Marxism

A large body of Marxian writing and reflection lies beyond the framework of doctrinal Marxism. Until World War II almost all of this "independent Marxism"—as we might call it—emerged within the framework of, or at least in close dialogue with, doctrinal Marxism. After World War II, this changed, for much Marxian reflection was carried out in essential independence from both official Marxism-Leninism and from whatever Marxist residues remained in the social democratic movement. In addition to independent Marxists, there were many scholars and intellectuals who deployed Marxian perspectives without accepting Marxism as a whole and usually without even considering themselves Marxists. This is a tradition that goes back to the early twentieth century. By the end of the twentieth century it was certainly the dominant mode of serious intellectual work and reflection in a Marxian register. Of course, one encounters a difficulty here, for at this point one reaches the boundary of what can legitimately be called Marxism.

Existential Marxism.

Another difficulty is that of characterizing in a general way the Marxisms that diverge from doctrinal Marxism. Beyond social-democratic and Marxist-Leninist Marxisms, Hook identified a third, post-1945 variant: existential Marxism. In doing so he inflated the significance of a relatively minor school of mainly French Marxists. Still, Hook's category does point in the direction of at least two significant developments in post-1945 Marxism. First, after about 1950, much effort went into reinterpreting Marx in the light of the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," which revealed a "humanist" Marx different from the Marx of Marxism-Leninism. While Marx was no existentialist, his early interest in estrangement and in activity do reveal affinities with existentialism. Second, an important development since World War II among persons sympathetic to Marxism has been the impulse to work in the mode of "Marxism and … "—combining Marxism with something else, whether method, school, commitment, or discipline. In offering an existentially inflected Marxism in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was operating in just this sort of combinatory mode. A German-Jewish refugee to the United States, Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), engaged in a similar effort, variously combining a Marxian perspective with Freud (Eros and Civilization, 1955) and with vaguely Heideggerian notions of an oppressive modernity (One-Dimensional Man, 1964). Other combinations involved less an attempt to combine Marxism with some other perspective than an attempt to apply Marxism to an implied object of study. It was a potentially unending intellectual game, for one could pair Marx with other partners virtually at will: a short list includes feminism, structuralism, psychoanalysis, ecology, anthropology, history, literary criticism, literary theory, film studies, and cultural studies. Although it involves much question-begging, the game still continues.

Western Marxism.

Other commentators have identified a tradition of "Western Marxism." "Western Marxism" is largely a post hoc imposition. Still, the category can help us to see common features in a large body of Marxist theory that first emerged as a challenge to Engelsian and Leninist versions of Marxism. The unintending founder of Western Marxism was György Lukács (1885–1971), whose History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923) was actually written in defense of "orthodox Marxism." But in the midst of defending orthodox Marxism, Lukács emphasized two concepts that were to be important for Western Marxism. One was estrangement (which he intuited in Marx without having read the then-unavailable "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts"). The other was totality. The gist of this latter concept is the claim that the correct understanding of any reality requires that one first understand it as a whole (which among other things, involves understanding its place within the historical process), rather than arriving at conclusions about it solely by induction from particulars. Lukács held that bourgeois empiricists, as well as some Marxists, had failed to understand this point. A second theorist often seen as a founder of Western Marxism was Karl Korsch (1886–1961), who in Marxism and Philosophy (1923) and other writings emphasized that Marxism is primarily concerned with human practice (praxis) and, like Lukács, criticized positivist or empiricist versions of Marxism.

Other theorists commonly associated with so-called Western Marxism include Karl Korsch (1886–1961), Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), Ernst Bloch (1885–1977), Herbert Marcuse, Henri Lefebvre (1905–1991), Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), and the "Frankfurt School" theorists Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and Theodor Adorno (1903–1969). What is most striking about the "Western Marxists" is that none of them focused on Marxism's basic socioeconomic claims. They either directly assert or implicitly assume the truth of these claims, but they never see the need to show that they are true in fact. For example, Lukács emphatically saw the proletariat as the "identical subject-object" of history, but he never did the work to show how this must be so. The omission was made easier by the fact that Western Marxists focused overwhelmingly on culture, social consciousness, and ideology rather than on economics. For example, Gramsci is best known for his notion of hegemony, a kind of updated notion of ideology; Benjamin was a brilliant cultural and literary critic; and Adorno offered a cutting analysis of "the culture industry."

