Western Marxism

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Western Marxism is a term that Maurice Merleau-Ponty brought up in the 1950s, but only became popular through Perry Anderson and his widely acclaimed study On Western Marxism (1976). Anderson understands “Western Marxism” as a Marxist tendency that emerged in the wake of the First World War , which is characterized by a “structural separation from political practice ” and a “fundamental” shift in emphasis from Marxism to “ philosophy ”. Linked to this is a geographical shift of Marxism from east to west, with the centers of Germany, France and Italy. He counts Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch among the protagonists of Western Marxism with their writings History and Class Consciousness and Marxism and Philosophy , published in 1923 .

character

With the increasing distance from the “practice of the working class ”, the theorists of Western Marxism came closer to “contemporary non-Marxist or idealistic systems of thought”. At the same time there was a “general backward looking search for the spiritual ancestors of Marxism in European thought”. According to Anderson, the theoretical approaches that emerged during this period are characterized by the following three features:

  1. "Clear dominance of work in the epistemological field that mainly concentrated on methodological issues"
  2. Concentration on the "structures of the cultural superstructure ", especially on questions of aesthetics
  3. “Persistent pessimism” on questions outside the cultural realm

Stylistically, the works of the representatives of Western Marxism are characterized by a "strange esotericism" and a tortuous language. They belonged to a literature "which is fundamentally alien to the world of Marx, Labriola or Lenin".

With regard to Stalinism, Western Marxism shows an ambiguous relationship. He never fully accepted Stalinism, but never actively fought it either. Outside of Stalinism, for him there was ultimately “no other real field of socialist action”.

An essential characteristic of the representatives of Western Marxism is that after the Second World War, almost without exception, they were employed at universities and held a chair in philosophy there. For them the universities became “areas of retreat and exile from the political struggles in the outside world”.

classification

Representatives of the individual phases of Marxism (Anderson)
Classical Marxism (1st generation) Classical Marxism (2nd generation) Western Marxism (until 1968) New Marxism (since 1968) / Trotskyism
Marx (1818–1883)
Engels (1820–1895)
Labriola (1843–1904)
Mehring (1846–1919)
Kautsky (1854–1938)
Plekhanov (1856–1918) 		Lenin (1870–1924)
Luxemburg (1871–1919)
Hilferding (1877–1941)
Trotsky (1879–1940)
Bauer (1881–1938)
Preobrazhensky (1886–1937)
Bukharin (1888–1938) 		Lukacs (1885–1971)
Korsch (1886–1961)
Gramsci (1891–1937)
Benjamin (1892–1940)
Horkheimer (1895–1973)
Della Volpe (1895–1968)
Marcuse (1898–1979)
Lefebvre (1901–1991)
Adorno (1903–1969)
Sartre (1905–1980)
Goldmann (1913–1970)
Althusser (1918–1990)
Colletti (1924–2001) 		Trotsky (1879–1940)
German (1907–1967)
Rosdolsky (1898–1967)
Mandel (1923–1995)

The crisis of the socialist labor movement that began with the beginning of the First World War is viewed as the historical starting point of Western Marxism . Essential factors were the collapse of the Second International (1914), the split in the labor movement, the failure of the revolutions in Central and Southern Europe (1918-23) and the victory of fascism since 1922. According to Anderson, the predecessor of Western Marxism was the “classical Marxism". While its representatives of the first generation (Labriola, Mehring, Kautsky, Plechanow) endeavored more to “complete than a further development of the Marxian legacy”, the representatives of the second generation saw it as their main task to develop the theory further, “to further develop it of the productive forces and the relations of production ( monopoly capital and imperialism ) ”. In addition, with the Russian Revolution of 1905, the question of a Marxist policy came on the agenda, which was taken up primarily by Trotsky and Lenin.

According to Anderson, the replacement of Western Marxism began with the unrest of May 1968 , which was "a decisive turning point in history". With the re-emergence of revolutionary masses outside the control of a bureaucratized party, "the possibility of the reunification of Marxist theory and practice of the working class became apparent".

