Marxism behind closed doors

The politics of intimacy in Sally Rooney’s fiction

Does commercial literary success invalidate a critique of capitalism? And to what extent can a novel ever be considered “Marxist”? Sally Rooney has hit the headlines in recent weeks. Having sold over six million books worldwide – including more than two million in the United Kingdom – her novels have been withdrawn from the shelves of British bookshops because of her vocal and financial support for Palestine Action. She has taken a principled stand on other issues such as climate change, housing insecurity, trade union rights and reproductive politics, and in consequence she has been subjected to predictable jibes of naivety, self-aggrandisement and lofty intellectualism.

She says she thinks about the world through “a sort of Marxist framework”. At the same time she doubts that novels have any great potential as overtly political texts. “I don’t know what it means to write a Marxist novel,” she says. She is not a member of a political party, as far as I know, and it is not clear to me – or, I suspect, to Sally Rooney herself – what exactly she means by Marxism.

What is clear, however, is that her use of that framework informs and influences her fiction. Her outlook serves as an observational lens for understanding how broad economic structures and class dynamics shape private, intimate lives, even behind closed bedroom doors.

She uses the title of her most celebrated work of fiction, Normal People, with deep, multi-layered irony to challenge the very idea of what “normal” means in a capitalist society, in which the divisions of wealth and class are almost impossible to bridge. While Marianne and Connell both seem like normal Irish teenagers on the surface, their financial and social realities radically splinter their lived experiences. Rooney understands that there is a deep and natural emotional desire to “fit in”, a term I fall back on a lot in my first novel, Lamb to the Slaughter, but this desire is constantly foiled by the material realities of class division.

Under capitalism, there is no “normal”. If you have already read the book, apologies for the oversimplification but in essence, the main male protagonist Connell is popular and socially secure in their small hometown in County Sligo, yet his private life is defined by economic precarity. His mother cleans Marianne’s family mansion. When he goes to Trinity College, his lack of wealth makes him feel alienated, uncultured, and completely out of place.

“His [Connell’s] classmates view the world through a grid of social connections that they have inherited rather than earned… Their wealth is not an accidental feature of their lives, it is the primary architecture of their world.”

By contrast Marianne is a wealthy outcast at secondary school, but her economic privilege gives her an effortless, invisible safety net. At university, her wealth allows her to fit seamlessly into the elite bourgeois social scene; a world that treats her lifestyle as normal, while treating financial struggle as an anomaly.

By bringing these tensions to light, Rooney adheres very strictly to the principle, “show, don’t tell”. The Marxism is implicit. She does not preach. She is not a propagandist.

From nationalism to internationalism

Rooney represents a significant shift in Irish left-wing fiction, which historically has been dominated or heavily influenced by the national question. Whilst earlier Irish Marxists often viewed the struggle against British imperialism as a necessary precursor or an inseparable part of the class struggle, nationalism is not merely absent in Rooney’s work – it has become obsolete. She writes in a globalised world order where Ireland has become one of the most advanced bourgeois capitalist economies on the planet.

For Marxists such as James Connolly, a leader of the 1916 Easter Rising who profoundly influenced authors such as Seán O’Casey, class struggle and national liberation are two sides of the same coin. In a colonised Ireland, the British Crown and the Anglo-Irish upper class controlled the means of production. The orthodox Leninist position was therefore to resolve the national question first in order to end foreign exploitation. As Connolly declared: “The cause of Ireland is the cause of labour, and the cause of labour is the cause of Ireland.”

In literature, the issue was never clearly resolved. Seán O’Casey and Brendan Behan constantly grappled with nationalism, but did so uneasily. Behan, the playwright and novelist (The Quare Fellow, Borstal Boy) was a member of the IRA in his youth. Yet he maintained a deeply complex, highly satirical relationship with Irish nationalism rather than an uncritical one. The same can be said of his socialism. Unlike his brother Brian, who embraced Soviet communism, Brendan never adopted Marxism as a rigid ideology. Instead, his works are imbued with an anarchic, deeply humanistic spirit that humorously dismantles both state and ecclesiastical authority.

Even when they criticised nationalism (as O’Casey did, for example in The Plough and the Stars and Juno and the Paycock) as a distraction from the real hardships of the working class, it remained a primary frame of reference with which they had to contend. Likewise their ambiguous stance on the church: Behan famously said, “I’m a communist by day and a Catholic as soon as it gets dark!” A joke, but religion was imposed on the Irish with such brutality that it inevitably, and often literally, left its mark. Behan relates being beaten by a Christian Brother as a schoolboy, when he replied “yes” to the question: “Can Ireland become a communist country?” His brother Brian, escaping from the repressive atmosphere of the Republic to Brighton, referred to the English seaside town as “Dublin without the priests”.

