Peter Beilharz. The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory. Cambridge University Press. 2020.
What is the Marxist legacy? Let us begin with a mind game. Imagine yourself in a plush room in the Kremlin around 1950, the proverbial fly on the wall. To our left, the youthful figure of Cornelius Castoriadis, until recently a Greek Trotskyist, but on the way to the advocacy of the idea of autonomy as the core value for radicals; a true libertarian in the making. On our right, Josef Stalin, mass murderer, self-proclaimed saviour of the Soviet peoples, and responsible for their mass execution and starvation. Is it silence that ensues, or else angry exchange?
What are these two doing in the same room? Of course, this is a mind game; they never met, and had they, Castoriadis would have been immediately dispatched to the cells, waiting for the press of cold metal on the nape of his neck. One was the master, the engineer of human souls; the other was the rebel, self-driven to say no to dictatorship, yes to self-legislation and to the dream of freedom, driven into exile in Paris.
The paradox, or the contradiction of this image is apparent: these were both Marxists. The Marxist legacy is founded on this contradiction, which in turn reflects a contradiction in Marx and in the broader socialist tradition.
There have been various attempts to capture, or at least to name this contradiction over the years. Hal Draper famously catalogued the Two Souls of Socialism in 1966 (Draper, 1966). Twenty years later Alvin Gouldner revisited the field in a book called The Two Marxisms (Gouldner, 1978). Others, earlier, such as the English guild socialist G. D. H Cole, referred to socialists as being either As or Bs: anarchists or bureaucrats, though historically even those two lines are blurred. As the later Marxist joke had it, scratch an anarchist, and you find a bureaucrat. Ernst Bloch, in a related dual vein, spoke of the warm and the cold streams in Marxism, the spirited and analytical threads, which he saw as mutually constitutive but which constantly risked separation (Bloch, 1986). Into the 1970s the differences among Marxists sometimes were halved between the schools of humanism and structuralism: optimists and pessimists, to caricature.
There are many puzzles here, many splits and bifurcations. If the map of Marxism was, as in Borges, the same size as its object, then we could detail every nuance and difference in these lineages. But there are also some plainer patterns that emerge, as we simplify in order to make sense of all this. For the Marxist legacy is many things, and many things more than two, but it is also this: it is a bifurcated tradition. In this chapter we will survey some of these tensions, splits and differences, initially in Marx’s work, then into the following traditions of Marxism—Classical Social Democracy; Bolshevism; Western Marxism and Critical Theory; structuralism and the residues of the emancipatory and critical lineage. For these shifts and changes are historical, ethical, and ideological—they are amenable to mapping out—but they may also be ontological. Gouldner opens The Two Marxisms with the inevitable line from Goethe’s Faust, where there are two souls in one breast, each struggling with the other. Historically, the authoritarian stream of Marxism won, pyrrhically; the emancipatory stream remains a subordinate dream (Howard, 1978). Castoriadis later gave up his formal association with Marxism, following the Hegelian maxim that world history was the world’s court of judgement: after Stalin and Mao, Marxism was irredeemably toxic, the emancipatory claims of the red flag stained irrevocably by the blood of millions. This fact of the matter seems, alone in this context, to be simple: Marxism is forever stained by its appropriation by the Bolsheviks. After 1917, with Lenin and Trotsky, after 1927, with Stalin, Marxism becomes the ideology of an actually existing state power whose actuality is totalitarian. Marxism becomes forever associated in the popular mind with the Soviet Union, this a great convenience both to the Soviets and to their Western enemies.
This is to anticipate some of the broader coordinates as they here unfold: that socialism, and Marxism and modernity are transformed by their entanglement with the state and state power; and that socialist argument across this period is stretched across other frames, of Romanticism and Enlightenment (another set of dual claimants as the two souls of Western modernity), of cooperation from below and the imposition of order from above. More, Marxisms and socialisms both spread and dilute across the last two centuries; at the present time, it is possible that socialism is both everywhere and nowhere. Rarely has a family name like Marxism had to do so much work, or to obscure so many differences. Clearly some history, or periodization is necessary, for Marxism has a long modern history, and a global reach. More, it is both a theory and a practice, the two not always neatly conjoined. For the theory is often exercised by intellectuals, while the practice of the workers’ movement also has a history of its own. The broad story is then further complicated by the way in which the ideas of one man (or two?) become the leading ideas of a mass movement or social democratic counterculture, and then are appropriated by the Bolsheviks to become the ideology of a murderous totalitarian state, finally to become apparently obsolete with the eventual collapse of the Soviet Empire, but revived at a street level against the renewed rapacity of global capitalism.
