Western Marxism


Western Marxism is a current of Marxist theory that emerged in Western and Central Europe following the failure of proletarian revolutions in the advanced capitalist world after World War I. The term denotes a loose collection of theorists who emphasized the philosophical and cultural aspects of Karl Marx's thought, in contrast to the more economistic and deterministic interpretations of orthodox Marxism and Marxism–Leninism. The movement's key early figures included Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, and Antonio Gramsci. Later theorists associated with Western Marxism include the members of the Frankfurt School, as well as Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Lefebvre, Louis Althusser, and Jürgen Habermas.
The tradition emerged from the historical context of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia and the crushing of revolutionary movements in countries like Germany, Hungary, and Italy between 1918 and 1923. This defeat, consolidated by the rise of fascism and Stalinism, and culminating in the devastation of World War II, led to a profound and lasting divorce between socialist theory and the working-class movement, a stark contrast to the unity of theory and practice that had defined the preceding tradition of classical Marxism. In the post-war era, Western Marxism's major theorists were largely professional philosophers and academics rather than political leaders. This academic turn was accompanied by a shift in Marxist theory's geographical center of gravity from Eastern to Western Europe—primarily Germany, France, and Italy.
Western Marxism is characterized by a philosophical, rather than scientific, approach; a primary focus on culture and the "superstructure"; and a deep engagement with humanism and idealism, particularly the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The tradition also involved a preoccupation with epistemology and method; the development of an esoteric and complex language; a deep engagement with non-Marxist intellectual currents and a search for philosophical ancestries to Marxism in earlier Western thought; and a pervasive, though often latent, pessimism about the prospects for revolutionary change. The historian Martin Jay suggests that the central, contested concept that unites the otherwise disparate thinkers of the tradition is that of "totality", while J. G. Merquior argues that a defining feature of the tradition is its Kulturkritik, a romantic and humanist revulsion against industrial modernity that often conflated its critique of capitalism with a rejection of modern civilization itself.

Etymology and definition

The term "Western Marxism" is generally understood to denote non-Soviet Marxist thought, though its geographical meaning can be misleading, as not all Marxists in the West fall under its definition. The movement's origins lie in the early 1920s as a theoretical challenge to the official Soviet interpretation of Marxism. The first use of the term has been traced to the Communist International 's 1923 polemical attack on the work of Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch, and by 1930, Korsch was using the term "western communists" to describe himself and others who opposed the Comintern. The phrase is more generally attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who popularized it in his book Adventures of the Dialectic.
In his 1976 study, Considerations on Western Marxism, Perry Anderson defines Western Marxism primarily by its "structural divorce from political practice", which marked a radical break from the classical Marxist tradition of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky, whose theoretical work was organically connected to their role as leaders or militants within working-class organizations. For Anderson, Western Marxism represents a theoretical corpus produced during a long historical period of political defeat for the socialist movement in the advanced capitalist world. This defeat, beginning with the failure of proletarian revolutions outside Russia between 1918 and 1923 and consolidated by the rise of Stalinism and fascism, severed the dynamic link between theory and mass struggle. As a result, Marxist theory retreated from its classical concerns with economic laws and political strategy into the more abstract domains of philosophy, methodology, and culture, produced largely by academics "at an increasingly remote distance from the class whose fortunes it formally sought to serve or articulate". The tradition's geographical axis also shifted, from the pre-1920 concentration in Eastern and Central Europe to a new focus on Germany, France, and Italy.
J. G. Merquior offers a complementary definition, highlighting three key characteristics: a prominent cultural focus, which he terms "the Marxism of the superstructure"; a staunchly humanist and idealist view of knowledge that rejects scientific determinism in favor of "critique"; and a broad eclecticism in its use of concepts from non-Marxist sources.

Contrast with other Marxist tendencies

Anderson establishes the identity of Western Marxism by contrasting it with the "classical tradition" that preceded it. This earlier tradition, from Marx and Engels through the leading theorists of the Second International and the Bolshevik Revolution, was defined by several key characteristics:
  • An organic unity of theory and practice, in which major theorists were also figures of political leadership in national parties.
  • A central focus on the economic laws of motion of capitalism and the political realities of the bourgeois state, with the aim of developing a strategy for proletarian revolution.
  • A vibrant internationalism, in which theorists from different countries engaged in extensive and passionate debate with one another.
  • A geographical center of gravity in Central and Eastern Europe.
This tradition produced major works on economics and developed a "Marxist science of politics" for the first time in the writings of Lenin and Trotsky. Western Marxism, by contrast, arose from the perceived failures of this orthodox tradition, particularly its "fatalistic economism" and its inability to account for the resilience of capitalism and the defeat of the proletarian revolutions. The "vulgar Marxism" of the Second International, based on a rigid set of doctrines and natural-scientific "laws of social development", had resulted in a catastrophic political passivity in the face of the post-war crisis. As Merquior notes, Western Marxism's philosophical challenge to deterministic historical materialism was not unique, having appeared in earlier Marxist "heresies" like Austro-Marxism or the revisionist critiques of Eduard Bernstein and Georges Sorel. However, these earlier anti-determinist schools did not reject the ideal of Marxism as a science. Western Marxism was defined from its inception by a rejection of Marxism as a science in favor of "critique"—a philosophical, rather than scientific, weapon.
To further delineate the boundaries of Western Marxism, Anderson contrasts it with another intellectual tradition that also emerged from the struggles against Stalinism: Trotskyism. He presents the tradition of Leon Trotsky and his heirs as a "polar contrast" to Western Marxism. Where Western Marxism was philosophical, academic, esoteric, and nationally confined, the Trotskyist tradition was political and economic, internationalist, written with clarity and urgency, and produced by persecuted exiles rather than university professors. Most importantly, it sought to maintain the classical unity of theory and practice by engaging in the practical construction of revolutionary organizations, however small. While this defiance of the historical tide preserved the classical focus on economics and politics, it also came at a price, sometimes leading to a doctrinal conservatism and a "triumphalism" that asserted revolutionary prospects more by will than by intellect.

Characteristics

While early Western Marxists such as Lukács and Antonio Gramsci remained loyal to the communist movement and Leninism in their political practice, their theoretical work departed significantly from the orthodoxy of both the Second International and Soviet Marxism–Leninism. Scholars have identified a set of interlocking formal traits that define the Western Marxist tradition as a coherent intellectual formation, despite the significant differences between its individual thinkers.

Divorce from political practice

The most fundamental characteristic of Western Marxism is the structural separation of its theory from the life of the working class. While the first generation—Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci—were political leaders, their theoretical work was produced after their direct political involvement had been terminated by defeat. Subsequent generations of Western Marxists were almost exclusively university-based academics. As Lucio Colletti later reflected, "In the West, where the revolution failed and the proletariat was defeated, Marxism lived on merely as an academic current in the universities, producing works of purely theoretical scope or cultural reflection. The career of Lukács is the clearest demonstration of this process." This academic emplacement fostered an increasingly rarefied and specialized theoretical culture, marking a complete break with the classical tradition, where theorists taught at party schools and their work was directly tied to the strategic debates of the socialist movement.
The official Communist Parties of the West became the "central or sole pole of relationship to organized socialist politics" for these thinkers, whether they joined, allied with, or rejected them. This relationship, however, was one of profound tension and distance, precluding any genuine synthesis of theory and mass practice. The theorists of Western Marxism were often self-consciously an "intellectual avant-garde", proud of their intellectual status and with an "inorganic" relationship to the working class they claimed to represent. The result was a "studied silence" in the core areas of classical Marxism: the economic analysis of capitalism and the political theory of the state and revolution.