Gensyn med Perry Andersons "vestlig marxisme"

ABSTRACTThis article reviews the history of research on Rosa Luxemburg in China and concludes the characteristics of recent study. Although the study on Rosa Luxemburg has already made great progress, it still has many shortcomings and limitations. First, influenced by Western Marxism, the study contains a trend of over abstraction and modernization of the thought of Rosa Luxemburg; second, it may be far from reality to regard historical materialism as a totality method; additionally, the study is not sufficient in cognizing the limitation of Rosa Luxemburg's thought. After elaborating these problems, this article will try to point out the possible prospects of the study on Rosa Luxemburg in the future.

The Western Marxist tradition from Lukacs to Colletti is usually considered a continental European one, with no major British representative. This thesis presents the Welsh cultural critic and novelist Raymond Williams as a critical Anglophone participant in that tradition. The development of Williams's cultural materialism, far from being the product of a rigid 'British' empiricism, was centrally influenced by the ideas of Western Marxist thinkers. At the core of this influence, and of the 'European' rationalist element in Williams's work, is the concept of 'totality', an abiding concern with which Williams shares with the Western Marxists. The three European Marxists to whom Williams's intellectual development is most indebted are those whom he described, in 1972, as 'Marxism's alternative tradition': Georg Lukacs (1885-1971), Jean-Paul Sartre and Antonio Gramsci (1891Gramsci ( -1937)). The work of these thinkers, as it slowly appears in English, confirms Williams's insistence on 'total' analysis and permits him to generate a Marxism capable of reconciling subjective experience with the complex materiality of social relations. I read the theoretical apparatus which results from these transnational interactions as a literary and a philosophical realism committed both to the aesthetic representation of the social totality and to the interaction of experience with objective reality. The form of political praxis engendered by these European influences is a 'revolutionary culturalism' in which the working-class attains hegemony by realising its experience and interests in a concrete culture.

This synoptic essay considers the nature and evolution of the Marxist theory that developed in Western Europe, after the defeat of the proletarian rebellions in the West and the isolation of the Russian Revolution in the East in the early 1920s. It focuses particularly on the work of Lukacs, Korsch and Gramsci; Adorno, Marcuse and Benjamin; Sartre and Althusser; and Della Volpe and Colletti, together with other figures within Western Marxism from 1920 to 1975. The theoretical production of each of these thinkers is related simultaneously to the practical fate of working-class struggles and to the cultural mutations of bourgeois thought in their time. The philosophical antecedents of the various school within this tradition Lukacsian, Gramscian, Frankfurt, Sartrean, Althusserian and Della Volpean are compared, and the specific innovations of their respective systems surveyed. The structural unity of 'Western Marxism', beyond the diversity of its individual thinkers, is then assessed, in a balance-sheet that contrasts its heritage with the tradition of 'classical' Marxism that preceded it, and with the commanding problems which will confront any historical materialism to succeed it.

Much as what we now call ‘the Marxism of the Second International’ long ago passed from the scene, the Age of ‘Western Marxism’ has apparently come to an end. Internal theoretical developments, changes in intellectual culture and, above all, political circumstances have joined together to hasten the demise of this episode in the history of radical theory. It would be instructive to trace the trajectory of Western Marxism, and to reflect on the political conditions for its decline. In both Western and Eastern Europe, Marxian politics has been in crisis at least since the watershed year of 1968, and in disarray for more than a decade. Western Marxism has always been joined programatically to currents within these political movements and has suffered grave, indeed fatal, damage in consequence. But it is not my intention to reflect on the vicissitudes of Western Marxism here. What follows will consider instead a style of theorizing that has effectively superceded Western Marxism, just as Western Marxism earlier replaced the Marxism of the Second International. This new kind of radical theory is widely designated—approvingly by some, disparagingly by others—‘analytical Marxism.’

