Strand of Marxist theory
Political Marxism (PM) is a strand of Marxist theory that places history at the centre of its analysis. It is also referred to as a form of neo-Marxism or Western Marxism. [1] [2]
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Political Marxism (PM) is a strand of Marxist theory that places history at the centre of its analysis. It is also referred to as a form of neo-Marxism or Western Marxism. [1] [2]
The term political Marxism itself was coined during the Brenner debate of the late 1970s as a criticism of the work of Brenner by the French Marxist historian Guy Bois. Bois distinguished Brenner's "political Marxism" from "economic Marxism". [3] As such, the label political Marxism has not always been accepted by the scholars to whom it has been applied. [4] [5] The term is also distinguished from Marxism in the politically activist sense. According to Arnold Hauser, in this system of analysis, one can agree with Marxism as a philosophy of history and society without being a Marxist. [6]
Political Marxism was developed as a reaction against historical models of Marxist analysis in the debate on the origins of capitalism. The political Marxist critique brought social agency and class conflict to the centre of Marxism. In this context, Robert Brenner and Ellen Wood developed political Marxism as a distinct approach to rehistoricize and repoliticize the Marxist project. It was a movement away from structuralist and timeless accounts towards historical specificity as contested process and lived praxis. This research programme has since expanded across the social sciences to include the fields of history, political theory, political economy, sociology, international relations, and international political economy. [7]
Researchers linked with political Marxism today include Benno Teschke, [8] Hannes Lacher, [9] and George Comninel. [10]
The Frankfurt School is a school of thought in sociology and critical philosophy. It is associated with the Institute for Social Research founded at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1923. Formed during the Weimar Republic during the European interwar period, the first generation of the Frankfurt School was composed of intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the contemporary socio-economic systems of the 1930s: namely, capitalism, fascism, and communism.
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).
Alexander Theodore Callinicos is a Rhodesian-born British political theorist and activist. An adherent of Trotskyism, he is a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and serves as its International Secretary. Between 2009 and 2020 he was the editor of International Socialism, the SWP's theoretical journal, and has published a number of books.
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, and social transformation. Marxism originates with the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, and as a result, there is no single, definitive Marxist theory. Marxism has had a profound effect in shaping the modern world, with various left-wing and far-left political movements taking inspiration from it in varying local contexts.
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production. This is generally taken to imply the moral permissibility of profit, free trade, capital accumulation, voluntary exchange, wage labor, etc. Its emergence, evolution, and spread are the subjects of extensive research and debate. Debates sometimes focus on how to bring substantive historical data to bear on key questions. Key parameters of debate include: the extent to which capitalism is natural, versus the extent to which it arises from specific historical circumstances; whether its origins lie in towns and trade or in rural property relations; the role of class conflict; the role of the state; the extent to which capitalism is a distinctively European innovation; its relationship with European imperialism; whether technological change is a driver or merely a secondary byproduct of capitalism; and whether or not it is the most beneficial way to organize human societies.
Ellen Meiksins Wood was an American-Canadian Marxist historian, and one of the primary developers of the Marxist tendency known as Political Marxism.
Neal Norman Wood was an American-Canadian Marxist scholar of the history of political thought. He located political ideas within social relations, property forms, and popular struggles, writing on topics as variant as the British Communist Party, John Locke, Aristotle, Edmund Burke, and Augustine of Hippo.
Robert Paul Brenner is an American economic historian. He is a professor emeritus of history and director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA, editor of the socialist journal Against the Current, and editorial committee member of New Left Review. His research interests are early modern European history, economic, social and religious history, agrarian history, social theory/Marxism, and Tudor–Stuart England.
The Origin of Capitalism is a 1999 book on history and political economy, specifically the history of capitalism, by the political theorist Ellen Meiksins Wood, written from the perspective of political Marxism. It was reviewed as an "Outstanding Academic Book" by Michael Perelman.
Benno Teschke is a German international relations theorist. He is professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex. Teschke's scholarship is a contribution to Marxist international relations theory, specifically in the Political Marxism tendency. He obtained his PhD from the London School of Economics in 1999, with a thesis titled The making of the Westphalian state-system: Social property relations, geopolitics and the myth of 1648.
