Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works
in philosophy that are strongly influenced
by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory,
or works written by Marxists.
Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided
into Western Marxism, which drew out of various
sources, and the official philosophy in the
Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading
of Marx called dialectical materialism, in
particular during the 1930s.
Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined
sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse
influence of Marxist theory has extended into
fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology,
epistemology, theoretical psychology and philosophy
of science, as well as its obvious influence
on political philosophy and the philosophy
of history.
The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy
are its materialism and its commitment to
political practice as the end goal of all
thought.
Marxist theorist Louis Althusser, for example,
defined philosophy as "class struggle in theory",
thus radically separating himself from those
who claimed philosophers could adopt a "God's
eye view" as a purely neutral judge.
== Marxism and philosophy ==
The philosopher Étienne Balibar wrote in
1996 that "there is no Marxist philosophy
and there never will be; on the other hand,
Marx is more important for philosophy than
ever before."
So even the existence of Marxist philosophy
is debatable (the answer may depend on what
is meant by "philosophy," a complicated question
in itself).
Balibar's remark is intended to explain the
significance of the final line of Karl Marx's
11 Theses on Feuerbach (1845), which can be
read as an epitaph for philosophy: "The philosophers
have only interpreted the world, in various
ways; the point is to change it".
If this claim (which Marx originally intended
as a criticism of German Idealism and the
more moderate Young Hegelians) is still more
or less the case in the 21st century, as many
Marxists would claim, then Marxist theory
is in fact the practical continuation of the
philosophical tradition, while much of philosophy
is still politically irrelevant.
Many critics, both philosophers outside Marxism
and some Marxist philosophers, feel that this
is too quick a dismissal of the post-Marxian
philosophical tradition.
Much sophisticated and important thought has
taken place after the writing of Marx and
Engels; much or perhaps even all of it has
been influenced, subtly or overtly, by Marxism.
Simply dismissing all philosophy as sophistry
might condemn Marxism to a simplistic empiricism
or economism, crippling it in practice and
making it comically simplistic at the level
of theory.
Nonetheless, the force of Marx's opposition
to Hegelian idealism and to any "philosophy"
divorced from political practice remains powerful
even to a contemporary reader.
Marxist and Marx-influenced 20th century theory,
such as (to name a few random examples) the
critical theory of the Frankfurt School, the
political writing of Antonio Gramsci, and
the neo-Marxism of Fredric Jameson, must take
Marx's condemnation of philosophy into account,
but many such thinkers also feel a strong
need to remedy the perceived theoretical problems
with orthodox Marxism.
Such problems might include a too-simple economic
determinism, an untenable theory of ideology
as "false consciousness," or a simplistic
model of state power rather than hegemony.
So Marxist philosophy must continue to take
account of advances in the theory of politics
developed after Marx, but it must also be
wary of a descent into theoreticism or the
temptations of idealism.
Étienne Balibar claimed that if one philosopher
could be called a "Marxist philosopher", that
one would doubtlessly be Louis Althusser:
Althusser proposed a 'new definition' of philosophy
as "class struggle in theory"... marxism had
proper signification (and original "problematic")
only insofar as it was the theory of the tendency
towards communism, and in view of its realization.
The criteria of acceptation or rejectal of
a 'marxist' proposition was always the same,
whether it was presented as 'epistemological'
or as 'philosophical': it was in the act of
rendering intelligible a communist policy,
or not."
(Ecrits pour Althusser, 1991, p.98).
However, "Althusser never ceased to put in
question the images of communism that Marxist
theory and ideology carried on: but he did
it in the name of communism itself."
Althusser thus criticized the evolutionist
image which made of communism an ultimate
stage of history, as well as the apocalyptic
images which made it a "society of transparence",
"without contradiction" nor ideology.
Balibar observes that, in the end, Althusser
enjoined the most sober definition of communism,
exposed by Marx in The German Ideology: Communism
is "not a state of the future, but the real
movement which destroys the existing state
of being.".
== 
The Philosophy of Marx ==
There are endless interpretations of the "philosophy
of Marx", from the interior of the Marxist
movement as well as in its exterior.