If we consider Jean-Paul Sartre's position in the history of philosophy through his own method of reading history, it would not be wrong to identify him as a philosopher of a period of crisis. Sartre reads history by focusing on periods of crisis or crisis in theory and practice, and in doing so he follows the Marxist thesis that every theory is determined by practice. The period of crisis Sartre lived in, however, did not produce the conditions and means for the transcendence of Marxist philosophy, nor did it make it possible to embrace Marxist philosophy as it is. This study will try to show how "nausea" or "depression" can be seen as an important element that can provide a basis for historical and philosophical movements when Sartre's intellectual work is considered in its entirety. Because, although nausea is an individual experience, it points to the common existential crisis of human beings as a species, and social crisis situations feed this feeling. In this respect, it will be argued that the inextricability of the deep crisis and depression that the earth and humanity are in, in our age, is precisely due to the lack of the feeling of "nausea" in humans. Keywords: Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, History, Western Marxism, Crisis, Existentialism.

The article deals firstly with Hegel's theses of ”recognition” and ”Master-Slave relationship”. It then discusses Marx's concept of man and social division in terms of class opposition and exploitation following his interpretation of Hegel's doctrine. Further, the essay focuses on social inequality, class antagonism and the possibility of human emancipation elaborated by Western Marxists (Lukacs, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty etc.) and Neo-Marxists (especially Feminist Ann Ferguson) on the basis of Hegel's and Marx's conceptions of man, society and history. Finally, the author attempts to explicate the implications of Hegel's idea for the motivation of men and women participating in sport activities and other games.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) is one of the best-known philosophers of the twentieth century. He was also a novelist, literary critic, playwright, essayist, biographer, autobiographer, journalist, and political theorist. Because Sartre’s philosophy was fundamentally about the nature of human existence, it inflects all his writing. Although Sartre is often described as a major existentialist philosopher, this label should be treated with caution, as the term ‘existentialist’ only came to be associated with Sartre after the publication of his major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (hereafter BN) in 1943. Sartre’s early philosophy was highly influenced by Husserl’s phenomenology; his first philosophical publication, The Transcendence of the Ego (hereafter TE), engaged in scholarly detail with Husserl’s commitment to a pure Ego, arguing that even by Husserl’s own lights this was a mistake. Other early philosophical writings by Sartre include an account of the emotions, and two short books about the imagination. Heidegger was another major influence, to whom Sartre’s conception of nothingness in BN was indebted but with whom, in the same text, Sartre radically disagrees about our relations with others and the significance of death. The central postulate of BN is human freedom, which Sartre seeks to establish both ontologically and phenomenologically. This freedom, incompatible both with determinism and naturalism, is a source of anguish and it is in order to escape this anguish that people commonly live their lives in an attitude akin to denial or self-deception, which Sartre labels ‘bad faith’. Sartre’s account of freedom in BN is subtle, and has sometimes been caricatured. It drew criticisms from traditionalists, who saw it as a threat to (Christian) moral orthodoxy; in fact Sartre intended to say more, in a subsequent work, about the ethical dimension of his philosophy but, although he left hundreds of pages of preparatory notes (Sartre, 1992), that promised work was never completed. From the other end of the political spectrum, many socialists attacked BN for its alleged (bourgeois) individualism. From the 1950s onwards Sartre was increasingly politically engaged; several essays from that period seek to formulate his position in relation to the French Communist Party and the USSR. Correlatively with these activities, Sartre’s later philosophy argues that existentialist philosophy provides a necessary complement to Marxist thought, by supplying a framework within which the individual’s relationship to her historical situation and the class struggle can be adequately theorised. The first volume of Sartre’s ambitious Critique of Dialectical Reason (hereafter CDR) develops a series of original concepts designed to capture the ‘mediations’, or structural relationships, between individuals and their historical world. See also: Western Marxism §2. This project was to be continued in CDR’s second volume, which Sartre did not complete, whose focus was to be the problem of comprehending within a single historical outlook, people’s multiple and opposing individual actions. The Family Idiot, Sartre’s monumental study of Flaubert, applied Sartre’s recently developed methodology to the case of this nineteenth-century French novelist; Sartre’s guiding question was ‘What, at this point in time, can we know about a man?’ Sartre died in 1980, leaving several manuscripts for abandoned or uncompleted projects, many of which have since been posthumously published.

