Thomas Mann, a bourgeois but used for Marxist purposes.

The Marxist literary critic Georg Lukács found a way to cut
through the Gordian knot of  Thomas Mann’s bewilderingly contradictory
statements on economic issues. Lukács readily admitted that
Mann was a bourgeois writer, but he argued that the author of
Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus could nevertheless be used for Marxist purposes.

For Lukács, Mann was the great representative in the twentieth century of what he called critical realism in literature. In the tradition of holding the mirror up to nature, Mann’s fiction offers a remarkably accurate
representation of life in the modern bourgeois world. Thus, it did not matter to Lukács what Mann himself said about this world in his own voice.

 All that mattered to Lukács was that Mann had
succeeded in embodying in his works a true reflection of the contradictions in bourgeois society. Lukács felt that he could read Marxist lessons out of Mann’s fiction—if Mann realistically represents the modern bourgeois world, then anything Marx says about that world should be equally true of Mann’s fictional universe.  Thus, despite Mann’s bourgeois roots and sympathies, Lukács viewed him as more useful to the cause of socialism than many writers openly working on its behalf:

Thomas Mann occupies a special position in the history of critical realism. While the great bourgeois realists, say from Fielding to Tolstoy, presented bourgeois life itself, Thomas Mann gives us a totality of the inner
problems of contemporary bourgeois life. Obviously not in an abstract, conceptual form; Mann always
presents living people in real situations. However, the particular position he takes vis-à-vis the present and
future of bourgeois society makes him choose his characters and plots from the standpoint of these inner
problems ratther than directly from everyday life.

Thus he class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie is not reflected immediately in his work. But the ideological, emotional and moral problems, all the typical
reflexes of bourgeois society upon which class struggle
leaves its mark emerge as a result in a more complete,
more comprehensive totality. . . . Posterity will be able
to recapture from his work with equal freshness how
the typical figures of present-day bourgeois society
lived, with what issues they wrestled.

Source:LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY: SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE
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