Although some have separated Marx's works
between a "young Marx" (in particular the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of
1844) and a "mature Marx" or also by separating
it into purely philosophical works, economics
works and political and historical interventions,
Étienne Balibar (1993) has pointed out that
Marx's works can be divided into "economic
works" (Das Kapital, 1867), "philosophical
works" and "historical works" (The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the 1871 Civil
War in France which concerned the Paris Commune
and acclaimed it as the first "dictatorship
of the proletariat", etc.)
Marx's philosophy is thus inextricably linked
to his critique of political economy and to
his historical interventions in the workers'
movement, such as the 1875 Critique of the
Gotha Program or The Communist Manifesto,
written with Engels (who was observing the
Chartist movement) a year before the Revolutions
of 1848.
Both after the defeat of the French socialist
movement during Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's
1851 coup and then after the crushing of the
1871 Paris Commune, Marx's thought transformed
itself.
Marxism's philosophical roots were thus commonly
explained as derived from three sources: English
political economy, French republicanism and
radicalism, and German idealist philosophy.
Although this "three sources" model is an
oversimplification, it still has some measure
of truth.
On the other hand, Costanzo Preve (1990) has
assigned four "masters" to Marx: Epicurus
(to whom he dedicated his thesis, Difference
of natural philosophy between Democritus and
Epicurus, 1841) for his materialism and theory
of clinamen which opened up a realm of liberty;
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from which come his
idea of egalitarian democracy; Adam Smith,
from whom came the idea that the grounds of
property is labour; and finally Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel.
"Vulgar Marxism" (or codified dialectical
materialism) was seen as little other than
a variety of economic determinism, with the
alleged determination of the ideological superstructure
by the economical infrastructure.
This positivist reading, which mostly based
itself on Engels' latter writings in an attempt
to theorize "scientific socialism" (an expression
coined by Engels) has been challenged by Marxist
theorists, such as Lukacs, Gramsci, Althusser
or, more recently, Étienne Balibar.
=== Hegel ===
Marx developed a comprehensive, theoretical
understanding of political reality early in
his intellectual and activist career by means
of a critical adoption and radicalization
of the categories of 18th and 19th century
German Idealist thought.
Of particular importance is Hegel's appropriation
of Aristotle's organicist and essentialist
categories in the light of Kant's transcendental
turn.Marx builds on four contributions Hegel
makes to our philosophical understanding.
They are: (1) the replacement of mechanism
and atomism with Aristotelean categories of
organicism and essentialism, (2) the idea
that world history progresses through stages,
(3) the difference between natural and historical
(dialectical) change, and (4) the idea that
dialectical change proceeds through contradictions
in the thing itself.
(1) Aristotelian Organicism and Essentialism
(a) Hegel adopts the position that chance
is not the basis of phenomena and that events
are governed by laws.
Some have falsely attributed to Hegel the
position that phenomena are governed by transcendent,
supersensible ideas that ground them.
On the contrary, Hegel argues for the organic
unity between universal and particular.
Particulars are not mere token types of universals;
rather, they relate to each other as a part
relates to a whole.
This latter has import for Marx's own conception
of law and necessity.
(b) In rejecting the idea that laws merely
describe or independently ground phenomena,
Hegel revives the Aristotlean position that
law or principle is something implicit in
a thing, a potentiality which is not actual
but which is in the process of becoming actual.
This means that if we want to know the principle
governing something, we have to observe its
typical life-process and figure out its characteristic
behavior.
Observing an acorn on its own, we can never
deduce that it is an oak tree.
To figure out what the acorn is - and also
what the oak tree is - we have to observe
the line of development from one to the other.
(c) The phenomena of history arise from a
whole with an essence which undergoes transformation
of form and which has an end or telos.
For Hegel, the essence of humanity is freedom,
and the telos of that essence is the actualization
of that freedom.
Like Aristotle, Hegel believes the essence
of a thing is revealed in the entire, typical
process of development of that thing.
Looked at purely formally, human society has
a natural line of development in accordance
with its essence just like any other living
thing.
This process of development appears as a succession
of stages of world history.
(2) The Stages of World History
Human history passes through several stages,
in each of which is materialized a higher
level of human consciousness of freedom.
