all literature is geared toward a specific purpose, that is to serve the proletariat’s cause, it seems like growth would be stunted, and no one would be able or allowed to conceive of something other than the social structure which the art serves. Is that a problem, considering that socialism is supposed to be the final stage of society’s evolution? That’s a lot of questions, and it could be that I don’t understand Benjamin’s argument.

                While we’re on things I don’t completely understand, the form and content explanation is still not completely clear. What I think I understood was that new, revolutionary forms are required to express revolutionary sentiment. Socialist ideas in bourgeois forms are not sufficient. If someone has other thoughts on this, I’d like to hear it…please.

Edit: After class, I realized what I was trying to say in the first part of the post. Both the bourgeois purpose for art (as propaganda) and Benjamin's recommended purpose utilize instrumental rationality. Art as means to an end, with no regard to its inherent value. I added this hoping it would help make sense of the above babbling.