Marx’s Legacy
We began our investigation of the Marxist legacy with a mind game, as above: Castoriadis and Stalin in the same room. Let us follow with another, almost as paradoxical. Imagine that there could be two Karl Marxes: double trouble. One, less well known, is the green, rural, romantic hothead from the Rhineland, who dreams of a world of labour without alienation, who hopes for the regime of the associated producers, who believes that the emancipation of the working class can only be their own effort—a Promethean lover of freedom, one who says no to all gods. The second, better known from banners and clichés of the post-1917 Soviet world, has the bearded visage of Marx the sage, usually portrayed in iconography along with Engels, Lenin, Stalin. This is the Marx often associated with the laws of history and the inevitability of Communism. He is a Communist, not a socialist, one who can explain the nature of surplus value and the necessary transition from feudalism to capitalism and on, finally, to Communism.
Can there really have been two Marxes? The question is worth asking, and not just with reference to Marx. For it opens a broader issue of epistemology and intellectual history. In its weak sense, the issue is that interesting thinkers will often be inconsistent across the path of their lives, will change their minds or even shift from one world view to another. In a stronger sense, the issue may be that the transformations of the social world demand that we periodically change our minds. This reminds us of Keynes: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?’ The worlds we are born into may not be the same as those we face as we grow older. Our views of the world may also harden as we grow older and deal with defeat or disappointment. And more, the thinking of our closest collaborators, in this case Engels as the holder of the legacy, is by no means identical with ours. If there were two Marxes, one of them might sometimes look like Engels.
In the case of Marx studies, the split that is commonly identified is that between the Young or the Early and the Mature or the Late Marx. This split has become an orthodoxy, though there is of course a case also to be made for continuity from the Paris Manuscripts to the Grundrisse to Capital, all of which can be tracked across the Marx–Engels Collected Works or on the Internet. The latter approach sees Marx’s master project as consisting of instalments of the critique of political economy. The former approach, which values the difference in his work over the continuity, either values the philosophical greenness over the grey-on-grey of the later work, or instead sees the later work of Capital as a more sophisticated architecture of capital and capitalism. Let us unpack these differences.
The early Marx is usually typified as a humanist (see Beilharz, 1992). Like Rousseau, his animating sense is that human beings construct social relations which constrain them, make them unfree. Capital is the primary instance of this phenomenon and this activity; and in the early Marx the emphasis is indeed on activity, and on sensuous human suffering. Most famously, this involves the argument about the alienation of labour. Writing in Paris in 1844, the young Marx is finding his way intellectually. He begins from the argument that private property, far from being universal, is the historically specific result of capitalist activity. Private property, or capital, is the result of labour. Capitalism as we know it is not a universal; it is an historical formation, open to transformation. It is a process of expropriation, rather than a norm or transhistorical premise of human activity. It begets four different kinds or aspects of alienation. Under capitalism the labourer is alienated from the result of production; from the process of production; from his fellow workers; and from the human species. His premise here is that men are born free; but also that their nature or anthropology is to express themselves in the labouring act. The young Marx is often characterized as a Romantic, and sometimes as an Expressivist. Sometimes he is characterized as a Promethean, as the eternal rebel, who denies all gods, but perhaps also wants men to be as gods themselves. For he hates all gods, and following Feuerbach, wants man to make the world in his own image. As the root term of humanism, man or Mensch is here the actor not of world history but of everyday life. The early Marx therefore values the subject, or the actor, the sensuous, suffering, sentient individual. But he also claims to have discovered the proletariat as the collective actor of a future possible history, and here there is set in motion a kind of projection or redemption in which Marxists claim to have solved the riddle of history by having located the carrier of the cause of socialism. Viewed from a later, critical perspective, this opens up the possibility that Marx can be praised for his diagnosis, but not his prognosis. His critique of actually existing capitalism bristles with insight; his hopes for where it might be headed—socialism—have no such power of insight, but instead inscribe desire into the project, leaping from Is to Ought.