Each stage also has its own principle or law
according to which it develops and lives in
accordance with this freedom.
Yet the law is not free-standing.
It is delivered by means of the actions of
men which spring from their needs, passions,
and interests.
Teleology, according to Hegel, is not opposed
to the efficient causation provided by passion;
on the contrary, the latter is the vehicle
realizing the former.
Hegel consistently lays more stress on passion
than on the more historically specifiable
interests of men.
Marx will reverse this priority.(3) The Difference
Between Natural and Historical Change
Hegel distinguishes as Aristotle did not between
the application of organic, essentialist categories
to the realm of human history and the realm
of organic nature.
According to Hegel, human history strives
toward perfectibility, but nature does not.
Marx deepens and expands this idea into the
claim that humankind itself can adapt society
to its own purposes rather than adapting themselves
to it.Natural and historical change, according
to Hegel, have two different kinds of essences.
Organic natural entities develop through a
straightforward process, relatively simple
to comprehend at least in outline.
Historical development, however, is a more
complex process.
Its specific difference is its "dialectical"
character.
The process of natural development occurs
in a relatively straight line from the germ
to the fully realized being and back to the
germ again.
Some accident from the outside might come
along to interrupt this process of development,
but if left to its own devices, it proceeds
in a relatively straightforward manner.
Society's historical development is internally
more complex.
The transaction from potentiality to actuality
is mediated by consciousness and will.
The essence realized in the development of
human society is freedom, but freedom is precisely
that ability to negate the smooth line of
development and go off in novel, hitherto
unforeseen directions.
As humankind's essence reveals itself, that
revelation is at the same time the subversion
of itself.
Spirit is constantly at war with itself.
This appears as the contradictions constituting
the essence of Spirit.
(4) Contradiction
In the development of a natural thing, there
is by and large no contradiction between the
process of development and the way that development
must appear.
So the transition from an acorn, to an oak,
to an acorn again occurs in a relatively uninterrupted
flow of the acorn back to itself again.
When change in the essence takes place, as
it does in the process of evolution, we can
understand the change mostly in mechanical
terms using principles of genetics and natural
selection.
The historical process, however, never attempts
to preserve an essence in the first place.
Rather, it develops an essence through successive
forms.
This means that at any moment on the path
of historical change, there is a contradiction
between what exists and what is in the process
of coming-to-be.
The realization of a natural thing like a
tree is a process that by and large points
back toward itself: every step of the process
takes place in order to reproduce the genus.
In the historical process, however, what exists,
what is actual, is imperfect.
It is inimical to the potential.
What is trying to come into existence - freedom
- inherently negates everything preceding
it and everything existing, since no actual
existing human institution can possibly embody
pure human freedom.
So the actual is both itself and its opposite
(as potential).
And this potential (freedom) is never inert
but constantly exerts an impulse toward change.
=== The rupture with German Idealism and the
Young Hegelians ===
Marx did not study directly with Hegel, but
after Hegel died Marx studied under one of
Hegel's pupils, Bruno Bauer, a leader of the
circle of Young Hegelians to whom Marx attached
himself.
However, Marx and Engels came to disagree
with Bruno Bauer and the rest of the Young
Hegelians about socialism and also about the
usage of Hegel's dialectic.
Having achieved his thesis on the Difference
of natural philosophy between Democritus and
Epicurus in 1841, the young Marx progressively
broke away with the Prussian university and
its teachings impregnated by German Idealism
(Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel).
Along with Engels, who observed the Chartist
movement in the United Kingdom, he cut away
with the environment in which he grew up and
encountered the proletariat in France and
Germany.
He then wrote a scathing criticism of the
Young Hegelians in two books, The Holy Family
(1845), and The German Ideology (1845), in
which he criticized not only Bauer but also
Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own (1844),
considered as one of the founding book of
individualist anarchism.
Max Stirner claimed that all ideals were inherently
alienating, and that replacing God with Humanity,
as did Ludwig Feuerbach in The Essence of
Christianity (1841), was not sufficient.
According to Stirner, any ideals, God, Humanity,
the Nation, or even the Revolution alienated
the "Ego".