Originally published in post-Brexit Italy in 2017 and translated into English by Steven Colatrella with George De Stefano in 2024 in the United States, Western Marxism by Domenico Losurdo calls for Western Marxists—often perceived as defining the boundaries of progressive political imagination in Western democracies—to confront the foundations of apologetic intellectual imperialism and utopian tendencies. Losurdo, an Italian Marxist, known for his sweeping critiques of nearly every canonical thinker celebrated in American English departments, is not primarily concerned with indicting Western Marxism as ethically flawed. Rather, he argues that its limited comparative horizon results from a lack of global-scale, long-durée knowledge of the concrete history of the colonialist-slavery system. This limited horizon fails to grasp the primary struggles of the twentieth century—the dialectic relationship between the demands of anticolonial resistance and national modernization in the Global South. Since Western Marxism is a dense book with an expansive list of references, this review aims to offer a comprehensive summary of its major claims, provides historical contextualization of the complicated anticolonial struggles in the Global South with which Western readers might not be familiar, and considers the book’s possible intervention into the definitional question of periodization in global modernisms and postcolonial studies.

The idea of praxis was explored in the 1960s, contemporaneously with the publication of an English translation of History and Class Consciousness—the early writings of Hungarian Marxist Georgy Lukacs. Reminding us that Marx titled Capital Volume One ‘The Process of Production’, his dynamic, processional and revolutionary brand of Marxism inspired many would-be radicals by its contrast with the official Marxism of the Eastern Bloc (and Western European communist parties). Like Elias, his notion of social figurations going through long-term processes of change as the motor of history represented a dynamic breakthrough from the rigidities of previously held versions of necessary stages of historical development. When Lukacs wrote in the 1920s he was countering the determinism represented by the Second International Marxism of Kautsky and Plekhanov, the leading theoreticians of Western social democracy and Russian menshevism. By the 1960s and 1970s this ‘objectivist’ brand of Marxism was associated with Althusser and the structuralists. The political sense of liberation represented by the Paris uprising in May 1968 gelled with Lukacs’ revolutionary ‘subjectivism’, which affirmed that the working class could make history in the dynamic process of making social change. Like his contemporary Antonio Gramsci, Lukacs was centrally involved in a revolutionary uprising in 1919, in Turin and Budapest respectively. Both sought what Lukacs called ‘the algebra of revolution’;1 both wrestled with the ways in which the state and its rulers hegemonised, and the tactics of the resistance; and both wrote in a style that was both suggestive whilst being open to a range of interpretations. Ninety years on, this article explores the extent to which these two ‘Western Marxists’ agree, and still provide relevant insight, and how linked ideologies from contemporaries such as Mannheim and Elias2—and later, Wacquant—have further developed ‘praxical’ sociology. 1 J. Rees, The Algebra of Revolution (London: Routledge, 1998). 2 R. Kilminster, Praxis and Method (London: Routledge, 1979).

This article discusses the relationship between Paul Feyerabend and Marxism. Feyerabend mentioned, referenced, quoted, discussed or commented on the following Marxists, communists or leftists in his writings: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, MAO, Fidel Castro, Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Walter Hollitscher, Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Joseph Needham, Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Daniel Cohn-Benit and Robin Blackburn. On numerous occasions he discussed and commented on Dadaism, Marxism, communism, anarchism, liberalism, dialectical materialism, reductive materialism and, especially, eliminative materialism. He originated a Dadaistic philosophy, and in particular a Dadaistic epistemology. He did not convert to dialectical materialism; nevertheless, Dadaism seems highly relevant to Marxism and communism. As a Dadaist in philosophy he could well have been a Marxist, a non-Marxist, or an anti-Marxist.