Writing in the 21st century, in an Ireland that has transformed itself from an impoverished, post-colonial agrarian state into a European hub of global tech and financial capitalism (the “Celtic Tiger” and its aftermath), Rooney has an entirely different perspective.

In Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You, the characters move within a space that, whilst situated in Dublin or the west of Ireland, is characterised by an entirely globalised economic reality. Rents in Dublin are not dictated by British aristocrats, but by the global property market and multinational corporations.

Rooney’s characters (such as Frances in Conversations with Friends or Eileen in Beautiful World, Where Are You) reflect on the collapse of the ecosystem, global supply chains, the war in the Middle East or exploitation in textile factories in the Global South. Rooney’s Marxism is profoundly internationalist, closer to Rosa Luxemburg than Lenin. The Irish nation-state simply no longer offers a relevant framework for resolving the global malaise of the 21st century.

Of course, it’s not all good. On the negative side of the equation, Rooney may have been influenced by the fake Marxism of the so-called “Frankfurt School”, best represented in modern Irish non-fiction by the likes of Emma Dabiri. Having lost faith in the working class as the real force that changes history, these writers switch their focus to culture, media, and above all, “identity”. For real Marxists, identity politics is just nationalism in a posh new frock, and it brings a whole new wave of careerism, opportunism and academic navel-gazing along with it.

The demystification of bourgeois marriage

Nonetheless, Rooney stands within a very specific Marxist tradition that links her not only to authors of fiction such as O’Casey but the great theoretician Friedrich Engels (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State): the analysis of intimacy as a commodity. In O’Casey’s work, we see how poverty (a material reality, in contrast to identity) erodes love and family solidarity. In Engels’ masterpiece, we learn that bourgeois marriage, being based on property and the preservation of inheritance (also material realities), is subject to moral decay. The social revolution would not only free the poor from their poverty but also emancipate men and women from the commodification of sexual relations.

Rooney takes this further. She shows how, even outside the formal contractual relationship within a marriage, capitalism distorts the love lives of young people. Relationships are negotiated like contracts; class differences (such as those between Marianne and Connell in Normal People) subtly determine the power dynamics between two lovers. She uses this framework to show how intimacy, social status, and personal worth are commodified: In Conversations with Friends, Frances reflects on the absurdity of institutional wealth:

“I wanted to say that my political views had been formed by an observation of the way wealth was distributed in my own family, and that I thought the redistribution of resources was the only meaningful political goal.”

This inescapable commodification of modern life extends beyond the text itself; even the cover of the British edition of Normal People already tells its own story. Placing the ultimate expression of human intimacy, two people holding each other in bed, inside a cheap, mass-produced supermarket item (a sardine tin) visually mirrors how capitalism treats everything, even love and trauma, as a consumable product.

The commodification of art

Rooney is also in the Marxist tradition when it comes to art and culture. In Beautiful World, Where Are You, she uses the emails between Alice and Eileen, two twenty-nine-year-old Marxists, to critique the global market. Alice reflects on the web of systemic exploitation behind everyday convenience store items and expresses scepticism regarding the role of literature, viewing the contemporary novel as a bourgeois commodity that comforts affluent readers while ignoring structural violence. She reminds me of the situationist critique that “culture” is the worst commodity of all, because it is the commodity used to sell all other commodities.  Eileen writes:

“I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilization is facing collapse.”

She then adds:

“But at the same time, that is what I do every day.”

Rooney is even sceptical about how her own books are marketed as accessories “like beautiful items that you can fill your shelves with and therefore become a sort of book person.” In much the same way, she finds it problematic that bourgeois society puts successful authors on a pedestal, taken away from their background and made “part of a special class which is somewhat fenced off from normal life as it proceeds in the outside world.”

The point is that in a capitalist society, even our intellectual output, if successful, is commodified and packaged for the market (fortunately my own conscience need not be greatly troubled by this, for the time being at least).

In fact, the commodity serves as a leading protagonist in Rooney’s work, not merely through the alienation of the worker from the products of his labour, but through utterly banal acts such as buying lunch. These acts present the inescapability of a type of domination by things, or “commodity fetishism” as Marx calls it. Capitalism robs human beings of control over their activity, since to survive the vast majority of us must sell our labour time to capital in order to obtain the necessities of life, which return to haunt us as commodities. This Marxist perspective was further articulated by the philosopher György Lukács as “reification”: the process where social relations and the products of human labour take on the appearance of independent, objective things that exert power over human beings.

Thus in Normal People Connell reflects on the commodification of literature:

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false journeys into the lives of the poor, so that they could feel emotional validation without having to alter their real-world behaviour.”