Marx also criticized Proudhon, who had become
famous with his cry "Property is theft!",
in The Poverty of Philosophy (1845).
Marx's early writings are thus a response
towards Hegel, German Idealism and a break
with the rest of the Young Hegelians.
Marx, "stood Hegel on his head," in his own
view of his role, by turning the idealistic
dialectic into a materialistic one, in proposing
that material circumstances shape ideas, instead
of the other way around.
In this, Marx was following the lead of Feuerbach.
His theory of alienation, developed in the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of
1844 (published in 1932), inspired itself
from Feuerbach's critique of the alienation
of Man in God through the objectivation of
all his inherent characteristics (thus man
projected on God all qualities which are in
fact man's own quality which defines the "human
nature").
But Marx also criticized Feuerbach for being
insufficiently materialistic, as Stirner himself
had pointed out, and explained that the alienation
described by the Young Hegelians was in fact
the result of the structure of the economy
itself.
Furthermore, he criticized Feuerbach's conception
of human nature in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach
as an abstract "kind" which incarnated itself
in each singular individual: "Feuerbach resolves
the essence of religion into the essence of
man (menschliche Wesen, human nature).
But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent
in each single individual.
In reality, it is the ensemble of the social
relations."
Thereupon, instead of founding itself on the
singular, concrete individual subject, as
did classic philosophy, including contractualism
(Hobbes, John Locke and Rousseau) but also
political economy, Marx began with the totality
of social relations: labour, language and
all which constitute our human existence.
He claimed that individualism was the result
of commodity fetishism or alienation.
Some critics have claimed that meant that
Marx enforced a strict social determinism
which destroyed the possibility of free will.
==== Criticisms of the "human rights" ====
In the same way, following Babeuf, considered
as one of the founder of communism during
the French Revolution, he criticized the 1789
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
Citizen as a "bourgeois declaration" of the
rights of the "egoistic individual", ultimately
based on the "right to private property",
which economism deduced from its own implicit
"philosophy of the subject", which asserts
the preeminence of an individual and universal
subject over social relations.
On the other hand, Marx also criticized Bentham's
utilitarianism.
Alongside Freud, Nietzsche, and Durkheim,
Marx thus takes a place amongst the 19th century
philosophers who criticized this pre-eminence
of the subject and its consciousness.
Instead, Marx saw consciousness as political.
According to Marx, the recognition of these
individual rights was the result of the universal
extension of market relations to all of society
and to all of the world, first through the
primitive accumulation of capital (including
the first period of European colonialism)
and then through the globalization of the
capitalist sphere.
Such individual rights were the symmetric
of the "right for the labourer" to "freely"
sell his labor force on the marketplace through
juridical contracts, and worked in the same
time as an ideological means to discompose
the collective grouping of producers required
by the Industrial Revolution: thus, in the
same time that the Industrial Era requires
masses to concentrate themselves in factories
and in cities, the individualist, "bourgeois"
ideology separated themselves as competing
homo economicus.
Marx's critique of the ideology of the human
rights thus departs from the counterrevolutionary
critique by Edmund Burke, who dismissed the
"rights of Man" in favour of the "rights of
the individual": it is not grounded on an
opposition to the Enlightenment's universalism
and humanist project on behalf of the right
of tradition, as in Burke's case, but rather
on the claim that the ideology of economism
and the ideology of the human rights are the
reverse sides of the same coin.
However, as Étienne Balibar puts it, "the
accent put on those contradictions can not
not ring out on the signification of 'human
rights', since these therefore appears both
as the language in which exploitation masks
itself and as the one in which the exploited
class struggle express itself: more than a
truth or an illusion, it is therefore a stake".
Das Kapital ironizes on the "pompous catalogue
of the human rights" in comparison to the
"modest Magna Charta of a day work limited
by law":
The creation of a normal working-day is, therefore,
the product of a protracted civil war, more
or less dissembled, between the capitalist
class and the working-class...
It must be acknowledged that our labourer
comes out of the process of production other
than he entered.
In the market he stood as owner of the commodity
"labour-power" face to face with other owners
of commodities, dealer against dealer.
