Western Marxism and Folklore: A Critical Introduction

1983 ◽  
Vol 96 (379) ◽  
pp. 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jose E. Limon
Keyword(s):  
Western Marxism

Karl Marx’s Legacy: The Historical Overview

2007 ◽  
pp. 87-103
Author(s):  
R. Nureev
Keyword(s):  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Neoclassical Economic ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Economic Theories ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Marxism

The article is devoted to the history of reception and interpretation of the ideas of Marx and Engels. The author considers the reasons for divergence between Marxist and neoclassical economic theories. He also analyzes the ways of vulgarization of Marx’s theory and the making of Marxist voluntarism. It is shown that the works of Marx and Engels had a certain potential for their over-simplified interpretations. The article also considers academic ("Western") Marxism and evaluates the prospects of Marxist theory in the future.

Foucault, Lenin, and Western Marxism

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-267
Keyword(s):  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Real Problem ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
Marxist Tradition ◽  
Western Marxism

This article others a brief historical account of the complex relationship between Michel Foucault and certain theorists in the Western Marxist philosophical tradition. In the context of the history of the “short twentieth century,” Western Marxism is an intellectual trend based on an interpretation of non-Western revolutionary praxis (by Bolsheviks, Maoists, Guevaristas, etc.). Comparative analysis of several schematic portraits - of Lenin’s revolutionary intellectual, of traditional as opposed to organic intellectuals in Gramsci, and of Foucault’s public intellectual - shows that Foucault in a certain instances was not an external enemy of the Western Marxist tradition, but rather its internal critic. Foucault comes across as a revisionist who engaged in a debate with Lenin about the strategy of the revolutionary movement in France of the 1960s and the 70s. Foucault’s criticism of Leninism unexpectedly turns out to be consistent with the basic struggle of post-WWII Western Marxism to find an alternative to the Bolshevik experience of revolution. This deliberate concurrence makes Foucault one of the significant figures in the history of late Western Marxism, but this becomes a real problem for current historians of neo-Marxist thought when coupled with his generally anti-Marxist views. The article discusses two possible solutions to this problem devised by Perry Anderson and Daniel Bensaid. Anderson’s description of the role of Foucault in the fate of Western Marxism is limited to conceptual questions about the relationship between Marxism and (post) structuralism. Bensaid tries to explain how Foucault fits into the Marxist tradition by appealing to social changes, specifically the changing ideology of capitalist society (in the spirit of The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello). Building on Bensaid’s work, the article shows the link between Foucault’s position on public intellectuals and the crisis of the revolutionary movement of the last half-century, in particular by reference to the famous “Iranian episode” in Foucault’s biography.

Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study.

1996 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 823
Author(s):  
Douglas Moggach ◽  
Kevin Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Critical Study ◽  
Western Marxism

How the Critique of Heaven Confines the Critique of the Earth

Qui Parle ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-245
Author(s):  
Mohamad Amer Meziane
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
Anthropology Of Religion ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Western Marxism ◽  
Critique Of Religion

Abstract This essay examines the effects of the critique of religion on the critique of capital and how the former confines the latter. It asks: What remains of the concepts of alienation or fetishism if they all stem from an anthropology of religion that seems to be criticized? If religion ceases to refer to an anthropological essence and is criticized as a European colonial concept, then what happens to the critique of capital? It argues that what Marx considers the condition for critique seems to be the blind spot of Western Marxism. Without a critical analysis of how the concept of religion is constructed and how religion is thus described as a human invention, Marxism cannot know itself. If Marx is a “critic of the critique of religion,” this gesture must apply to Marx as well as to Marxism itself. The critique of capitalism might need an alternative foundation if the anthropological concept of religion that supported it collapses. It is therefore impossible to maintain the critique of capital as it is while refusing the critique of religion that lies at its foundation.

Bloch, Ernst Simon (1885–1977)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Geoghegan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Open System ◽  
Its Analysis ◽  
New Material ◽  
Closed Systems ◽  
The Many ◽  
Fundamental Categories ◽  
Western Marxism ◽  
The Universe

Bloch was one of the most innovative Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century. His metaphysical and ontological concerns, combined with a self-conscious utopianism, distanced him from much mainstream Marxist thought. He was sympathetic to the classical philosophical search for fundamental categories, but distinguished earlier static, fixed and closed systems from his own open system, in which he characterized the universe as a changing and unfinished process. Furthermore, his distinctive materialism entailed the rejection of a radical separation of the human and the natural, unlike much twentieth-century Western Marxism. His validation of utopianism was grounded in a distinctive epistemology centred on the processes whereby ‘new’ material emerges in consciousness. The resulting social theory was sensitive to the many and varied ways in which the utopian impulse emerges, as, for example, in its analysis of the utopian dimension in religion.

The Young Lukács and the Origins of Western Marxism

Sociology ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 308-308
Author(s):  
David Held
Keyword(s):  
Western Marxism

Théorie de la connaissance et théorie du parti chez Lénine

1978 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 803-828
Author(s):  
Denis Monière ◽  
Robert Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
External Character ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Western Marxism

In the crisis that pervades Western Marxism, the question of the party and its relation to the masses occupies a central position. This article critically examines the Leninist conception of party, specifying those intrinsic limits which are linked to the theoretical and political context of the period in which it was elaborated. The authors raise the problem of the development of class consciousness and criticize the Leninist principle of the external character of class consciousness.This theory in which the party is conceived as the master-thinker and theoretical guide of a proletariat dominated by its material conditions of existence rests on an epistemological justification: the theory of reflection. The authors retrace in Lenin's theory of knowledge the philosophical foundations of this conception which makes the party the mediator\bearer of the historical truth of the proletariat. In fact, for Lenin, the lack of consciousness of the working class is explained by its inability to pass beyond its class determination and to rise to a comprehension of contradiction. It is precisely by reason of this deep-seated narrowness of the working class that the party is indispensable in bringing knowledge of society in its totality to the proletariat.A consequence of this theory of knowledge is to separate arbitrarily what is conceptualized and what exists, that is to say on one hand a knowledge produced and retained by intellectuals, and on the other a working class delivered over to a blind spontaneity, to ignorance. This position, taken to its extreme, can justify all forms of authoritarianism and elitism.

Spectacle and Détournement

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
McKenzie Wark
Keyword(s):  
Private Property ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Henri Lefebvre ◽  
Situationist International ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Commodity Production ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Practices ◽  
Western Marxism

The concepts of spectacle and détournement are closely associated with the Paris-based postwar avant-garde movement known as the Situationist International. Spectacle is meant to work as a concept that critiques not this or that aspect of media culture, but its totality. It reveals the spectacle as the double, in the world of consumption, of capitalist commodity production. Détournement is the practice which opposes spectacle by refusing all forms of private property in the production of cultural works. While the Situationist International expired as a movement in 1972, these concepts were subsequently taken up by others, although most often shorn of the revolutionary impulse their linkage was meant to forge. This is why it is important to stress the origins of these concepts in both Western Marxism and also in the radical avant-garde movements of the prewar period. Guy Debord, a central animating presence in the Situationist International, was drawing on militant Marxist thinkers such as Georg Lukács and Henri Lefebvre, as well as the lesser-known Belgian branch of the Surrealist avant-garde. Understood as keys to a unified critical theory and practice, spectacle and détournement can be retrieved from merely descriptive studies of literature and media, and also from more narrowly formalist avant-garde literary practices.

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