The growing relevance of Marcuse's dialectic of individual and class

This article others a brief historical account of the complex relationship between Michel Foucault and certain theorists in the Western Marxist philosophical tradition. In the context of the history of the “short twentieth century,” Western Marxism is an intellectual trend based on an interpretation of non-Western revolutionary praxis (by Bolsheviks, Maoists, Guevaristas, etc.). Comparative analysis of several schematic portraits - of Lenin’s revolutionary intellectual, of traditional as opposed to organic intellectuals in Gramsci, and of Foucault’s public intellectual - shows that Foucault in a certain instances was not an external enemy of the Western Marxist tradition, but rather its internal critic. Foucault comes across as a revisionist who engaged in a debate with Lenin about the strategy of the revolutionary movement in France of the 1960s and the 70s. Foucault’s criticism of Leninism unexpectedly turns out to be consistent with the basic struggle of post-WWII Western Marxism to find an alternative to the Bolshevik experience of revolution. This deliberate concurrence makes Foucault one of the significant figures in the history of late Western Marxism, but this becomes a real problem for current historians of neo-Marxist thought when coupled with his generally anti-Marxist views. The article discusses two possible solutions to this problem devised by Perry Anderson and Daniel Bensaid. Anderson’s description of the role of Foucault in the fate of Western Marxism is limited to conceptual questions about the relationship between Marxism and (post) structuralism. Bensaid tries to explain how Foucault fits into the Marxist tradition by appealing to social changes, specifically the changing ideology of capitalist society (in the spirit of The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello). Building on Bensaid’s work, the article shows the link between Foucault’s position on public intellectuals and the crisis of the revolutionary movement of the last half-century, in particular by reference to the famous “Iranian episode” in Foucault’s biography.

With only slight exaggeration, Frank Parkin once stated that “Inside every neo-Marxist there seems to be a Weberian struggling to get oat.”1 Indeed, many in the Marxian tradition have turned to the analyses of Weber in order to remedy the perceived weaknesses of Marxian social theory. Although Weber was a political conservative, he is not the “anti-Marx” that he is sometimes portrayed to be. Weber himself stated. that his exploration of the religious roots of capitalist culture was intended not to displace “materialist” explanations but to complement them.2 Repaying the favor, a number of thinkers who helped constitute what is known as “Western Marxism”—especially Georg Lakács, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse—drew on Weberian insights in order to deepen the analysis of contemporary capitalism and, in the case of Horkheimer and Adorno, in order to understand the defeat of Marxian hopes by the middle of the twentieth century.

This paper will be of interest to all those who have a general interest in Western Marxism since two traditions within this framework are opposed in this paper and their opposition is explained: the Althusserian tradition, which is followed by Callinicos, and the Frankfurt School, which is followed by me. The main purpose of the paper is not to analyse Callinicos's theory per se but, through a focus on Callinicos's theory, to bring the Frankfurt School/Open Marxist tradition into contrast with the Althusserian tradition for the first time. My hope is to show how someone like Callinicos, who appears to be a Marxist thinker, is really not, and thus to contribute to the discussion about what it means to be a Marxist in political philosophy. I argue that the integration of a vague notion of totality and dialectics into Callinicos's theory, as well his references to the role of class struggle, which remain problematic, give a false impression that he has moved far from the Althusserian path. Callinicos's political philosophy, like that of Althusser, has difficulty in connecting both dialectics to materialism and also totality to difference and contradiction, and thus in disentangling itself from liberal thinking.

This essay aims to raise the question whether the Association for Economic and Social Analysis (AESA) has arrived at a theoretical crossroads. On the one hand I criticize three AESA essays by George DeMartino, J. K. Gibson-Graham, and David Ruccio for their equivocating rejection of what they call “traditional Marxism,” a rejection that entails the rejection of history itself. On the other hand, I argue for the methodological convergence of an AESA essay by Wolff with Wood's Western marxist historicism, a historicism that entails the inevitability of tragic witness. Finally, I argue for the vindication conferred on this Wolff/Wood Western marxism, in contrast to the DeMartino/Gibson-Graham/Ruccio postmodern materialism, by Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible.

