Brecht's relationship to Marxism is both vital and complex. 

From the 1920s until his death in 1956, Brecht had been identified as a Marxist; when he returned to Germany after World War II, and met his actress wife Helene Weigel, where they formed their own theater company, the Berliner Ensemble, and were eventually given a state theater to run. Yet Brecht's relationship to orthodox Marxist officials and doctrine was often conflictual, and his own work and life were often related. Of a strongly anti-bourgeois disposition from his youth, the young Brecht was also initially repelled by Bolshevism. He experienced the German revolution of 1918  and dedicated himself to literary and not political activity during the early years of the Weimar republic.

Not only did Korsch strongly influence Brecht's conception of Marxian dialectics, but the Marxian ideas that were most important for Brecht's visual practice were exactly the ideas shared by Brecht and Korsch in their interpretation of materialist dialectics and revolutionary practice. Brecht used the Korschian version of the Marxian dialectic in both his aesthetic theory and practice, in ways that are central, rather than incidental, to his work.

Korsch wrote his book Karl Marx, which summarizes his description of the basic principles of Marxism, Korsch was a guest of the Brecht family in exile in Denmark and he and Brecht often had discussions of the basic ideas of Marxism. They tended to agree on the basic principles, although they differed widely on their application, with Korsch highly critical of Leninism and the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union, while Brecht was more sympathetic.

In his epic theater, Brecht looked to illuminate the historically specific features of an environment in order to show how that environment influenced, shaped, and destroyed the characters. Unlike dramatists who focused on the universal elements of the human situation and fate, Brecht was interested in the attitudes and behavior people adopted toward each other in specific historical situations, and wanted his ideology to be a "partially theatrical illusion." His work was also based on not entertaining the passive audience, but allow them to question every aspect of the messages given out by the actors of what they had just watched.

The actors in his work must be able to be "watched, judged and changed" and the audience must be able to do/experience that.