Marx’s legacy cannot be reduced to the simple division between young and mature; there is also, among other things, Marx the historian, Marx the writer, follower of comedy and farce, where the devil is in the detail of the argument and sarcasm is often its dominant critical voice. But for the purpose of this chapter and this narrative, and in the main Marx reception, the division has been allowed to hold sway. In the language of sociology, which postdates Marx, Marx’s work shifts from a focus on agency to one on structure, or from experience to concept. From Paris in 1844, and the above-mentioned concerns, he finds himself in exile in England, and works for more than twenty more years on developing the critique of political economy. There are two vital transitional steps in this project, the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859, and the unpublished manuscripts now called the Grundrisse, which spread across the previous two years. The crowning result of this process is the publication of Das Kapital, or Capital, in 1867. Marx spent much of this time in the British Library reading, for example, the Blue Books or government reports and commissions of enquiry into the consequences of industrialization. He wasted a great deal of time in polemics, but also gave time to organizing the First Workingmen’s International. But he also dealt with two decades of head-aching over how best to present the masterwork conceptually, coming to the conclusion that it was best procedurally to move from the elementary unit of the commodity through to the exchange of commodities, before, like Dante, descending into the secret abode of capitalist production in the factory itself. Only later in the book does the working class appear, as actors, largely here victims nestled into structures of oppression. The revolutionary working class makes a dramatic reappearance in the penultimate chapter of Capital 1, but this gesture is like a theatre prop lowered too late onto the stage. The putative revolutionary outcome of the process of capitalist production is immaculate; it is asserted, rather than emerging out of the argument itself. This, together with other claims about the tendency of the profit rate to fall, leave Marx’s revolution and his proletariat as script, rather than history.
Does this shift from 1844 to 1867 then sufficiently justify the dominant claim that there are indeed two Marxes? That there are some elements of continuity is indeed apparent from the insertion of the revolutionary class from the early work into the penultimate chapter of Capital. There are certainly significant differences of sensibility, among other things. The most remarkable break is historical rather than epistemological. The world that the younger Marx and Engels grow into is indeed apocalyptic, both with reference to the devastating effects of industrialization and with reference to the Age of Revolutions, not least around 1848. Into the 1850s global capitalism stabilizes, and Marx turns to explaining its capacity for self-reproduction rather than revolution. This makes sense: if the object of analysis changes, so too should the mode or attitude of its interpretation. Marx’s reliance on Hegel in designing the first part of Das Kapital suggests that there are also independent intellectual dynamics at play here. These are explanatory nuances which do not much undermine the hegemony of the young/mature Marx argument, for which the young Marx wants to change the world, whereas the later Marx feels the need to explain it scientifically.
Ironic though it may seem in retrospect, none of this Marx interpretation was of any significant consequence until the postwar period, when emerging Marxist humanists in the West began to use the forgotten, or suppressed Marx of the Paris Manuscripts to argue for a new, emancipatory reading of Marx against the twin evils of triumphant consumer capitalism and Stalinism in the east. And this is certainly one key dimension of the dispute over Marx’s legacy, that the young Marx was all but unknown until the early 1960s, especially in the English language. The translation of the Paris Manuscripts and the Grundrisse from the 1960s to the 1970s coincided with and was carried along by the culture of radicalism associated with the New Left, hippy culture, and the youth movement. To which one sceptical response would be: too little, too late, by the time the emancipatory Marx was exhumed, there were too many mountains of bodies already created in the name of Marx.
The historical issue is that there is very little in Marx’s work to justify anything like Jacobinism, the terror of the Bolsheviks after 1917, and then Stalin and Mao. By the time of the later Lenin, and Mao, it was indeed the peasantry who were to be regarded as the magical or additional revolutionary class, this harnessed by an invincible Communist Party, for which there is no equivalent in Marx. Nothing could be further from the spirit of the early and later Marx, for whom socialism was only conceivable as the work of the associated producers, not the Party, and on the basis of the abundance generated by the capitalist revolution, not the primitive Communism begot by shortage, misery, famine, and poverty. The surprise, historically speaking, was that Marxism became a world idea at all. In Marx’s day his ‘Party’ was a small and loose group of the vaguely co-minded at a loose end in London, and the reading audience for his work was minuscule, with the exception of his American journalism. All this was to change with the rise of the German Social Democrats, who first made classical Marxism formulaic and spread it systematically through an elaborate system of press, publications, and Party schools. The precondition for this process of the popularization of Marxism was the emergence of a new political form, the institution of the mass political party as we know it today, and its consolidation in a hostile Prussian culture as a society within a society.