Every generation of modern philosophy sets for itself the task of reinvent? ing the master thinkers of its tradition. In this century, this phenomenon has been borne out by repeated substantial reinterpretations of Marx, par? ticularly so in France where since 1945 emergent philosophical movements have infused new philosophical concepts into Marxism. As hermeneutics informs us, such infusion is a condition for the possibility of the continued vitality of any tradition, whether political, philosophical or otherwise. This interplay with other philosophical movements and their new vocabularies has been a particular strength of Western European, non-orthodox Marxism. "Existential" Marxism in France is perhaps the greatest expression of the lack of orthodoxy in Western Marxism.1 Its most influential works came after World War II, written by Merleau-Ponty and Sartre in the face of the situation of post-War Europe. The various versions of Existential Marxism influenced the interpretation of Marx in the entire post-war generation and introduced a rich phenomenological vocabulary into historical materialism, replacing its abstract, large-scale sociological descriptions with ones more adequate to phenomena of subjectivity, intersubjectivity and everyday life. However, with the rise of Althusser and now post-structuralism, the influence of existentialism has waned considerably. Against the trend toward anti-humanism in reaction to phenomenology and existentialism, Henry's work represents a revitalization of this important Western Marxist philosophical tradition, informing it with the criticism of Western metaphysics that has been developed by Levinas and Heidegger. While in some ways it is a return to this older movement, Henry's book is more importantly a new phenomenological Marxism appropriate to the contem? porary philosophical situation in France. Existential Marxism fell out of favor primarily because of its humanism.

An Italian RuptureProduction against Development Antonio Negri (bio) Translated by Bruno Bosteels How can I begin to define the Italian “difference” within the philosophical framework of postwar Europe? I begin with the end of the 1950s, when a group of politicized intellectuals began to question the extent of the immanence of work in the development of capitalist technologies.1 What were the transformations that from within the modern factory foisted labor-power on machines? Questions like these continued to be elaborated upon with respect to the violent social development of the postwar economic expansion. What, it was asked, was the impact of human activity on how society is structured, passing from the factory to society? On the one hand is this question: what was the effect of capitalist command (and its technological instrumentation) on social life? And vice versa: what transformations did social movements force upon the structures and the institutions of capitalist command? Capitalist power was quickly extended to the control of social life until being configured as biopower, in spite of widespread and effective resistance. How could biopolitical relations be lived and organized so as to create alternatives to biopower? 1 I am convinced that these are the central points around which an original political philosophy has come to constitute itself in Italy within the tormented framework of the heterodox Marxist debate but that also has deep ties with the Italian phenomenological schools of the 1960s. The latter came on the scene by opposing the tedious but extremely widespread Heideggerian philosophy that was hegemonic both on the Right, in neo-scholasticism, and on the Left, with the last Sirens of the Frankfurt School. They offered an analysis of the antagonistic subjectivity in the phenomenologies of Enzo Paci, Giuseppe Semerari, and Enzo Melandri (as well as the new critical positivism of Giulio Preti and Ferruccio Rossi-Landi). They focused on the anthropological relations between the human being and the machine, productive activity and language, perception and action; in so doing they updated Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s humanism, following it up with insights and approaches that “Western Marxism” had elaborated from Georg Lukács to Karel Kosíc. Some research paths have been identified in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno in 1996 (with essays written in the 1980s and 1990s). From this period onward, the themes mentioned above (originally conceptualized in terms of the relationship between class movements and technological transformations) became entwined with and nourished by contact with poststructuralist philosophical literature, primarily, but not exclusively, from France. Through this thematic hybridization, the problems summarized above became central to the postindustrial, postmodern, and globalizing debate. [End Page 21] If this is the overall framework in which the original adventure of the authors of The Italian Difference is to be located, allow me now to focus my attention on a concept, or better yet, on the watchword that was at the center of that period of research and political activity: a phrase that uniquely captured both the rational point of the period as well as its esprit de finesse. I want to ask what the “refusal of work” actually meant.2 To this end, I want to reflect upon a few concepts that, even though they do not immediately refer to the question of the meaning and significance of the “refusal of work,” will be useful to us if we wish to tackle this question. Here I would like to take up a few theoretical achievements that are relevant to our problem and that were set out decisively in Empire and then worked out above all in Commonwealth. Forgive me for employing concepts a posteriori but if I were to trace the development of these concepts from beginning to end, my thinking would become rather cumbersome. I would like to engage some hypotheses about the ways in which the ontology of human labor, or better, productive power [potenza] (as has been adopted in the social and political sciences), historically takes on a form and then in that form either becomes dominated (subjected and enjoyed, disciplined and controlled) or places itself in the condition of revolting, of liberating, and (in the words...

