Introduction to the Special Theme: Finding out the Contemporary Value of Marx’s Philosophy

Abstract

Theorists in the period of the Second International mostly regarded Marx’s theories as an empirical science but refused to admit the existence of “Marx’s philosophy.” Marx himself also held the idea of “abolishing philosophy” and in The German Ideology, he even drew an analogy comparing the relationship between philosophy and empirical science and that between masturbation and actual sexual love. Since Plekhanov, and particularly since Lenin, Dialectical Materialism has been considered to be synonymous with Marx’s philosophy. Early Marxists from Lukacs and Gramsci to Korsch were all against the trend that theorists of the Second International consigning Marx’s theories to empirical science, but, at the same time, they also objected to systemizing Marx’s philosophy in terms of Dialectical Materialism (they even traced the origin of this approach back to Engels), and, as the result, they created a new interpretive approach to Marx’s “praxis philosophy.” After the 20 th century, its existence or non-existence not having been a big problem for “Marx’s philosophy,” Western scholars still scarcely introduced Marx when it came to compiling of the histories of philosophy. Nonetheless, the situation has changed recently. For instance, both Samuel Stumpf’s textbook Socrates to Sartre and Beyond: A History of Philosophy (2007) and Douglas J. Soccio’s Archetypes of Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy (2010) introduce Marx as an important philosopher, the latter even set aside a chapter for Marx’s philosophy. Of course, these works fail to understand Marx’s philosophy in the true sense of going beyond Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism. It merits mentioning though that, not long after the Cold War, Etienne Balibar in The Philosophy of Marx (1993) and Tom Rockmore in Marx after Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx (2002) both coincided in being committed to rebuilding “Marx’s philosophy.”