Classical Social Democracy
Again, there is irony and paradox here. Nothing in Marx’s work was arguably necessary to the fact of the Russian Revolution. The logic of Marx’s work was that there would have to be a capitalist revolution before a subsequent socialist revolution, which was turned into a joke in some circles after 1989: now, in the post-Soviet world, there had had to be a socialist revolution as a prelude to the revolution of capitalism. Lenin and Trotsky decide to seize state power against Marx; Marx was incidental to their purpose, for the great revolutions of left and right in the twentieth century needed some strong ideology or other, the most powerful component of which was actually the nationalism which Marx kept his distance from. But nor, in the nineteenth-century phase, was there anything necessarily German about the adoption of this émigré political identity from Marx and Engels, living and working in England. Engels mediated the legacy of Marx to the SPD (Social Democratic Party) in liaison with its great early minds, those of Kautsky and Bernstein: these were the executors, and the minders of the remaining manuscripts, of Marx’s Nachlass or his very intellectual legacy itself. Marxism passed over the Channel and back to Germany again after Marx’s death.
The emergent forces of German social democracy did, however, adopt Marxism as their theory and ideology. As the party consolidated into the 1890s, there were not one but three dominant voices in the SPD. There emerged here a kind of bifurcation less between the early and later phases of any single thinker, than between the grand motifs of reform and revolution. The split here was between the dominant institutional voice of Eduard Bernstein and the revolutionary spirit of Rosa Luxemburg. The spirit of the party mainstream itself was best captured by the position of Karl Kautsky, who sat in between, combining revolutionary rhetoric with reformist practice, and codifying Marxism in the process, a dangerous process of simplification that would eventually lead to the so-called laws of dialectical and historical materialism in the hands of Stalin.
The tension between theory and practice is already evident in the treatment of Marx’s legacy above. Theory, here, was the voice of the later Marx, where Das Kapital was the science of society, philosophically rendered. Practice or praxis was closer to the legacy of the early Marx, where a latent sociology of everyday life and labour jostled with calls for its revolutionary transformation, activity brought forward into activism. But the tension in Marx is that of a solitary thinker, in league with his friend Engels, and their handful of associates and hangers-on. By the time of the successful rise of the SPD, there was a more marked tension at work. The rise and consolidation of the SPD as a mass left party represented a major instance of the anomaly of power and its institutionalization. For when the party became a counterculture, the obvious imperative was to protect and defend the party; the question of its goals became difficult, or ephemeral. Bernstein, from the right, expressed the challenge in his famous saying that the socialist movement was everything, the goal nothing. By this he meant that the capacity of the SPD to influence society and protect the downtrodden, even to expand the parameters of change through the expansion of citizenship was to be valued over and above the pie-in-the-sky hallucinations of the revolutionary dreamers. Talking about revolution, from this perspective, was dangerous, but also sociologically misleading; complex societies did not give themselves to being overturned, as the metaphor of revolution suggests. Revolution would mean chaos, which would play into the hands of reaction (Bernstein, 1961). The weakness of Bernstein’s argument, well identified by Luxemburg, was that the idea of introducing socialism by instalments was also unconvincing, because incremental radical politics did not work, and because the powers that be would never allow this slide into socialism to happen in the first place. Luxemburg, for her part, sought the emancipatory image of socialism coming out of Marx, whereby the workers themselves would take power, through the process of the General Strike. Her position came to be known as spontaneist, as it had no leading role for the party, and it opposed what she called the barracks socialism of the Bolsheviks (Luxemburg, 1900).