And in Beautiful World, Where Are You, Eileen reflects on the bleakness and banality of the capitalist environment:

“…as a mechanised billboard on the station wall rotated from an advertisement for hair products to an advertisement for car insurance; as life in its ordinariness and even ugly vulgarity imposed itself everywhere all around them…”

Beyond the national question

Sally Rooney reflects a generational shift that has, over time, eased the burden of nationalism on Irish writers. She recognises that modern capitalism knows no borders. In her fiction, the struggle against a foreign flag gives way to housing insecurity, alienation in wage labour, and powerlessness in the face of global capital.

A century ago Irish socialists could not escape the national question. Seán O’Casey highlighted how British imperialism and poverty distort the minds and safety of ordinary people. For example, in The Plough and the Stars (1926) the character Bessie Burgess, a staunchly Protestant, pro-British loyalist, joins in the looting spree alongside her neighbour, Mrs Gogan, who is from the other side of the sectarian divide. Bessie’s immediate material needs and desire for luxury completely override her political allegiance. Yet she is killed when she intervenes to save Nora Clitheroe. National allegiances fail to protect people, while human solidarity crosses them.

The target of the satire is a foreign presence (British rule or the Anglo-Irish gentry). But it was the British class system that persisted as the target, not the British per se. The most sympathetic character in Brendan Behan’s play The Hostage (1958) is the English squaddie, Leslie Williams. Behan makes it clear that Leslie is an orphan from the slums of London who joined the army simply because he had no other options. When the IRA captors try to lecture him on the historical crimes of the British Empire, Leslie is completely bewildered. He doesn’t know anything about Irish history or politics.

Rooney has moved on from all this. Part of the post-1994 ceasefire generation, she almost completely avoids referring to the British presence or the Troubles in her fiction. Her focus is instead on an invasive and ubiquitous commercialism that knows no country. The nation has faded into the background; the characters are left wrestling with the psychological and emotional tolls of the global capitalist market.

Even in her support for the struggle of the Palestinians, in contrast to old-school Irish nationalists, Rooney does not draw parallels with the anticolonial struggle in Ireland in past centuries.

She takes a similar stand with regard to religion. She does not completely bypass the Catholic Church, but she views it as a spent institutional force that has been actively supplanted by neoliberal capitalism. In a 2017 interview Rooney gave to The Irish Times, she said, “We got rid of the Catholic Church and replaced it with predatory capitalism. In some ways that was a good trade-off, and in other ways, really bad.” In her framework, capitalist values form the new dominant religion dictating Irish morality, shame, and social control. On the other hand, as a Marxist, she understands that historical structures do not vanish overnight.

In Normal People, the intense secrecy, silence, and social policing that Connell and Marianne experience do not come from a priest. Instead, they come from class anxieties and bourgeois social expectations. The old Catholic mechanism of “guilt and shame” has been re-engineered by the neoliberal market. If you are poor (like Connell’s mother, a single mother), or if you do not fit the polished, wealthy mould of Trinity College, you are socially excluded.

It’s Marxism, Jim, but not as we know it

While Rooney claims that she cannot directly apply her Marxism to the form of a novel (“I don’t know what it means to write a Marxist novel”), her sharp class-based analysis reveals itself time and again and in unexpected places. In an interview with Kathrine Tschemerinsky at the 2019 Louisiana Literature festival she said, “The best I can do is to try and observe how class, as a very broad social structure, impacts our personal and intimate lives.”

I only hope Rooney does not fall further into the pessimism of the so-called “Western Marxists” who have entirely replaced the material struggles of the working class with abstract debates about art, identity, and philosophy. She is already a very different figure from the great Marxist authors and playwrights of the past such as Bertolt Brecht and Robert Tressell (the pen name of Dublin-born house painter Robert Noonan). These writers offer biting satires of capitalist society but in ways that are accessible to a broader public. Brecht, despite falling under the influence of Stalinism, maintained an unshakable belief in the revolutionary agency of the proletariat. Notably, Brecht’s short stories and aphorisms (such as Die unwürdige Greisin (The Unworthy Old Woman) and the Geschichten von Herrn Keuner (Stories of Mr. Keuner)), are profoundly and explicitly Marxist, but also delightfully witty and thought-provoking.

Tressell’s only masterpiece, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, deploys satirical comedy and the grotesque to make its brutal political points. It is set in the English seaside town of Hastings (reimagined as Mugsborough). His satirical naming of characters is influenced by Dickens: the capitalists Mr. Sweater and Mr. Rushton, the aristocratic Sir Graball D’Enclosedland and the duped proletarian Crass. The grotesque physical reality of the workers is described with a raw, ugly intensity: men spitting up blood from tuberculosis, breathing in toxic lead paint dust, and working until their joints are permanently warped.

In its most memorable scene, Tressell uses pieces of leftover bread during a lunch break to demonstrate Karl Marx’s core theory in Das Kapital: how capitalists exploit laborers by paying them a fraction of the value they produce and keeping the surplus value as profit.