Antonio Gramsci is rightly regarded as one of the most important Western Marxists of the 20th century. This is largely due to the work of scholars like Perry Anderson, Noberto Bobbio, Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. They returned to the history of 20th century Marxism in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to rediscover neglected intellectual currents, unsullied by the sins of Stalinism, which might still provide intellectual insights to radical socialist and democratic politics within and beyond the Marxist tradition. 1 Gramsci’s Italian heritage — and critical interest in the work of Croce and Machiavelli — was obviously important here. But of equal significance was the fact that immediately prior to his imprisonment in 1926 by Mussolini’s fascist state, Gramsci had penned two important letters to the Comintern that were critical of the early phase of Stalinism and its attack on party democracy. 2 For some at least, these letters represented a kind of parting of the ways between East and West within Marxism, 3 and Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks emerge as one of the first great works of the Western Marxist tradition in its rejection of Eastern-style Marxism (and Stalinism in particular), and its development of a body of ideas tailored to the unique challenges of Western societies and their democratic culture.

The most important intellectual source of Habermas’ thinking is the broad, flexible and interdisciplinary Marxist tradition which inspired what came to be called the ‘Frankfurt School’ of Critical Theory, based in the early 1930s and again from 1950 in the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. As Habermas showed in detail in his Theory of Communicative Action, this tradition draws on both Marx and Max Weber, on another non-Marxist, Weber’s contemporary Georg Simmel, and on the father of ‘western Marxism’, Georg Lukács. In an autobiographical interview, Habermas recalls reading Lukács for the first time with great excitement, but with a sense that his work was no longer directly relevant to post-war societies such as West Germany. His thinking remained shaped, however, by a western Marxist agenda emphasizing the interplay between capitalist exploitation and bureaucratic state rule, and their implications for individual identity and collective political autonomy. More concretely, as a member of what has been called the ‘Hitler Youth generation’, drawn as a child into complicity with the most appalling regime of modern times, he was horrified both by the crimes of the Third Reich and by the unwillingness of his compatriots to face up to their responsibility for what had happened.

Critical pedagogy after Marx Western Marxism, the New Marxist Reading and Educational Connections The article attempts to bring together variants of German pedagogical Marx reception and three central historical readings of Marx’s theory. After an overview of the interpretations of Traditional Marxism, Western Marxism, and the Neue Marx-Lektüre, it is shown that the pedagogical reception is predominantly connected with Western Marxism. It is argued that perspectives of a critical pedagogy that takes up insights from the currently popular reading of the Neue Marx-Lektüre are yet to be developed. Some apparently crucial aspects are discussed in this respect.

MARXIST SOCIAL THEORY is enjoying an unparalleled influence in the contemporary intellectual life of the West, and its presence in the United States is no exception (Aronowitz 1981:ix). Well developed Marxist perspectives are increasingly evident in the social sciences, historiography, and literary criticism; so it is, perhaps, something of a surprise to discover the relative absence of a parallel discussion in folkloristics. The reasons for this absence and the possibilities for such a Marxist discourse particularly among English-speaking folklorists remain largely unexplored, although Fox has taken an initial step (1980). The present remarks are intended as another but more substantial initiative toward a continuing discussion. A full analysis of Marxist thought and folklore would require a discussion of several key topics: the status of folklore in the writings of Marx and Engels, the development of a Soviet folkloristics, the fate of Marxism in Western folkloristics, and conversely, the place of folklore in the development of Marxism outside the Soviet bloc and among Soviet dissidents. Previous discussions of these subjects have varied in quality and have lent an almost exclusive emphasis to Soviet practice or its rejection in the West (Dorson 1972; Fox 1980; Oinas 1973; Oinas and Soudakoff 1975; Sokolov 1950; Williams 1975; Zemljanova 1963). In a larger study in progress I discuss all of these areas and elaborate my theoretical views on the subject. In this instance, however, I wish to explore the most ignored of these topics-the place of folklore in the development of non-Soviet Marxism, specifically among selected and representative nonfolklorists whom I will generally refer to as Western Marxists. While folklorists have had little to say about Marxism and folklore, this Western Marxist tradition has demonstrated a high degree of interest in this relationship. Their commentary merits discussion both as an important chapter in a developing history of folkloristics (Ben-Amos 1973) and as a necessary background for future theorizing in this area. My chief contention is that the treatment of folklore by Western Marxists has a limited character. They intuitively view folklore as collective behaviors whose fundamental character is in some way inherently opposed to the dominant social order of state capitalism, an unclear formulation at best. Further,

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.