Reform or revolution: this was the hard choice presented to the constituents of the SPD by Bernstein and Luxemburg. On a daily level, it was more a matter of business as usual, though this was also punctuated by rupture and crisis into the period of the Russian Revolution and the daily pattern of violence between the left and the proto-Nazis into the Weimar Republic. Bernstein died a natural death; Luxemburg was murdered. By this stage, since the SPD had voted for war credits in 1914, economic crisis and political crisis had been running in tandem. In the period of high social democracy, from the 1890s on, the tension between reform and revolution was dealt with cosmetically, by embracing in effect both—reform today, revolution tomorrow. This was the point at which Kautsky dominated the stage, with his centrist maxim, that the SPD, before Bolshevism, was revolutionary but not revolution-making. Kautsky’s was the position later referred to as maturational socialism; Bebel had earlier suggested that socialism would fall into the laps of the German socialists like a ripe fruit. And this, indeed was one part of Marx’s legacy, in the idea that successive modes of production would rise and fall, bringing to fruition the basis of the next, higher stage of development from feudalism, to capitalism, to socialism and on to Communism. This thread was alive and well as late as the interwar period, as in the crisis/collapse theorem of Henryk Grossman, later characterized as automatic Marxism.
Over the years there has been ongoing discussion of the question of the relationship between the thinking of Darwin and Marx. Was Marx an evolutionary thinker? Almost certainly, in the most general of terms. The later Marx was plainly taken by the idea of progress, and this idea was in any case in the ether; Marx and Darwin were both Victorian thinkers. Yet Marx also believed that human beings make their own history, even if not just as they please; and he anticipated, as later did Luxemburg and then Castoriadis, that the alternative was socialism or barbarism. Nothing was actually guaranteed. What does seem clear in all this is that following Engels, Kautsky, the so-called Pope of Marxism, tended to associate Marx and Darwin implicitly. Socialism, in this way of thinking, would look after itself in the long run; this, or else, as Bernstein hoped, the majority of the population, seeing life from below, would themselves usher in socialism through the democratic voting system. While there is, as always, more to these thinkers than this summary here suggests, the great compromise was enshrined in Kautsky’s Erfurt Programme, aka The Class Struggle, for the SPD of 1892 (Reference KautskyKautsky, 1892). The founding text of Marxism, the 1848 Communist Manifesto, had already provided the precedent, tacking a series of immediate or short-term demands on to the earlier, revolutionary hymn to the bourgeoisie as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice of the great power of Capital. The Erfurt Programme formalized this precedent into two steps or stages: the Minimum Programme and the Maximum Programme of the SPD. But what was the process of transition from one to the next? If reform and revolution were the two souls of classical social democracy, then the issue now was no longer Faust’s, that they ran together, but rather that they ran so far apart as to invite political defeat at the hands of the Nazis in the making who would soon be standing at the door.
Bolshevism
The German Social Democrats were not the only Marxist force in the global field, but they were the most influential presence on the horizon. They were the dominant organizational and ideological force of the Second International. Others, from William Morris to the Fabians, the latter not Marxist but earnestly reformist, spoke more powerfully in England, and forces like revolutionary syndicalism were significant in France and the USA and even in Australia, especially among transient labour. These latter forces fed into the Communist parties formed throughout the world in the wake of 1917, and then organized through the Third, or Communist International from 1919. Other social democratic forces again stood strong and small, in Sweden especially with Ernst Wigforss, and in the example of Austro-Marxism.
The year 1917, of course, changed everything, for the history of the twentieth century and for the path of the Marxist legacy. But before 1917, Russian social democracy had also been formed in the image of the SPD. This was not a good fit, given the significant economic, cultural, and political differences between Russia and Germany, and it did not last. The German Social Democrats were committed to many things, but one of them was democracy. The Russians claimed as their Great War slogan ‘Peace, Bread, and Land, and All Power to the Soviets’. The invention and intervention of the Bolshevik, or combat party, took them somewhere else than to democracy (see Beilharz, 1992).
Was there then a significant split or shift between the young Lenin and the mature Lenin, the young Trotsky and the mature Trotsky? Before state power, and after state power? The short answer to this question is yes, more so in the case of Trotsky, partly because he was more theoretically sophisticated and given to reflection; partly because he lived longer, opposed power early, and seized and then lost power in the course of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath.
