Literature and simple-minded Marxism

 Bakhtin will have nothing to do with the simple-minded Marxism which debases literature by using it as direct evidence for the state of society at the time of its writing. That he finds insultingly naive: what literature reports on is not social facts but social idioms,

.This Bakhtin finds undemocratic, as if there were restrictions on what may be seen as ‘literary’. Anything in a language is ‘literary’ if it occurs in a literary work. So the ‘literary’ language is on absolutely equal terms with the ‘everyday’ language where both can be found to have entered literature.