Western Marxism

Name and scope

The first use of the term has been traced to the Comintern's polemic against the work of Lukács and Korsch in 1923, and by 1930 Korsch was calling himself and other opponents of the Comintern "western communists". Maurice Merleau-Ponty popularised the phrase in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), whose second chapter was titled "'Western' Marxism", and Perry Anderson's 1976 study fixed it as the name of a distinct theoretical tradition. Despite the geographical label it does not cover every Marxist in the West; it generally denotes non-Soviet Marxist thought. In Anderson's account the centre of gravity of Marxist theory also moved, from Germany, Poland, Austria and Russia before 1920 to Germany, France and Italy.

Philosophy out of defeat

The tradition grew out of the October Revolution and the crushing of revolutionary movements in Germany, Hungary and Italy between 1918 and 1923. Its first generation were political leaders: Lukács had been Deputy People's Commissar for Culture in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, Korsch was Minister of Justice in the Communist-led government of Thuringia in 1923, and Gramsci was a founding leader of the Italian Communist Party. Defeat ended their political activity: Lukács was pushed into quietism and exile, Korsch was expelled from the KPD, and Gramsci was imprisoned by Mussolini. History and Class Consciousness (1923) rejected Engels's dialectic of nature and Lenin's reflection theory, made the "point of view of totality" the essence of Marxist method and developed the concept of reification. Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy, of the same year, argued that the orthodox Marxism of the Second International had hardened into a rigid, positivistic science. Grigory Zinoviev condemned both books at the Fifth Congress of the Comintern in 1924, and the Soviet philosopher Abram Deborin attacked Lukács. In his Prison Notebooks, written between 1929 and 1935, Gramsci set out his theory of hegemony, in which the ruling class rules through consent won in the institutions of civil society as well as through force, and argued that the West required a protracted "war of position" rather than the "war of movement" that had succeeded in Russia.

From Frankfurt to Paris and Rome

The Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, founded in 1924 through the efforts of Felix Weil, turned under Max Horkheimer in the 1930s from empirical research on the labour movement to "social philosophy" and "cultural criticism"; its "critical theory" became the main idiom of Western Marxism after the Second World War. Driven into American exile after 1933, Horkheimer and Adorno argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) that the project of liberation through reason had turned into a new form of domination. Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964) made him one of the most influential thinkers of the 1960s New Left. In post-war France Jean-Paul Sartre sought to synthesise existentialism and Marxism in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), and after the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 Henri Lefebvre and others developed a Marxist-humanist critique of Stalinism around the journal Arguments. In the mid-1960s Louis Althusser answered humanist Marxism with the "epistemological break" and theoretical anti-humanism of For Marx and Reading Capital (1965). In Italy Galvano Della Volpe and Lucio Colletti attacked Gramsci's historicism and the Hegelian tradition. Beginning as a Hegelian and humanist current, Western Marxism came to include strongly anti-humanist forms such as structural Marxism.

Common traits and neighbouring currents

Anderson set the tradition against the "classical Marxism" running from Marx and Engels through Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, whose theorists were leaders or militants of working-class organisations and wrote on the economic laws of capitalism and on the state and revolutionary strategy. The later Western Marxists were almost all university academics who concentrated on epistemology and method and on the cultural superstructure, above all art; Anderson also pointed to their esoteric language and a common, latent pessimism. Within the same anti-Stalinist field, the Trotskyist tradition of Isaac Deutscher and Ernest Mandel was its "polar contrast": political and economic, internationalist, and committed to building organisations. Council communism overlaps without being the same thing. The Dutch left communists Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter, who held that bourgeois power in the West rested on cultural hegemony and stressed working-class consciousness, were political precursors, but theirs was a political line that rejected the Leninist party, whereas Lukács and Gramsci stayed loyal to the communist movement and Leninism in practice. Eurocommunism, the 1970s–1980s line of the Italian, Spanish and French parties against Soviet influence, was a party programme; Western Marxism was an intellectual tradition. Its relation to Stalinism has been described as ambiguous: it never fully accepted Stalinism, but never actively fought it either.

Assessment and afterlife

In the late 1950s Lukács denounced the Frankfurt School for pessimism and distance from revolutionary politics, picturing it in a "Grand Hotel Abyss", a comfortable hotel on the edge of an abyss. Anderson held that the student and worker uprisings beginning with May 1968 in France reopened, for the first time in fifty years, the possibility of reuniting Marxist theory with mass revolutionary practice in the West, a reunification that would mean the extinction of a tradition defined by the divorce. Russell Jacoby countered that the philosophical turn was a necessary advance toward re-examining Marxism. Jürgen Habermas, the leading figure of the Frankfurt School's "second generation", sought a new foundation for critical theory in The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). In the 1970s and 1980s post-structuralists such as Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard attacked the concept of totality at the heart of the tradition, and many former Western Marxists abandoned it for an emphasis on difference and contingency.