Unfinished, still a work-in-progress at the time of his death in 1969, Aesthetic Theory is arguably not only Theodor W. Adorno's masterwork, but perhaps the pivotal document of twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics. The book was to be dedicated to Samuel Beckett; and, at one level, the work can be construed as the philosophical articulation of the meaning of artistic modernism, as modernism brought to the level of the concept. Yet even these simple statements cannot be forwarded innocently: that a work of aesthetics stands at or near the center of the thought of Adorno's Marxism has always been cause for consternation and embarrassment; that western Marxism (in the writings of Ernst Bloch, Györky Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse) has been from the outset bound to cultural critique and aesthetic theory can only deepen the puzzle. Some ground-clearing is thus necessary before a real start can be made.

As an intellectual tradition, the history of Hegelianism is the history of the reception and influence of the thought of G.W.F. Hegel. This tradition is notoriously complex and many-sided, because while some Hegelians have seen themselves as merely defending and developing his ideas along what they took to be orthodox lines, others have sought to ‘reform’ his system, or to appropriate individual aspects and overturn others, or to offer consciously revisionary readings of his work. This makes it very hard to identify any body of doctrine common to members of this tradition, and a wide range of divergent philosophical views can be found among those who (despite this) can none the less claim to be Hegelians. There are both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ reasons for this: on one hand, Hegel’s position itself brings together many different tendencies (idealism and objectivism, historicism and absolutism, rationalism and empiricism, Christianity and humanism, classicism and modernism, a liberal view of civil society with an organicist view of the state); any balance between them is hermeneutically very unstable, enabling existing readings to be challenged and old orthodoxies to be overturned. On the other hand, the critical response to Hegel’s thought and the many attempts to undermine it have meant that Hegelians have continually needed to reconstruct his ideas and even to turn Hegel against himself, while each new intellectual development, such as Marxism, pragmatism, phenomenology or existential philosophy, has brought about some reassessment of his position. This feature of the Hegelian tradition has been heightened by the fact that Hegel’s work has had an impact at different times over a long period and in a wide range of countries, so that divergent intellectual, social and historical pressures have influenced its distinct appropriations. At the hermeneutic level, these appropriations have contributed greatly to keeping the philosophical understanding of Hegel alive and open-ended, so that our present-day conception of his thought cannot properly be separated from them. Moreover, because questions of Hegel interpretation have so often revolved around the main philosophical, political and religious issues of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hegelianism has also had a significant impact on the development of modern Western thought in its own right. As a result of its complex evolution, Hegelianism is best understood historically, by showing how the changing representation of Hegel’s ideas have come about, shaped by the different critical concerns, sociopolitical conditions and intellectual movements that dominated his reception in different countries at different times. Initially, Hegel’s influence was naturally most strongly felt in Germany as a comprehensive, integrative philosophy that seemed to do justice to all realms of experience and promised to preserve the Christian heritage in a modern and progressive form within a speculative framework. However, this position was quickly challenged, both from other philosophical standpoints (such as F.W.J. Schelling’s ‘positive philosophy’ and F.A. Trendelenburg’s neo-Aristotelian empiricism), and by the celebrated generation of younger thinkers (the so-called ‘Young’ or ‘Left’ Hegelians, such as Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge and the early Karl Marx), who insisted that to discover what made Hegel a truly significant thinker (his dialectical method, his view of alienation, his ‘sublation’ of Christianity), this orthodoxy must be overturned. None the less, both among these radicals and in academic circles, Hegel’s influence was considerably weakened in Germany by the 1860s and 1870s, while by this time developments in Hegelian thought had begun to take place elsewhere. Hegel’s work was known outside Germany from the 1820s onwards, and Hegelian schools developed in northern Europe, Italy, France, Eastern Europe, America and (somewhat later) Britain, each with their own distinctive line of interpretation, but all fairly uncritical in their attempts to assimilate his ideas. However, in each of these countries challenges to the Hegelian position were quick to arise, partly because the influence of Hegel’s German critics soon spread abroad, and partly because of the growing impact of other philosophical positions (such as Neo-Kantianism, materialism and pragmatism). Nevertheless, Hegelianism outside Germany proved more durable in the face of these attacks, as new readings and approaches emerged to counter them, and ways were found to reinterpret Hegel’s work to show that it could accommodate these other positions, once the earlier accounts of Hegel’s metaphysics, political philosophy and philosophy of religion (in particular) were rejected as too crude. This pattern has continued into the twentieth century, as many of the movements that began by defining themselves against Hegel (such as Neo-Kantianism, Marxism, existentialism, pragmatism, post-structuralism and even ‘analytic’ philosophy) have then come to find unexpected common ground, giving a new impetus and depth to Hegelianism as it began to be assimilated within and influenced by these diverse approaches. Such efforts at rapprochement began in the early part of the century with Wilhelm Dilthey’s attempt to link Hegel with his own historicism, and although they were more ambivalent, this connection was reinforced in Italy by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. The realignment continued in France in the 1930s, as Jean Wahl brought out the more existentialist themes in Hegel’s thought, followed in the 1940s by Alexander Kojève’s influential Marxist readings. Hegelianism has also had an impact on Western Marxism through the writings of the Hungarian Georg Lukács, and this influence has continued in the critical reinterpretations offered by members of the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas and others. More recently, most of the major schools of philosophical thought (from French post-structuralism to Anglo-American ‘analytic’ philosophy) have emphasized the need to take account of Hegel, and as a result Hegelian thought (both exegetical and constructive) is continually finding new directions.