The contract by which he sold to the capitalist
his labour-power proved, so to say, in black
and white that he disposed of himself freely.
The bargain concluded, it is discovered that
he was no "free agent," that the time for
which he is free to sell his labour-power
is the time for which he is forced to sell
it, that in fact the vampire will not lose
its hold on him "so long as there is a muscle,
a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited."
For "protection" against "the serpent of their
agonies," the labourers must put their heads
together, and, as a class, compel the passing
of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that
shall prevent the very workers from selling,
by voluntary contract with capital, themselves
and their families into slavery and death.
In place of the pompous catalogue of the "inalienable
rights of man" comes the modest Magna Charta
of a legally limited working-day, which shall
make clear "when the time which the worker
sells is ended, and when his own begins.
Quantum mutatus ab illo![How changed from
what he/it was!]"
But the communist revolution does not end
with the negation of individual liberty and
equality ("collectivism"), but with the "negation
of the negation": "individual property" in
the capitalist regime is in fact the "expropriation
of the immediate producers."
"Self-earned private property, that is based,
so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated,
independent laboring-individual with the conditions
of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic
private property, which rests on exploitation
of the nominally free labor of others, i.e.,
on wage-labor...
The capitalist mode of appropriation, the
result of the capitalist mode of production,
produces capitalist private property.
This is the first negation of individual private
property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor.
But capitalist production begets, with the
inexorability of a law of Nature, its own
negation.
It is the negation of negation.
This does not re-establish private property
for the producer, but gives him individual
property based on the acquisition of the capitalist
era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession
in common of the land and of the means of
production.
==== Criticisms of Feuerbach ====
What distinguished Marx from Feuerbach was
his view of Feuerbach's humanism as excessively
abstract, and so no less ahistorical and idealist
than what it purported to replace, namely
the reified notion of God found in institutional
Christianity that legitimized the repressive
power of the Prussian state.
Instead, Marx aspired to give ontological
priority to what he called the "real life
process" of real human beings, as he and Engels
said in The German Ideology (1846):
In direct contrast to German philosophy, which
descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend
from earth to heaven.
That is to say, we do not set out from what
men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as
narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived,
in order to arrive at men in the flesh.
We set out from real, active men, and on the
basis of their real life process we demonstrate
the development of the ideological reflexes
and echoes of this life process.
The phantoms formed in the human brain are
also, necessarily, sublimates of their material
life process, which is empirically verifiable
and bound to material premises.
Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest
of ideology and their corresponding forms
of consciousness, thus no longer retain the
semblance of independence.
They have no history, no development; but
men, developing their material production
and their material intercourse, alter, along
with this, their real existence, their thinking,
and the products of their thinking.
Life is not determined by consciousness, but
consciousness by life.
Also, in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845), in
which the young Marx broke with Feuerbach's
idealism, he writes that "the philosophers
have only described the world, in various
ways, the point is to change it," and his
materialist approach allows for and empowers
such change.
This opposition between various subjective
interpretations given by philosophers, which
may be, in a sense, compared with Weltanschauung
designed to legitimize the current state of
affairs, and effective transformation of the
world through praxis, which combines theory
and practice in a materialist way, is what
distinguish "Marxist philosophers" with the
rest of philosophers.
Indeed, Marx's break with German Idealism
involves a new definition of philosophy; Louis
Althusser, founder of "Structural Marxism"
in the 1960s, would define it as "class struggle
in theory".
Marx's movement away from university philosophy
and towards the workers' movement is thus
inextricably linked to his rupture with his
earlier writings, which pushed Marxist commentators
to speak of a "young Marx" and a "mature Marx",
although the nature of this cut poses problems.
A year before the Revolutions of 1848, Marx
and Engels thus wrote The Communist Manifesto,
which was prepared to an imminent revolution,
and ended with the famous cry: "Proletarians
of all countries, unite!".
However, Marx's thought changed again following
Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's December 2, 1851
coup, which put an end to the French Second
Republic and created the Second Empire which
would last until the 1870 Franco-Prussian
War.