Alberto Toscano is an Italian cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher, and translator. He has translated the work of Alain Badiou, including Badiou's The Century and Logics of Worlds. He served as both editor and translator of Badiou's Theoretical Writings and On Beckett.
Tom Brass is an academic who has written widely on peasant studies. For many years he was at the University of Cambridge as an affiliated lecturer in their Faculty of Social and Political Sciences and at Queens' College, Cambridge as their Director of Studies of the Social and Political Sciences. For many years he was an, and then the, editor of the Journal of Peasant Studies. Murray reports Brass as being "dismissive of the cultural turn in peasant studies" and the rise of post-modern perspectives and his notion that this has been a conservative process and that it has lent support to neoliberalism.
The Brenner debate was a major debate amongst Marxist historians during the late 1970s and early 1980s, regarding the origins of capitalism. The debate began with Robert Brenner's 1976 journal article "Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe", published in the influential historical journal Past & Present.
Erik Olin Wright was an American analytical Marxist sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, specializing in social stratification and in egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism. He was known for diverging from classical Marxism in his breakdown of the working class into subgroups of diversely held power and therefore varying degrees of class consciousness. Wright introduced novel concepts to adapt to this change of perspective including deep democracy and interstitial revolution.
In Marxist theory, society consists of two parts: the base and superstructure. The base refers to the mode of production which includes the forces and relations of production into which people enter to produce the necessities and amenities of life. The superstructure refers to society's other relationships and ideas not directly relating to production including its culture, institutions, roles, rituals, religion, media, and state. The relation of the two parts is not strictly unidirectional. The superstructure can affect the base. However, the influence of the base is predominant.
Neo-Marxism is a collection of Marxist schools of thought originating from 20th-century approaches to amend or extend Marxism and Marxist theory, typically by incorporating elements from other intellectual traditions such as critical theory, psychoanalysis, or existentialism. Neo-Marxism comes under the broader framework of the New Left. In a sociological sense, neo-Marxism adds Max Weber's broader understanding of social inequality, such as status and power, to Marxist philosophy.
Post-Marxism is a perspective in critical social theory which radically reinterprets Marxism, countering its association with economism, historical determinism, anti-humanism, and class reductionism, whilst remaining committed to the construction of socialism. Most notably, Post-Marxists are anti-essentialist, rejecting the primacy of class struggle, and instead focus on building radical democracy. Post-Marxism can be considered a synthesis of post-structuralist frameworks and neo-Marxist analysis, in response to the decline of the New Left after the protests of 1968. In a broader sense, post-Marxism can refer to Marxists or Marxian-adjacent theories which break with the old worker's movements and socialist states entirely, in a similar sense to post-Leftism, and accept that the era of mass revolution premised on the Fordist worker is potentially over.
Marxian economics, or the Marxian school of economics, is a heterodox school of political economic thought. Its foundations can be traced back to Karl Marx's critique of political economy. However, unlike critics of political economy, Marxian economists tend to accept the concept of the economy prima facie. Marxian economics comprises several different theories and includes multiple schools of thought, which are sometimes opposed to each other; in many cases Marxian analysis is used to complement, or to supplement, other economic approaches. Because one does not necessarily have to be politically Marxist to be economically Marxian, the two adjectives coexist in usage, rather than being synonymous: They share a semantic field, while also allowing both connotative and denotative differences. An example of this can be found in the works of Soviet economists like Lev Gatovsky, who sought to apply Marxist economic theory to the objectives, needs, and political conditions of the socialist construction in the Soviet Union, contributing to the development of Soviet Political Economy.
The Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, or the Grundrisse is an unfinished manuscript by the German philosopher Karl Marx. The series of seven notebooks was rough-drafted by Marx, chiefly for purposes of self-clarification, during the winter of 1857–8. Left aside by Marx in 1858, it remained unpublished until 1939.
Vivek Aslam Chibber is an American academic, social theorist, editor, and professor of sociology at New York University, who has published widely on development, social theory, and politics. Chibber is the author of three books, The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital and Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India.