Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?

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.

For 'Western Marxism' — a term introduced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in 1955 in his Adventures of the Dialectic (1973) to describe the philosophical tendency stemming from Georg Lukács' History and Class Consciousness (1971; originally published in 1923) — no concept internal to Marxism has been more antithetical to the genuine development of historical materialism than the 'dialectics of nature'. Commonly attributed to Engels rather than Marx, this concept is often seen as the differentia specifica that beginning in the 1920s separated the official Marxism of the Soviet Union from Western Marxism. Yet, as Lukács, who played the leading role in questioning the concept of the dialectic of nature, was later to admit, Western Marxism's rejection of it struck at the very heart of the classical Marxist ontology — that of Marx no less than Engels.KeywordsHistorical MaterialismHuman PraxisClass ConsciousnessDialectical MaterialismMetabolic RelationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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.’

This essay centres on the English translation (2000) of Georg Lukács’s Tailism and the Dialectic (written in either 1925 or 1926). Lukács is generally heralded as a founding theoretician of a ‘Western Marxism’, in opposition to ‘Eastern’ Soviet Marxism, and his most impressive and most influential work, History and Class Consciousness (1923), is generally treated as having rehabilitated Marxist concern with questions of subjectivity. It might therefore come as a surprise when Lukács in Tailism states that the purpose of History and Class Consciousness was to demonstrate ‘that the organisation and tactics of Bolshevism are the only possible consequence of Marxism’. In my view, however, this should already be abundantly clear from History and Class Consciousness. For Lukács’s absorption with proletarian subjectivity was motivated by an obsession with what he saw as its immaturity. And he coined the category of ‘reification’ in order to explain his disappointed expectations, to explain, that is, why the proletariat did not make a ‘socialist’ revolution in the ‘objectively ripe’ situation of an ‘imperialist war’ created by ‘moribund capitalism’. In short, Lukács did raise anew the question of the subjective, but only to then declare that workers, not even ‘the most revolutionary among them’, could never attain proper class consciousness, which he attributed instead to the ‘revolutionary party’ bearing the properly revolutionary theory. For this reason I agree with Slavoj Žižek’s characterisation of Lukács as the ‘ultimate philosopher [my emphasis] of Leninism’ – although I do think that Lenin himself would have found, as he did in connection with one of Lukács’s other works, Marxism ‘present only at a verbal level’. My concern is two-fold: with a critique of the methodological short-cuts that Lukács made in his purely conceptual derivation of the concept of reification, and his purely conceptual attribution of it as the necessary form of working-class consciousness ‘in its immediacy’; and with the dangerous political consequences that Lukács derived from his assessment of the reified character of working-class subjectivity, mainly a theoretical guarantee that the party with the proper revolutionary theory must always be right, or at least more right than anyone else.

"Western Marxism" first made its appearance in the early 1920s and rapidly developed and spread after the Second World War, especially since the mid-1950s. Currently, it is not only popular in the advanced capitalist countries of Europe and America, but also commands considerable influence in some socialist and Third World countries. One of the major reasons for its broad influence is that it has managed to grasp the modern-day characteristic of scientific technology increasingly becoming the primary force of production, and to use this to carry out multi-faceted observations and criticisms of contemporary capitalist society. In this way, it has expressed a positive and actively critical spirit. In this article, we shall provide a general survey of some critical theories of Western Marxism.

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.

Many Western Marxists have jettisoned the concepts of imperialism while retaining opposition to actually existing socialist projects of the Global South. This paper asserts that the failure to critique imperialism and to support socialist projects in the Global South is grounded in a rejection of classical Marxist human relations to nature and a failure to contemplate the continuance of state-socialist projects in the Global South. Since the 1990s, Western Marxists have replaced imperialism with global capitalism that is untethered to Western imperialism. Western Marxists have also deemed socialist projects as a betrayal of their utopian views rooted in the Hegelian “purity fetish.” Instead, some Western Marxists have aligned with imperialist states in support of political and economic intervention against countries they view as failed projects, often leading to the reassertion of imperialist domination. Consequently, Western Marxists blindly support Western policies which undermine socialist state projects and wittingly or unwittingly, the reassertion of economic, political, cultural and military dependency on imperialist capitalism.

Lenin is the obvious keystone of what can be called ‘the Bolshevik tradition’. There has been considerable confusion over the meaning of this term, with frequent identification of it with the murderously bureaucratic phenomenon that in fact strangled it (for example, J. Arch Getty's description of Stalin's 1930s purges as ‘the self-destruction of the Bolsheviks’). To the contrary – Lenin and the Bolshevik tradition he represents are inseparable from the revolutionary, anti-dogmatic, profoundly democratic perspectives of Karl Marx. While rooted in problems and contradictions arising within ‘Leninism’ and Bolshevism in the difficult years of 1918–1924, Stalinism represents a qualitative divergence. In fact, Bolshevism is a tradition that is essential to the best and most activist elements associated with ‘Western Marxism’ – particularly as represented by its foundational figures of the 1920s, Lukács and Gramsci – and with currents influenced by Trotsky. It is likely that a resurgence of left-wing activism will cause renewed scholarly debate on the issue of Lenin and revolutionary democracy.