Marx thereby modified his theory of alienation
exposed in the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844 and would later arrive
to his theory of commodity fetishism, exposed
in the first chapter of the first book of
Das Kapital (1867).
This abandonment of the early theory of alienation
would be amply discussed, and several Marxist
theorists, including Marxist humanists such
as the Praxis School, would return to it.
Others, such as Althusser, would claim that
the "epistemological break" between the "young
Marx" and the "mature Marx" was such that
no comparisons could be done between both
works, marking a shift to a "scientific theory"
of society.
In 1844-5, when Marx was starting to settle
his account with Hegel and the Young Hegelians
in his writings, he critiqued the Young Hegelians
for limiting the horizon of their critique
to religion and not taking up the critique
of the state and civil society as paramount.
Indeed, in 1844, by the look of Marx's writings
in that period (most famous of which is the
"Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of
1844", a text that most explicitly elaborated
his theory of alienation), Marx's thinking
could have taken at least three possible courses:
the study of law, religion, and the state;
the study of natural philosophy; and the study
of political economy.
He chose the last as the predominant focus
of his studies for the rest of his life, largely
on account of his previous experience as the
editor of the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung
on whose pages he fought for freedom of expression
against Prussian censorship and made a rather
idealist, legal defense for the Moselle peasants'
customary right of collecting wood in the
forest (this right was at the point of being
criminalized and privatized by the state).
It was Marx's inability to penetrate beneath
the legal and polemical surface of the latter
issue to its materialist, economic, and social
roots that prompted him to critically study
political economy.
==== Historical materialism ====
Marx summarized the materialistic aspect of
his theory of history, otherwise known as
historical materialism (this term was coined
by Engels and popularised by Karl Kautsky
and Georgi Plekhanov), in the 1859 preface
to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy:
In the social production of their existence,
men inevitably enter into definite relations,
which are independent of their will, namely
relations of production appropriate to a given
stage in the development of their material
forces of production.
The totality of these relations of production
constitutes the economic structure of society,
the real foundation, on which arises a legal
and political superstructure and to which
correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
The mode of production of material life conditions
the general process of social, political and
intellectual life.
It is not the consciousness of men that determines
their existence, but their social existence
that determines their consciousness.
In this brief popularization of his ideas,
Marx emphasized that social development sprang
from the inherent contradictions within material
life and the social superstructure.
This notion is often understood as a simple
historical narrative: primitive communism
had developed into slave states.
Slave states had developed into feudal societies.
Those societies in turn became capitalist
states, and those states would be overthrown
by the self-conscious portion of their working-class,
or proletariat, creating the conditions for
socialism and, ultimately, a higher form of
communism than that with which the whole process
began.
Marx illustrated his ideas most prominently
by the development of capitalism from feudalism,
and by the prediction of the development of
socialism from capitalism.
The base-superstructure and stadialist formulations
in the 1859 preface took on canonical status
in the subsequent development of orthodox
Marxism, in particular in dialectical materialism
(diamat, as it was known in the Soviet Union).
They also gave way to a vulgar Marxism as
plain economic determinism (or economism),
which has been criticized by various Marxist
theorists.
"Vulgar Marxism" was seen as little other
than a variety of economic determinism, with
the alleged determination of the ideological
superstructure by the economical infrastructure.
However, this positivist reading, which mostly
based itself on Engels' latter writings in
an attempt to theorize "scientific socialism"
(an expression coined by Engels) has been
challenged by Marxist theorists, such as Antonio
Gramsci or Althusser.
Some believe that Marx regarded them merely
as a shorthand summary of his huge ongoing
work-in-progress (which was only published
posthumously over a hundred years later as
Grundrisse).
These sprawling, voluminous notebooks that
Marx put together for his research on political
economy, particularly those materials associated
with the study of "primitive communism" and
pre-capitalist communal production, in fact,
show a more radical turning "Hegel on his
head" than heretofore acknowledged by most
mainstream Marxists and Marxiologists.
In lieu of the Enlightenment belief in historical
progress and stages espoused by Hegel (often
in a racist, Eurocentric manner, as in his
Lectures on the Philosophy of History), Marx
pursues in these research notes a decidedly
empirical approach to analyzing historical
changes and different modes of production,
emphasizing without forcing them into a teleological
paradigm the rich varieties of communal productions
throughout the world and the critical importance
of collective working-class antagonism in
the development of capitalism.
