Western Marxism

Last updated

Western Marxism is a current of Marxist theory that arose from Western and Central Europe in the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the ascent of Leninism. The term denotes a loose collection of theorists who advanced an interpretation of Marxism distinct from classical and Orthodox Marxism and the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union. [1]

Contents

Less concerned with economic analysis than earlier schools of Marxist thought, Western Marxism placed greater emphasis on the study of the cultural trends of capitalist society, deploying the more philosophical and subjective aspects of Marxism, and incorporating non-Marxist approaches to investigating culture and historical development. [2] An important theme was the origins of Karl Marx's thought in the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel [lower-alpha 1] and the recovery of what they called the "Young Marx" (the more humanistic early works of Marx).

While some early Western Marxists were prominent political activists, [3] Western Marxism became predominantly the reserve of university-based philosophers. [4] Since the 1960s, the concept has been closely associated with the New Left. Many Western Marxists were adherents of Marxist humanism, but the term also encompasses figures and schools of thought that were strongly critical of Hegelianism and humanism. [5]

Etymology

In the 1920s, the Third International disparagingly branded certain Marxists of the period as "West European" theorists. [6] By 1930, one such figure, Karl Korsch, had begun to refer to himself as a "Western Communist". [7] Maurice Merleau-Ponty popularized the term Western Marxism with his book Adventures of the Dialectic in 1955. [8] Merleau-Ponty delineated a body of Marxist thought starting with György Lukács that differs from both the Soviet interpretation of Marxism and the earlier Marxism of the Second International. [9]

History

Perry Anderson notes that Western Marxism was born from the failure of proletarian revolutions in various advanced capitalist societies in Western Europe – Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Italy  –in the wake of the First World War. [10] He argues that the tradition represents a divorce between socialist theory and working-class practice that resulted from the defeat and stagnation of the Western working class after 1920. [11]

Western Marxism traces its origins to 1923, when György Lukács's History and Class Consciousness and Karl Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy were published. [1] In these books, Lukács and Korsch proffer a Marxism that underlines the Hegelian basis of Marx's thought. They argue that Marxism is not simply a theory of political economy that improves on its bourgeois predecessors. Nor is it a scientific sociology, akin to the natural sciences. For them, Marxism is primarily a critique –a self-conscious transformation of society. They stipulate that Marxism does not make philosophy obsolete, as "vulgar" Marxism believes; instead, Marxism preserves the truths of philosophy until their revolutionary transformation into reality. [12]

Their work was met with hostility by the Third International, [13] which saw Marxism as a universal science of history and nature. [12] Nonetheless, this style of Marxism was taken up by Germany's Frankfurt School in the 1930s. [1] The Prison Notebooks of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, written during this period, but not published until much later, are also classified as belonging to Western Marxism. [14] Ernst Bloch is a contemporaneous figure who is likewise sometimes judged to be one of Western Marxism's founding fathers. [15]

After the Second World War, a French Western Marxism was constituted by theorists based around the journals Arguments, Les Temps Modernes and Socialisme ou Barbarie such as Lucien Goldmann, Henri Lefebvre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre. [1] This later generation of Western Marxists were overwhelmingly professional academics and frequently professors of philosophy. [16]

Themes

Although there have been many schools of Marxist thought that are sharply distinguished from Marxism–Leninism, such as Austromarxism or the Dutch left communism of Antonie Pannekoek and Herman Gorter, theorists who downplay the primacy of economic analysis are considered Western Marxists. Where the base of the capitalist economy is the focus of earlier Marxists, Western Marxists concentrate on the problems of superstructures, [17] as their attention centres on culture, philosophy, and art. [1]

Western Marxism often emphasises the importance of the study of culture, class consciousness, and subjectivity for an adequate Marxist understanding of society. [1] Western Marxists have thus tended to heavily use Marx's theories of commodity fetishism, ideology, and alienation, [18] and they have expanded on these with new concepts such as reification and cultural hegemony. [19]

Engagement with non-Marxist systems of thought is a feature that distinguishes Western Marxism from the schools of Marxism that preceded it. [20] Many Western Marxists have drawn from psychoanalysis to explain the effect of culture on individual consciousness. [21] Concepts taken from German Lebensphilosophie , Weberian sociology, Piagetian psychology, French philosophy of science, phenomenology, and existentialism have all been assimilated and critiqued by Western Marxists. [20]

The epistemological principles of Marx's thought are an important theme for Western Marxism. [22] In this regard, Western Marxists view the theoretical contributions of Friedrich Engels's Anti-Dühring as a distortion of Marx. [23] While Engels sees dialectics as a universal and scientific law of nature, Western Marxists do not see Marxism as a general science, but as a theory of the cultural and historical structure of society. [12]