Lenin was also a sophisticated thinker, but the majority of his work was political, strategic, and given to the moment. There are strong economic treatises, like The Development of Capitalism in Russia, philosophical inquiries like Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, and flights of anarcho-Bolshevik fantasy like The State and Revolution in his writings, all available in his Collected Works; but even in these cases Lenin was looking to crack the heads of ideological opponents. Likely the most discernible shift across the path of his thinking is its more pragmatic turn after the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921 to replace the earlier, high Bolshevik period of war Communism. This later Lenin was apparently as attracted to Bukharin’s gradualism, socialism at a snail’s pace; the primary accumulation of capital and agricultural collectivism came later, with Stalin, who sought to make by force the capital base which the Russians had lacked in 1917. Whatever the changes across this path, the standard critical view for many years has been that Lenin announces the vanguard party at the moment that Bolshevism emerges, in 1902 with ‘What Is to Be Done?’ (Lenin, 1970 [1902]), which initiates the Bolshevik view that if trade union consciousness is the proletarian norm, then socialist consciousness needs to be introduced from without, by the party itself. This was a variation on Kautsky’s view, that Marxist consciousness came from without, but by educative means, ergo the plethora of SPD party papers, journals, and schools. This in turn reflected an unresolved tension in Marx, whereby the proletariat suffered and knew, and yet the intellectuals were necessary in order formally to systematize and pass on this knowledge in big books like Das Kapital.
Some recent scholarship has contested this view of Lenin. Žižek argues as though Lenin were a kind of comic Bolshevik who fell into totalitarian ways, though he also wants to make fun of the idea of totalitarianism. More seriously, Lars Lih (Lih, 2006) has gone through Lenin’s writing with a fine-tooth comb in order to argue that Lenin was an Erfurt Marxist, who actually took the more revolutionary turn. Certainly Lenin was a revolution-making, and not only a revolutionary Marxist. Indeed, it was Lenin who turned Kautsky into the Renegade Kautsky, when Kautsky’s larger error was likely that he never changed his mind at all. For Kautsky, it was r/evolution or nothing.
The young Trotsky was something else, closer to the spontaneist Luxemburg. Indeed, the young Trotsky was the most vehement critic of Lenin, whom he cast in his 1904 polemic as Robespierre, famously coining the image of substitutionism in critique of the Bolsheviks: the party substitutes itself for the proletariat; the leadership for the party; the leader for the leadership. The dictatorship of the proletariat becomes the dictatorship over the proletariat. In short, the young Trotsky anticipated Stalinism in 1904. He changes his mind and his affiliation in 1917, becoming the Best Bolshevik thereafter, and anticipating in the process the consolidation of the Stalinism that he was to spend his last decade contesting, until Stalin finally had him assassinated in Coyocan in 1940. The legacy of Trotskyism was something else. The later Trotsky seems to have second thoughts about the nature of the USSR, but his testament in The Revolution Betrayed (1937) was more orthodox, and the 1938 Transitional Programme of his new Fourth International insisted that the capitalist world was still rotten ripe for revolution: it was only necessary for his own lieutenants to offer the corpse the final shove, and the job of socialists would be done (see Beilharz 1982; 1987).
The young Trotsky was a skilled historian, honing his skills not least in witnessing the history of the 1905 Revolution, where it was the Soviets, here as the people, who were making Russian history from below. In terms of the diagnosis/prognosis distinction suggested above for Marx, Trotsky delivers the power of insight into what he calls combined and uneven development, but also assumes the inevitability of revolution in the formula of Permanent Revolution. By 1921 it was Trotsky, the lapsed libertarian, who authorized the shooting of the Kronstadt rebels, who had earlier been constructed as the champions of the Revolution. At the same time, he was writing books like Literature and Revolution, wildly Promethean in its conclusion, and defending barracks socialism and forced labour against the ageing Kautsky in Terrorism and Communism. Kautsky had not given up on the project of maturational socialism; but these were not his times. He died in exile in Amsterdam in 1938. By this time, Stalinism ruled, even if its hegemony was secured primarily through terror.