This essay investigates Jean-Paul Sartre's reaction to the Holocaust. While Sartre dealt frequently with Jewish themes, he did not explicitly address the question of why the Holocaust occurred or whether and how Western culture would be different in a post-Holocaust world. I claim that although Sartre never addressed the Shoah directly, his Marxist Existentialism provides valuable resources for understanding modern antisemitism. In his major postwar writings he developed the concepts of political engagement, authenticity and responsibility for systematic social harms. Sartre's importance in Holocaust studies is defended against the claim that Existentialism lacks the theoretical resources to grasp modern, systematic evil. Sartre's approach is briefly compared with that of other Western Marxist like Adorno.

This chapter deals with proletarian Gewalt, which Engels sees as necessary in both the revolutionary process and in the early stages of socialist construction. The concrete manifestation of this socialist Gewalt is the dictatorship of the proletariat, which Engels (like Marx) defines carefully not as an individual dictatorship (as with Bakunin) or by a small band (Blanquist), but as a collective dictatorship by the majority, the workers. Engels's important contribution was to go beyond Marx and identify the Paris Commune with the proletarian dictatorship. The context was a struggle with the moderates of the large German Social-Democratic Party, who tried to dispense with the dictatorship of the proletariat and work within bourgeois democracy. In light of later tendencies in European communism to downplay the proletarian dictatorship and idealise the Paris Commune (‘Eurocommunism’ and some Western Marxists), Engels's explicit argument that the commune was the exercise of the proletarian dictatorship, even that it did not go far enough in exercising such a dictatorship, is a timely warning. The chapter concludes by analysing Engels's explicit usage of ‘socialist Gewalt’ itself, both before and after a revolution, emphasising that political power also has economic influence and potency (Potenz).

For more than thirty years, Fredric Jameson has been one of the most productive, wide-ranging, and distinctive literary theorists in the United States and the Anglophone world. Marxism and Form provided a pioneering account of the work of the major European Marxist theorists--T. W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, and Jean-Paul Sartre--work that was, at the time, largely neglected in the English-speaking world. Through penetrating readings of each theorist, Jameson developed a critical mode of engagement that has had tremendous in.uence. He provided a framework for analyzing the connection between art and the historical circumstances of its making--in particular, how cultural artifacts distort, repress, or transform their circumstances through the abstractions of aesthetic form. Jameson's presentation of the critical thought of this Hegelian Marxism provided a stark alternative to the Anglo-American tradition of empiricism and humanism. It would later provide a compelling alternative to poststructuralism and deconstruction as they became dominant methodologies in aesthetic criticism. One year after Marxism and Form, Princeton published Jameson's The Prison-House of Language (1972), which provided a thorough historical and philosophical description of formalism and structuralism. Both books remain central to Jameson's main intellectual legacy: describing and extending a tradition of Western Marxism in cultural theory and literary interpretation.