Many Western Marxists believe the philosophical key to Marxism is found in the works of the Young Marx, where his encounters with Hegel, the Young Hegelians, and Ludwig Feuerbach reveal what they see as the humanist core of Marxist theory. [24] However, the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser, which attempts to purge Marxism of Hegelianism and humanism, also belongs to Western Marxism, as does the anti-Hegelianism of Galvano Della Volpe. [25] Althusser holds that Marx's primary philosophical antecedent is not Hegel or Feuerbach, but Baruch Spinoza. [26] Della Volpe claims that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a decisive precursor to Marx, while Della Volpe's pupil Lucio Colletti holds that the true philosophical predecessor to Marx is Immanuel Kant. [27]

Political commitments

While Western Marxism is often contrasted with the Marxism of the Soviet Union, Western Marxists have been divided in their opinion of it and other Marxist–Leninist states. Some have offered qualified support, others have been highly critical, and still others have changed their views over time: [28] Lukács, Gramsci, and Della Volpe were members of Soviet-aligned parties; Korsch, Herbert Marcuse, and Guy Debord were inimical to Soviet Communism and instead advocated council communism; Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser, and Lefebvre were, at different periods, supporters of the Soviet-aligned Communist Party of France, but all would later become disillusioned with it; Ernst Bloch lived in and supported the Eastern Bloc, but lost faith in Soviet Communism towards the end of his life. Nicos Poulantzas, a later Western Marxist, was an advocate for Eurocommunism. [29]

List of Western Marxists

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Hence, Western Marxism is sometimes referred to as "Hegelian Marxism"; Jay 1984, pp. 2–3

Bibliography

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Jacoby 1991, p. 581.
  2. ↑ Chambre, Henry; McLellan, David T. "Western Philosophy". Britannica Online . Retrieved 28 March 2021. Western Marxists were concerned less with the actual political or economic practice of Marxism than with its philosophical interpretation, especially in relation to cultural and historical studies. In order to explain the inarguable success of capitalist society, they felt it necessary to explore and understand non-Marxist approaches and all aspects of bourgeois culture.
  3. ↑ Anderson 1976, p. 30.
  4. ↑ Jacoby 1981, p. 109; Anderson 1976, pp. 49–50.
  5. ↑ Jay 1984, pp. 3–4.
  6. ↑ Merquior 1986, p. 3.
  7. ↑ Korsch 1970, pp. 119–120.
  8. ↑ Jay 1984, p. 1; Merleau-Ponty 1973, pp. 30–59.
  9. ↑ Jay 1984, p. 2.
  10. ↑ Anderson 1976, pp. 15–17.
  11. ↑ Anderson 1976, pp. 92–93; Anderson 1995.
  12. 1 2 3 Jacoby 1991, p. 582.
  13. ↑ Kołakowski 2005, pp. 994–995, 1034.
  14. ↑ Jacoby 1991, p. 581; Anderson 1976, pp. 54.
  15. ↑ Jay 1984, p. 3; Merquior 1986, p. 2.
  16. ↑ Anderson 1976, pp. 49–50.
  17. ↑ Anderson 1976, pp. 75.
  18. ↑ Jacoby 1991, p. 581-582.
  19. ↑ Jacoby 1991, p. 583; Gottlieb 1989.
  20. 1 2 Anderson 1976, pp. 56–57.
  21. ↑ Jacoby 1991, p. 583.
  22. ↑ Anderson 1976, pp. 52–53.
  23. ↑ Anderson 1976, pp. 59–60.
  24. ↑ Jacoby 1991, p. 582; Anderson 1976, pp. 50–52.
  25. ↑ Jay 1984, p. 3.
  26. ↑ Anderson 1976, pp. 64.
  27. ↑ Anderson 1976, pp. 63.
  28. ↑ Jay 1984, pp. 7–8.
  29. ↑ Soper 1986, pp. 89.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louis Althusser</span> French Marxist philosopher (1918–1990)

Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher who studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frankfurt School</span> School of social theory and critical philosophy

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karl Korsch</span> German theoretician and political philosopher (1886–1961)

Karl Korsch was a German Marxist theoretician and political philosopher. He is recognized as one of the "dissidents" that challenged the Marxism of the Second International of Karl Kautsky, Georgi Plekhanov and Lenin. Along with György Lukács, Korsch is considered to be one of the major figures responsible for laying the groundwork for Western Marxism in the 1920s.

Raya Dunayevskaya, later Rae Spiegel, also known by the pseudonym Freddie Forest, was the American founder of the philosophy of Marxist humanism in the United States. At one time Leon Trotsky's secretary, she later split with him and ultimately founded the organization News and Letters Committees and was its leader until her death.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucio Colletti</span> Italian Western Marxist philosopher

Lucio Colletti was an Italian Western Marxist philosopher. Colletti started to be known outside Italy because of a long interview with him that Marxist historian Perry Anderson published in the New Left Review in 1974.

Philosophy in the Soviet Union was officially confined to Marxist–Leninist thinking, which theoretically was the basis of objective and ultimate philosophical truth. During the 1920s and 1930s, other tendencies of Russian thought were repressed. Joseph Stalin enacted a decree in 1931 identifying dialectical materialism with Marxism–Leninism, making it the official philosophy which would be enforced in all communist states and, through the Comintern, in most communist parties. Following the traditional use in the Second International, opponents would be labeled as "revisionists".