Being a master of metaphors

Although Chinese Marxism—primarily represented by Maoism—is generally seen by Western intellectuals as monolithic, Liu Kang argues that its practices and projects are as diverse as those in Western Marxism, particularly in the area of aesthetics. In this comparative study of European and Chinese Marxist traditions, Liu reveals the extent to which Chinese Marxists incorporate ideas about aesthetics and culture in their theories and practices. In doing so, he constructs a wholly new understanding of Chinese Marxism. Far from being secondary considerations in Chinese Marxism, aesthetics and culture are in fact principal concerns. In this respect, such Marxists are similar to their Western counterparts, although Europeans have had little understanding of the Chinese experience. Liu traces the genealogy of aesthetic discourse in both modern China and the West since the era of classical German thought, showing where conceptual modifications and divergences have occurred in the two traditions. He examines the work of Mao Zedong, Lu Xun, Li Zehou, Qu Qiubai, and others in China, and from the West he discusses Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Marxist theorists including Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse. While stressing the diversity of Marxist positions within China as well as in the West, Liu explains how ideas of culture and aesthetics have offered a constructive vision for a postrevolutionary society and have affected a wide field of issues involving the problems of modernity. Forcefully argued and theoretically sophisticated, this book will appeal to students and scholars of contemporary Marxism, cultural studies, aesthetics, and modern Chinese culture, politics, and ideology.

This chapter specifically brings Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov's thought to bear on a set of debates about structure and agency that developed in the journal Open Marxism (OM) between 1992 and 1995. It focuses on John Holloway's contribution to these debates an important contemporary philosopher in the Western Marxist tradition whose book Change the World without Taking Power has been quite influential and the subject of much debate. The chapter demonstrates the relevance of Ilyenkov's work to the project of OM . It also takes seriously recent criticisms of Holloway and the philosophy that informs his political conclusions. Drawing on Ilyenkov's post-Cartesian anti-dualist reading of Marx, the chapter addresses some of these criticisms, specifically OM 's perceived subjectivism. It shows how the dominant categories of intellectual histories Western Marxism and Soviet Marxism exclude the subterranean tradition of creative Soviet Marxism. Keywords: creative Soviet Marxism; Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov; John Holloway; Open Marxism (OM) ; post-Cartesian anti-dualist; Western Marxism

This article explores the profound intellectual legacy and contributions of Perry Anderson, a leading figure in Marxist theory, history, and as the editor-in-chief of the New Left Review. Born in London in 1938, Anderson's scholarly journey encompasses diverse disciplines including political science, history, and literature, establishing him as a pivotal figure in contemporary Marxist thought. The study conducts a comprehensive historical review, focusing on Anderson’s seminal works such as "Considerations on Western Marxism," "The Origins of Postmodernity," and "The New Old World," situating them within the socio-political context of post-World War II Europe and the emergence of the New Left movement. Methodologically, employing a historical approach, the research examines Anderson’s critical interpretations of historical processes, socio-economic structures, and ideological formations. It elucidates how Anderson's writings challenge and extend traditional Marxist historiography, offering nuanced insights into the complexities of contemporary capitalism and its global ramifications. Major findings highlight the reception and impact of Anderson’s works, emphasizing their influence on Marxist scholarship and their resonance among global audiences, particularly in China. By documenting the interpretation and reception of Anderson’s works in China, the study underscores their international significance and cross-cultural relevance in understanding capitalist ideologies and societal structures. Furthermore, the article proposes avenues for future research, suggesting directions to explore Anderson’s ongoing relevance in contemporary socio-political challenges and advancing progressive perspectives in global intellectual discourse. Ultimately, this research contributes to a deeper appreciation of Anderson’s intellectual legacy, illuminating his enduring influence on Marxist theory and critical social analysis.