China’s reception of “Western Marxism” is a critical part of the global history of Marxism. This paper examines three aspects of the reception of Western Marxism in literary and art criticism during the early years of Mao’s China (1949-65): the Western Marxist critique of surrealism, debates over Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and Sartrean existentialism and Western Marxism. The impacts of Western Marxist literary thought upon Chinese literary studies during the early years of the PRC are discussed, along with the extensive influx of Western Marxism that began in the reform era of post-Mao China (1978- ) as a renewal of the early exchanges that were disrupted during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76).

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.

One of the lasting contributions of the Frankfurt School of social theorists, represented especially by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment, was the development of a philosophical critique of the domination of nature.… Yet their critique of the Enlightenment exploitation of nature was eventually extended to a critique of Marx himself as an Enlightenment figure, especially in relation to his mature work in Capital.… So all-encompassing was the critique of the "dialectic of the Enlightenment" within the main line of the Frankfurt School, and within what came to be known as "Western Marxism"…, that it led to the estrangement of thinkers in this tradition not only from the later Marx, but also from natural science—and hence nature itself. Consequently, when the ecological movement emerged in the 1960s and '70s, Western Marxism, with its abstract, philosophical notion of the domination of nature, was ill-equipped to analyze the changing and increasingly perilous forms of material interaction between humanity and nature.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

This article intends to bring to light the adventures of Western Marxism in China in the 1980s. It focuses on the philosophical ideas raised and illuminates the views of reformist and orthodox Marxists in the polemic about Western Marxism. I argue that in early 1989 the debate about Western Marxism had escalated into a fundamental challenge to the official ideology—a challenge that came to a sudden halt with the Tiananmen crackdown on 4 June 1989 and the chilling effect this event had on ideological discussion in ChinaThe Third Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1978 ushered in a decade of ideological fermentation in China that lasted until the Tiananmen crackdown on 4 June 1989. During this period, despite official campaigns against “bourgeois liberalization” and “spiritual pollution,” orthodox Marxism, understood by the CCP as Marxism-Leninism, became less sacrosanct. Discussions on various aspects of Marxism, in particular on “humanism” and “alienation,” captured the limelight in Chinese intellectual circles throughout much of the 1980s. Adhering to (jianchi) and developing (fazhan) Marxism in a new direction became leading themes among Chinese intellectuals.

I shall here examine aspects of Herbert Marcuse's recent work in the context of a more general examination and critique of con? temporary western Marxism. In this sense, I propose to treat Marcuse as the harbinger of a new perspective in the Marxist tradition, as well as one of the most articulate expositors of the "old" western Marxism, buried once and for all in the decade of the 1960s. My argument is that Marcuse, in spite of his recent descent into aesthetic resignation before an apparently inflexible capitalist totality of domination (paralleling Adorno's own critique in this regard) [ 1 ], illuminates in, for example, his An Essay on Liberation certain current dilemmas of western Marxism, and points the way toward their solution. Most notably, I believe that Marcuse understands the dialectic between individual and class levels of socialist struggle; and that he guides us beyond a monadic, inner-directed socialist aestheticism (in spite of his own personal inability to creatively reappropriate his own late-1960s insights in this respect).

Mikkel Bolt: Perry Anderson’s Western Marxism’ Revisited, Arbejderhistorie 1/2012, s. 84-96.Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism from 1976 remains an influential account of Western European Marxism in the 20. Century. Anderson analyse the difference between an earlier generation of Marxists such as Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg and a later generation including Karl Korsch, Jean-Paul Sartre and Theodor W.Adorno that all were forced into political isolation in a context characterised by the consolidation of bourgeois liberal democracy inWestern Europe and the disappearance of a revolutionary perspective. The consequence according to Anderson is a kind of philosophical withdrawal where Marxist intellectuals take up teaching positions in the university distancing themselves from politics. The article argues that Anderson’s mapping of the development of Marxism is a misreading that misses the explicit critique of the thendominant Marxism and its pretended objectivism and overlooks Western Marxism’s attempt to critically analyse the emergence ofnew forms of control in post-war Europe.

This article reconstructs the theory of ecological development that underlies the mature intellectual production of Friedrich Engels. It does so by means of a dialogue between recent scholarly interpretations of his thought, on the one hand, and a contextualized discussion of its reception in Latin America, on the other. Published in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, the mature work of Engels enabled Latin American Marxism to challenge mainstream theories of development that framed this concept in terms of mere growth or modernization, and to provide a multilinear understanding of historical and technological change in modern societies. For Engels, the (eco)socialist development of the forces of production would require the construction of a mass movement against capital. Accordingly, the article also unearths his writings on political strategy, and discusses the ways in which they informed anti-dictatorial struggles in Latin America. By bringing together the economic and the political underpinnings of an Engelsian theory of development, the article rethinks ecological socialism beyond Western Marxism – especially after its shift towards degrowth – and points at its implications for building an environmental politics of the working class.