20th-century French philosophy is a strand of contemporary philosophy generally associated with post-World War II French thinkers, although it is directly influenced by previous philosophical movements.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Marxism</span> Marxist school of thought

Open Marxism is a collection of critical and heterodox Marxist schools of thought which critique state socialism and party politics, stressing the need for openness to praxis and history through an anti-positivist method grounded in the "practical reflexivity" of Karl Marx's own concepts. The "openness" in open Marxism also refers to a non-deterministic view of history in which the unpredictability of class struggle is foregrounded.

Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that originates in the works of 19th century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism analyzes and critiques the development of class society and especially of capitalism as well as the role of class struggles in systemic, economic, social and political change. It frames capitalism through a paradigm of exploitation and analyzes class relations and social conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development – materialist in the sense that the politics and ideas of an epoch are determined by the way in which material production is carried on.

<i>For Marx</i> 1965 book by Louis Althusser

For Marx is a 1965 book by the philosopher Louis Althusser, a leading theoretician of the French Communist Party (PCF), in which the author reinterprets the work of the philosopher Karl Marx, proposing an epistemological break between the young, Hegelian Marx, and the old Marx, the author of Das Kapital (1867–1883). The book, first published in France by François Maspero, established Althusser's reputation. The texts presented in For Marx are theoretical interventions in a definite conjuncture, particularly aiming at the definition of the lines to be pursued by the PCF after Stalin's years in the Soviet Union. Althusser's position is of theoretical antihumanism, and is against the teleology of history. Althusser defends that history is a process without subject and with an open end, but that has determinations that can be theorized by the science of history as constructed by Marx in his mature work, Das Kapital. Society is then conceptualized as a complex whole articulated in dominance by the economy where several social practices co-exist with a relative autonomy, introducing the concept overdetermination to characterize the levels of effectivity.

<i>Main Currents of Marxism</i> 1976 book by Leszek Kołakowski

Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution is a work about Marxism by the political philosopher Leszek Kołakowski. Its three volumes in English are The Founders, The Golden Age, and The Breakdown. It was first published in Polish in Paris in 1976, with the English translation appearing in 1978. In 2005, Main Currents of Marxism was republished in a one volume edition, with a new preface and epilogue by Kołakowski. The work was intended to be a "handbook" on Marxism by Kołakowski, who was once an orthodox Marxist but ultimately rejected Marxism. Despite his critical stand toward Marxism, Kołakowski endorsed the philosopher György Lukács's interpretation of the philosopher Karl Marx.

Marxist humanism is an international body of thought and political action rooted in a humanist interpretation of the works of Karl Marx. It is an investigation into "what human nature consists of and what sort of society would be most conducive to human thriving" from a critical perspective rooted in Marxist philosophy. Marxist humanists argue that Marx himself was concerned with investigating similar questions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Young Marx</span> Karl Marxs writings from 1843 and 1844

The correct place of Karl Marx's early writings within his system as a whole has been a matter of great controversy. Some believe there is a break in Marx's development that divides his thought into two periods: the "Young Marx" is said to be a thinker who deals with the problem of alienation, while the "Mature Marx" is said to aspire to a scientific socialism.

<i>Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844</i> German-language work by Karl Marx, published 1932

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, also known as the Paris Manuscripts or the 1844 Manuscripts, are a series of notes written between April and August 1844 by Karl Marx. They were compiled and published posthumously in 1932 by the Soviet Union's Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute. They were first published in their original German in Berlin, and there followed a republication in the Soviet Union in 1933, also in German.

Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew from various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of what Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, social philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought. The theory is also about the struggles of the proletariat and their reprimand of the bourgeoisie.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">György Lukács</span> Hungarian philosopher and critic (1885–1971)

György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian, literary critic, and aesthetician. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Soviet Marxist ideological orthodoxy. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.

Dialectical materialism is a materialist theory based upon the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that has found widespread applications in a variety of philosophical disciplines ranging from philosophy of history to philosophy of science. As a materialist philosophy, Marxist dialectics emphasizes the importance of real-world conditions and the presence of functional contradictions within and among social relations, which derive from, but are not limited to, the contradictions that occur in social class, labour economics, and socioeconomic interactions. Within Marxism, a contradiction is a relationship in which two forces oppose each other, leading to mutual development.

<i>History and Class Consciousness</i> 1923 book by György Lukács

History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics is a 1923 book by the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács, in which the author re-emphasizes the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's influence on the philosopher Karl Marx, analyzes the concept of "class consciousness," and attempts a philosophical justification of Bolshevism.

Various Marxist authors have focused on Marx's method of analysis and presentation as key factors both in understanding the range and incisiveness of Karl Marx's writing in general, his critique of political economy, as well as Grundrisse andDas Kapital in particular. One of the clearest and most instructive examples of this is his discussion of the value-form, which acts as a primary guide or key to understanding the logical argument as it develops throughout the volumes of Das Kapital.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outline of Marxism</span> Overview of and topical guide to Marxism

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Marxism:

References

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.