One historian of Western Marxism, Martin Jay, has noted that a loss of confidence in the validity and usefulness of Western Marxism occurred by the late 1970s, after a brief period in which it had attracted some young, leftist, mainly American academics. The reasons for this deflation are no doubt complex, as are the reasons for the decline of Marxism generally. One crucial consideration is that thinking persons can hardly go on begging the question as to the truth of a theory's basic claims for long before doubts need to be addressed. It is "no accident," as a Marxist might say, that such figures as Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), scion of the Frankfurt School, and Agnes Heller (b. 1929), Lukács's most distinguished student, took issue, sooner or later, with Marxism.

By the 1970s, commitment to Marxism was not easy to maintain, for there had been too much experience contrary to Marx's hopes and predictions. Marx's claim that capitalism was doomed to collapse in a proletarian revolution had to face both the failure of any unified proletariat to appear and the fact that the institutions of capitalist society had managed to muddle through again and again. Marx's claim that socialism would be better than capitalism had to face both the experiential disconfirmation offered by actually existing communist states, and a serious argument, first articulated by Ludwig von Mises in 1920, to the effect that a complex nonmarket economy cannot operate efficiently, because markets are indispensable information-gathering mechanisms (see Steele).

Analytical Marxism.

Although various claims central to Marxism no longer seem tenable, Marxism has a legitimate survival in at least two respects. First, Marxism exists as a set of suggestions for research, for Marx offered many specific claims and suggestions concerning modern society and politics. Some of these are false, as Richard Hamilton has shown. But others, particularly when reformulated as abstract theoretical claims to be tested in specific present-day contexts, remain alive in current social science. For example, Marxism has been influential in recent thinking about international political economy—hardly surprising, in the light of Marx and Engels's early insistence on capitalism's global character. It has influenced thinking about state power, a theme emphasized by the Marxist political theorists Ralph Miliband (1924–1994) and Nicos Poulantzas (1936–1979) and picked up by others subsequently (see Aronowitz and Bratsis). It has influenced thinking about democratization—in particular, the thinking of those political scientists concerned with the relation between class structure and democracy. Finally, it has helped to inspire empirical research into the workings of class in modern society.

A question that arises in relation to such studies is: How Marxist are they? Clearly, they are not Marxist by the standards of revolutionary Marxism, since they are academic studies and not attempts to promote the revolution (at most, such researchers hope to encourage reform). But since in 2004 there exist virtually no active Marxian revolutionaries apart from the small circle of Nepalese Maoists, this is a high standard. By less stringent standards, such studies may well be Marxist in a looser sense—in the sense of taking Marx seriously, working within a tradition of Marxism, using Marxian language, and maintaining a normative commitment to the values of freedom, equality, and human dignity. Certainly, in the late 1970s a small but lively group of Anglo-American academics began to identify themselves as "analytical" or "rational choice" Marxists (see Roemer, Wright, and Wright et al.). However, insofar as their investigations were integrated into fields or subfields in political science, economics, sociology, and so on, these tended to become "research" rather than "Marxist research."

Thus one meets again a boundary, where what is valid in Marxism passes over into an intellectual territory that is no longer Marxist. Some writers, notably Ernesto Laclau (b. 1935) and Chantal Mouffe (b. 1943) have called this territory "post-Marxism" (see Sim). In the eyes of such writers, post-Marxism involves a reformulation of Marxism in order to accommodate such "movements" as poststructuralism, postmodernism, and second-wave feminism. Here Marxism appears, not as a set of analyzable propositions, but, in a much more attenuated guise, as a form of critique and of hope from which almost all specifically Marxian claims have disappeared. This is the second way in which Marxism continues to have a legitimate survival in the twenty-first century.