Marxism after Marx

On Marx’s death it was left to Friedrich Engels to take things forward. From papers left by Marx he compiled and published the two further volumes of Das Kapital Among those papers he found Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, written in 1845. He published this work in edited form in 1888. We owe many other Marxian texts to Engels’s research and editorial efforts. These tasks undoubtedly enabled Engels to exercise significant influence over the subsequent reception and interpretation of Marx’s thought. Commentators have questioned whether—or, rather, to what extent—his influence has contributed to, and detracted from, a genuine understanding of what Marx taught. Some suggest that a number of emphases found in Marxist theory are due to the cultural atmosphere abroad in Europe in the late ninetfenth century (especially the demand for philosophical grounding of concepts), rather than to any predilection for theory of that kind on the part of Marx himself.

Over these last decades of the century, both before and in the wake of Marx’s death, the newborn discipline of sociology pondered the implications of his teachings hard and long. Among the sociologists paying close attention to Marxist concepts were Ferdinand Tonnies, Emile Durkheim and Georg Simmel. Max Weber, in particular, was deeply influenced by Marx’s thought, as is readily acknowledged by Weberian scholars. After referring to the role played by Nietzsche in Weber’s development, Donald MacRae writes (1974, p. 52): ‘As for Marx, one of the most frequendy recurrent questions set students of sociology in Britain and America is the request to discuss the proposition that “Weber’s sociology is a debate with the ghost of Karl Marx’”.

Weber, of course, differs markedly from Marx on many issues. For him, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are not the only groupings in society that count. Nor is Weber ready to accord to economic interests the well-nigh exclusive hegemony that Marx attributes to them. In this respect, MacRae quotes Weber to the effect that ‘ideals and material interests direcdy govern men’s concepts’ (1974, p. 58). For all the differences, however, Weber remains heavily indebted to Marx.

For Weber, Marx was a quarry of ideas and facts … Weber’s debt here is not one of generalised judgement but it is considerable … it is the Marx of ideology, prophecy and German social democracy who counts as a major object of Weber’s public political consciousness. (MacRae 1974, 60-1)

The German social democracy to which MacRae refers found itself in severe crisis around the turn of the twentieth century. For some followers of Marx, orthodox Marxism was now displaying positivist and evolutionist features and appeared to be cast in excessively Hegelian form. This was seen to be due, at least in part, to the influence of Engels and Karl Kautsky (1854-1938), both of whom had been personally associated with Marx and were involved with the posthumous editing of his work. The ‘revisionists’—Marxists who felt that Marxism had gone astray and wished to see it return to a more authentic form—set their sights on Kautsky. Their own protagonist was Eduard Bernstein (1850- 1932), who argued that the trends discernible within Western capitalism were not those predicted by Marx and that Marxist theory needed to be adapted in the light of those trends. The Kautsky-Bemstein dispute ended with the defeat of Bernstein and revisionism generally.

Kautsky was to remain a sign of contradiction. After the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, he crossed swords with its chief architect, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924)- For Kautsky, as for many other orthodox Marxists of that time, the events in Russia failed to signal the victory of a proletarian revolution. What had emerged in that country, he believed, was a dictatorship over the proletariat, not a dictatorship of the proletariat. This dispute, as Aron points out (1965, pp. 180-1), issued in two streams of Marxist thought. One regarded the Soviet regime as, at least basically, the fulfilment of Marx’s vision. The other deemed it a gross distortion of Marxist ideals, insisting that socialist planning and collective ownership must be wedded to political democracy.

This set the scene for vigorous discussion of Marxist ideas and for the emergence of a ‘Western Marxism’. The discussion was carried out on many fronts. There was, for instance, the distincdy Hegelian, and therefore heavily dialectical, Marxism of Gyorgy (Georg) Lukacs (1885- 1971), for whom the proletariat, object as it is of capitalist exploitation, becomes the subject of history through revolutionary class consciousness. There was the praxis-oriented Marxism of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), which moved away from the historical determinism and materialism of the Marxist orthodoxy. Karl Korsch (1886-1961) also made praxis the centrepiece of his approach as he sought to unmask the fetishistic objectification of social relations. And there was Karl Mannheim (1893-1947), whose Marxism served as the matrix for his development of a sociology of knowledge. These were all to the fore in the early 1920s with Lukacs in Vienna, Gramsci in Rome, Korsch in Leipzig, and Mannheim in Frankfurt.

Forty years on and Western Marxism has not lost its impetus. In the 1960s and 1970s we find Louis Althusser (1918-90), Algerian-born like Camus, making a sharp distinction between the earlier, humanistic Marx and the later, much more ‘scientific’ Marx, and attempting to introduce elements of structuralism into Marxism. Such eclecticism was far from new in the history of Marxist thought.

The most striking fact about the relation between Marxism and philosophy, in the West at least, is how eclectic Marxists have been in their attitude to philosophy. Marxists have usually tried to articulate their ideas through whatever happened to be the current dominant philosophy.

The revival of interest in Hegel between the wars, coupled with the influence of Freud, was decisive for the formulations of the Frankfurt School; the post-war vogue for existentialism led to all sorts of New Left variations on Marxism with a human face, of which Sartre’s later work is only the most prominent example; the subsequent prestige of structuralism in the 1960s and 1970s led to the arcanely theoretical Marxism of Althusser and his disciples; while the rational choice of Marxism of more recent years is evidendy an effort to come to terms with some of the dominant concepts of the Reagan-Thatcher years. (McLellan 1995b, p.527). 

If we want to characterise Western Marxism, we might do best to underline the emphasis it has placed on culture as distinct from economics. The emphasis has been on the superstructure rather than the economic sub-structure. This has certainly been the case with the group of scholars—formed in Frankfurt, forced into a twenty-year exile from Frankfurt, but triumphandy re-established in Frankfurt—with whom critical social inquiry from a Marxist perspective has been strongly identified for almost three-quarters of a century.

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.