Anderson sees this new Marxism in the tradition of Leon Trotsky and his most important heirs Isaac Deutscher, Roman Rosdolsky and Ernest Mandel. In contrast to Western Marxism, Trotskyism is fundamentally “ internationalist ” in orientation. At the center of his theory are "politics and economics, not philosophy".

literature

Primary literature (selection)

  • Luis Althusser: Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d'Etat (1970). Dt: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (1977)
  • Walter Benjamin: The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility (1935/36)
  • Galvano della Volpe: Critica del gusto (1960)
  • Lucien Goldmann: Le Dieu caché (1955). German: The Hidden God (1973)
  • Antonio Gramsci: Notes from Prison (1967)
  • Karl Korsch: Marxism and Philosophy . In: Ders .: Complete Edition Vol. 3. Marxism and Philosophy. Writings on the theory of the labor movement 1920–1923, Amsterdam 1993 [1923], pp. 299–367 ( English translation )
  • Henri Lefebvre: Contribution à l'esthétique (1953)
  • Georg Lukács: History and Class Consciousness. Studies on Marxist Dialectics , 10th edition, Darmstadt 1988 [1923]
  • -: Aesthetics (1963)
  • Herbert Marcuse: Drive Structure and Society (1955)
  • -: Attempt at Liberation (1969)
  • Jean-Paul Sartre: L'idiot de la famille (1971/72). German: The Idiot of the Family (1977/78)
  • Alfred Schmidt : The concept of nature in the teaching of Marx. 4. Above. and exp. Edition, with a new foreword by Alfred Schmidt. European Publishing House, Hamburg 1993, ISBN 3-434-46209-0 .

Secondary literature

  • Perry Anderson : Considerations on Western Marxism , London 1976. Dt. Translation: On Western Marxism , Frankfurt / Main 1978, ISBN 3810800740
  • Ingo Elbe : Marx in the West. The new Marx reading in the Federal Republic since 1965 , Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-05-004470-5 , pp. 25-29 ( pdf )
  • Diethard Behrens, Kornelia Hafner: Westlicher Marxismus , Schmetterling Verlag, Stuttgart 2017, ISBN 3-89657-083-8 .

Essays

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Merleau-Ponty: Die Abenteuer der Dialektik , chap. II: Western Marxism , 1968 (1955)
  2. ↑ Perry Anderson: On Western Marxism , p. 50
  3. ↑ Perry Anderson: On Western Marxism , p. 77
  4. ↑ Perry Anderson: On Western Marxism , p. 49.
  5. ↑ Perry Anderson: On Western Marxism , pp. 136f.
  6. ↑ See p. 83ff. Anderson mentions the essay On the Concept of History by Walter Benjamin, Freud and Lacan by Louis Althusser and Critique of Dialectical Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre as examples
  7. ↑ Perry Anderson: On Western Marxism , pp. 83f., 134
  8. ↑ Perry Anderson: On Western Marxism , p. 140
  9. ↑ Perry Anderson: On Western Marxism , pp. 77f.
  10. ↑ Perry Anderson: On Western Marxism , p. 22
  11. ↑ Perry Anderson: On Western Marxism , p. 22
  12. ↑ Perry Anderson: On Western Marxism , p. 46
  13. ↑ Perry Anderson: On Western Marxism , pp. 140-145
  14. ↑ Perry Anderson: On Western Marxism , pp. 29-43
  15. ↑ Perry Anderson: On Western Marxism , p. 20
  16. ^ Wolfgang Fritz Haug: Western Marxism? Critique of a necessary attempt to historicize Marxist theory
  17. ↑ Perry Anderson: On Western Marxism , p. 139
  18. ↑ Perry Anderson: On Western Marxism , pp. 140-145
  19. ↑ Perry Anderson: On Western Marxism , p. 145