Second Foundation: Marxism in the Era of the Russian Revolution

Abstract

The support for most of the parties of the Second International for the First World War split the labor movement into revolutionary and reformist wings, with the Russian Revolution of October 1917 providing the former with both inspiration and a base, in the shape of the new Soviet state. The collapse of the Second International sent the revolutionaries, headed by Lenin, back to Marx to make sense of the disaster and to gain the founder’s authority for their critique of the naturalistic and gradualist version of Marxism associated especially with Karl Kautsky. The resulting reconstruction of Marxism as a “philosophy of praxis” was taken furthest by the very different theories of revolutionary subjectivity developed by György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci. As the revolutionary tide receded and fascism advanced in the decades between the world wars, and as intellectual creativity was snuffed out of the Communist movement by the Stalinist transformation of the Soviet Union, the Frankfurt School carried on elements of Lukács’s project, particularly his critique of capitalist reification, but abandoned his conception of Marxism as the self-understanding of the revolutionary proletariat.