Western Marxism is a current of
Marxist theory that arose from
Western and Central Europe in the aftermath of the 1917
October Revolution in Russia and the ascent of Leninism. The term denotes a loose collection of Marxist theorists who emphasised
culture,
philosophy, and
art, in contrast to the Marxism of the Soviet Union.
Key Western Marxists Georg Lukács Georg Lukács (13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and
literary critic, who founded Western Marxism with his magnum opus
History and Class Consciousness. Written between 1919 and 1922 and first published in 1923, the collection of essays contributed to debates concerning Marxism and its relation to sociology, politics and philosophy. The book also reconstructed aspects of
Marx's theory of alienation before the publication of the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in which Marx most clearly expounds the theory. Lukács's work underlines Marxism's origins in
Hegelianism and elaborates Marxist theories such as ideology,
false consciousness,
reification and
class consciousness.
Karl Korsch Karl Korsch (15 August 1886 – 21 October 1961) was born in Tostedt, near Hamburg, to the family of a middle-ranking bank official. His masterwork
Marxism and Philosophy, which attempts to re-establish the historic character of Marxism as the heir to
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, earned him condemnation from the
Third International. Korsch was especially concerned that Marxist theory was losing its precision and validity—in the words of the day, becoming "vulgarized"—within the upper echelons of the various socialist organizations. In his later work, he rejected Orthodox Marxism as historically outmoded, wanting to adapt Marxism to a new historical situation. He wrote in his
Ten Theses (1950) that "the first step in re-establishing a revolutionary theory and practice consists in breaking with that Marxism which claims to monopolize revolutionary initiative as well as theoretical and practical direction" and that "today, all attempts to re-establish the Marxist doctrine as a whole in its original function as a theory of the working classes social revolution are reactionary utopias".
Herbert Marcuse Herbert Marcuse (19 July 1898 – 29 July 1979) was a prominent German-American philosopher and sociologist of Jewish descent and a member of the Frankfurt School. Marcuse's critiques of capitalist society (especially his 1955 synthesis of Marx and
Freud,
Eros and Civilization and his 1964 book
One-Dimensional Man) resonated with the concerns of the leftist student movement in the 1960s. Because of his willingness to speak at student protests, Marcuse soon became known as "the father of the
New Left", a term he disliked and rejected.
Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was already a key and influential philosopher and playwright for his early writings on
individualistic existentialism. In his later career, Sartre attempted to reconcile the existential philosophy of
Søren Kierkegaard with Marxist philosophy and Hegelian dialectics in his work
Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre was also involved in Marxist politics and was impressed upon visiting Marxist revolutionary
Che Guevara, calling him "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age".
Louis Althusser Louis Althusser (16 October 1918 – 22 October 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. He was a longtime member and sometimes strong critic of the
French Communist Party. His arguments and theses were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of Marxism. These included both the influence of
empiricism on Marxist theory and
humanism and
reformist socialist orientations which manifested as divisions in the European Communist parties as well as the problem of the cult of personality and of ideology itself. Althusser is commonly referred to as a structural Marxist, although his relationship to other schools of French
structuralism is not a simple affiliation and he is critical of many aspects of structuralism. His essay
Marxism and Humanism is a strong statement of anti-humanism in Marxist theory, condemning ideas like "human potential" and "species-being", which are often put forth by Marxists, as outgrowths of a bourgeois ideology of "humanity". His essay
Contradiction and Overdetermination borrows the concept of
overdetermination from
psychoanalysis to replace the idea of "contradiction" with a more complex model of multiple
causality in political situations (an idea closely related to Gramsci's concept of
hegemony). Althusser is also widely known as a theorist of ideology and his best-known essay is
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation. The essay establishes the concept of ideology, also based on Gramsci's theory of hegemony. Whereas hegemony is ultimately determined entirely by political forces, ideology draws on
Sigmund Freud's and
Jacques Lacan's concepts of the unconscious and mirror-phase respectively and describes the structures and systems that allow us to meaningfully have a concept of the self.
Instrumental Marxism Instrumental Marxism, also "elite analysis" or "elite model", is a theory which reasons that policy makers in government and positions of power tend to "share a common business or class background, and that their decisions will reflect their business or class interests". It perceives the role of the state as more personal than impersonal, where actions such as nepotism and favoritism are common among those in power, and as a result of this, the shared backgrounds between the economic elite and the state elite are discernible.
Structural Marxism Instrumental Marxism is contrasted with
structural Marxism, which views the class background of policymakers and so on as purely incidental to the "
bourgeois" nature of the modern state, which is seen instead as a result of the position of the state and law in the objective structure of
capitalist society and their objective (i.e. consciousness-independent) function of reproducing the
relations of production and
private property regardless of the class background of the individuals involved in the administration thereof. For example, whereas for instrumentalist
Marxists the
formal equality of contract law in capitalist societies is a kind of ideological shell or mystification used by the
elite to conceal the real kernel of exploitation, for structural Marxists that formal legal equality is itself the real normative basis for properly capitalist exploitation, whether or not elites understand it as such as it allows labour-power to be traded at its real exchange-value (though not the value of its product), thus making regularity and rational allocation in labour markets possible. However, Miliband acknowledges that "there are ‘structural constraints which no government, whatever its complexion, wishes, and promises, can ignore or evade."
Neo-Marxism Neo-Marxism is a school of Marxism that began in the 20th century and hearkened back to the early writings of Marx before the influence of Friedrich Engels, which focused on dialectical idealism rather than dialectical materialism. It thus rejected economic determinism, being instead far more
libertarian. Neo-Marxism adds
Max Weber's broader understanding of
social inequality, such as
status and
power, to orthodox Marxist thought.
Frankfurt School The
Frankfurt School is a school of neo-Marxist social theory, social research and philosophy. The grouping emerged at the
Institute for Social Research () of the
University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. The term "Frankfurt School" is an informal term used to designate the thinkers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research or influenced by them—it is not the title of any institution and the main thinkers of the Frankfurt School did not use the term to refer to themselves. The Frankfurt School gathered together dissident Marxists, severe critics of capitalism who believed that some of Marx's alleged followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx's ideas, usually in defense of orthodox communist or social democratic parties. Influenced especially by the failure of working-class revolutions in Western Europe after
World War I and by the rise of
Nazism in an economically, technologically and culturally advanced nation (Germany), they took up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's thought might serve to clarify social conditions which Marx himself had never seen. They drew on other schools of thought to fill in Marx's perceived omissions. Max Weber exerted a major influence, as did Sigmund Freud (as in
Herbert Marcuse's
Freudo-Marxist synthesis in the 1954 work
Eros and Civilization). Their emphasis on the "critical" component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of
positivism, crude materialism and
phenomenology by returning to
Immanuel Kant's
critical philosophy and its successors in German
idealism, principally Hegel's philosophy, with its emphasis on
negation and
contradiction as inherent properties of reality. == Marxist feminism ==