Moreover, Marx's rejection of the necessity
of bourgeois revolution and appreciation of
the obschina, the communal land system, in
Russia in his letter to Vera Zasulich; respect
for the egalitarian culture of North African
Muslim commoners found in his letters from
Algeria; and sympathetic and searching investigation
of the global commons and indigenous cultures
and practices in his notebooks, including
the Ethnological Notebooks that he kept during
his last years, all point to a historical
Marx who was continuously developing his ideas
until his deathbed and does not fit into any
pre-existing ideological straitjacket.
== Differences within Marxist philosophy ==
Some varieties of Marxist philosophy are strongly
influenced by Hegel, emphasizing totality
and even teleology: for example, the work
of Georg Lukács, whose influence extends
to contemporary thinkers like Fredric Jameson.
Others consider "totality" merely another
version of Hegel's "spirit," and thus condemn
it as a crippling, secret idealism.
Theodor Adorno, a leading philosopher of the
Frankfurt School, who was strongly influenced
by Hegel, tried to take a middle path between
these extremes: Adorno contradicted Hegel's
motto "the true is the whole" with his new
version, "the whole is the false," but he
wished to preserve critical theory as a negative,
oppositional version of the utopia described
by Hegel's "spirit."
Adorno believed in totality and human potential
as ends to be striven for, but not as certainties.
The status of humanism in Marxist thought
has been quite contentious.
Many Marxists, especially Hegelian Marxists
and also those committed to political programs
(such as many Communist Parties), have been
strongly humanist.
These humanist Marxists believe that Marxism
describes the true potential of human beings,
and that this potential can be fulfilled in
collective freedom after the Communist revolution
has removed capitalism's constraints and subjugations
of humanity.
A particular version of the humanism within
the marxism is represented by the school of
Lev Vygotsky and his school in theoretical
psychology (Alexis Leontiev, Laszlo Garai).
The Praxis school based its theory on the
writings of the young Marx, emphasizing the
humanist and dialectical aspects thereof.
However, other Marxists, especially those
influenced by Louis Althusser, are just as
strongly anti-humanist.
Anti-humanist Marxists believe that ideas
like "humanity," "freedom," and "human potential"
are pure ideology, or theoretical versions
of the bourgeois economic order.
They feel that such concepts can only condemn
Marxism to theoretical self-contradictions
which may also hurt it politically.
== Key works and authors ==
the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels:
especially the earlier writings such as The
1844 Manuscripts, The German Ideology and
"Theses on Feuerbach," but also the Grundrisse,
Das Kapital and other works inspired
V.I.
Lenin
Leon Trotsky
Rosa Luxemburg
Karl Korsch
Georg Lukács: History and Class Consciousness
developed the theory of ideology to include
a more complex model of class consciousness
Antonio Gramsci
Laszlo Garai
Ernst Bloch
The Frankfurt School, esp. Theodor Adorno,
Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas
Walter Benjamin
Bertolt Brecht
Socialisme ou Barbarie (Cornelius Castoriadis,
Claude Lefort, etc.)
Louis Althusser and his students (e.g. Étienne
Balibar, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière,
Pierre Macherey)
Praxis school
Situationist International
Fredric Jameson
Antonio Negri and autonomist Marxism
Helmut Reichelt
Slavoj Žižek
Mao Zedong
== See also ==
Category:Marxist theorists and List of contributors
to Marxist theory
Critical theory
Dialectical materialism
Frankfurt School's critical theory
Freudo-Marxism
Marxist explanations of warfare
Marxist sociology
Neo-Marxism
Orthodox Marxism
Post-Marxism
Analytical Marxism
Rethinking Marxism, a review
== 
References ==
== Bibliography ==
Balibar, Étienne, The Philosophy of Marx.
Verso, 1995 (French edition: La philosophie
de Marx, La Découverte, Repères, 1991)
Bottomore, Thomas, ed..
A Dictionary of Marxist Thought.
Blackwell, 1991.
