The New Religious Dimension in Western Marxism: I

Abstract

AbstractFor decades, orthodox Marxists understood Marxist dialectical materialism merely as a turning upside down of Hegel's absolute idealism. Humanistic Marxists have corrected the Marxist concept of the relationship between economic basestructure and cultural superstructure which in turn leads them to a more differentiated view of religion as part of the cultural superstructure. Since the 1920's, Western Marxists discovered that the relationship between Hegel's idea dialectics and Marxian reality dialectics is much more complicated than orthodox Marxists and their opponents, the positivists, previously assumed. Marxist dialectical materialism is not necessarily an ontological materialism, but rather a regional one. That allows Humanistic Marxists today to speak more favorably about some metaphysical and theological trends and to produce a more adequate and deeper critical theory of religion than Marx himself was able to create.