Western Marxism
Bolshevism came after the fact to be identified as an Eastern Marxism; the locus of Marxism as a revolutionary movement was certainly moving east, heading next to China, but there shifting decisively away from the proletariat, real, or imagined, and towards the peasantry. In the interwar period another phenomenon was to emerge within Marxism. Retrospectively, it was to be called Western Marxism, and it had three major carriers: Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci. Lukács offered its most incendiary moment. From an early career in literature and high culture, he became a Bolshevik, momentarily Hungarian Commissar of Culture in its short-lived revolutionary regime. Later, in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, he was briefly to be a minister with Imre Nagy’s anti-Soviet reform movement. In 1923 he published the essay for which he is best remembered, gathered in History and Class Consciousness (Lukács, 1971), whose most seminal essay was entitled ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’. This argument resolved the tension in Marx with the announcement that the working class has revolutionary consciousness imputed to it; it was as though the working class were revolutionary whether it knew it or not. It was the necessary vocation of the working class to fulfil the task placed upon it by history, or by its leading intellectuals. Together with this came the brilliant analysis of commodity fetishism, anticipating Marx’s argument about alienation, which was not yet to appear until its first publication in German in 1932. Lukács’ brilliance, like that of the later Marx, was to excel at diagnosis rather than prognosis; reification in fact ruled. Romantic anti-capitalism railed against it. Lukács was then to renounce his views under the early Soviet attack on the so-called Red Professors, and to return to his literary interests, never again to achieve the quality of insight of his early work. He became a kind of internal exile, tacitly endorsing Stalinism, and his greatest later contribution was in sponsoring, and naming the Budapest School.
Korsch’s contribution was less fluorescent than this, but included brilliant essays, including ‘Marxism and Philosophy’ and ‘Three Essays on Marxism’, and the 1938 study of Marx which remains one of the best books on him to date, identifying Marx’s contribution with the idea of historic specificity and explaining the change in his views with the turn to a sociology of capitalism after the collapse of the Age of Revolutions (Korsch, 1938). For Korsch, as for Lukács, Marx’s Hegelian origins were crucial; ideas, and idealism, were no mere epiphenomena. Contemplation mattered, but also activity. Korsch served as Communist Minister for Justice in Thuringia in 1923. He worked for a time in England with the Fabians, and was to become a leading advocate of the idea and practice of workers’ councils: socialism must come from below, or it would not come at all. Finally, he died in exile in the United States, where other, later council communists would include figures like Paul Mattick; the syndicalist legacy remained, however marginal it might be. The fact that its followers now found it necessary to describe themselves as Left Communists spoke as much to the mainstreaming of the left in the USSR as to their own sense of solitude (El-Ojeili, 2003). Others again, such as the Dutch council Communist Anton Pannekoek, took on Lenin as a philosopher as well as a Bolshevik. The most sustained legacy of the Western Marxists, however, was that of Antonio Gramsci, which also follows a path of transition or development from early to later in his life.
Are there two Gramscis? Apparently, for there is at the least a major shift from his early to later views, a process caught up with the changing conjuncture from the revolutionary enthusiasm of the early days of the Russian Revolution to the interwar years, when Stalin grimly rules the Soviet Union, Mussolini, himself also earlier a leading socialist, rules Italy, and Gramsci languishes in his prison. In the beginning, Gramsci, a southerner and journalist, a keen organizer and advocate of prefiguration, was taken by the idea of the soviets or workers’ councils, and he was actively involved in the factory occupations in Turin in 1920, in the period of the worldwide after-effects of the October events (see Boggs, 1984). He had sympathized with the Russian Revolution as what he called the Revolution against capital, the pun indicating two things: a revolution against the capital of capitalism, but also a revolution against Das Kapital, or against the lethargic waiting for the revolution associated with Kautsky and the Second International.
The young Gramsci moves from Sardinia to Turin, the home of Fiat and Italian Fordism, to study, but instead becomes a leader of the newly founded Communist Party as the Second International collapses throughout Europe after World War I. He is also taken by Hegel or his local variant in Croce. On the cusp of his arrest in 1926 he had almost finished a text entitled The Southern Question, which encapsulated many of the themes still articulated by advocates of the South today; for Italy is a microcosm of the world system of imperialism, writ small (Gramsci, 1995). Gramsci follows Marx in believing in the necessity of industrialism, but he questions its modes of development, in which the North effectively freezes the South out of modernity. But though he is a Marxist and a Communist, and is inspired by the revolutionary Lenin, he also becomes known as a practical socialist, opposed to pie in the sky, and mortified that the Italian fascists might get there first, politically, which they do. For Mussolini’s forces offer themselves as hegemonic, and they organize themselves, as the Nazis originally claimed to do, as national socialists. Hegemony was to become a central concern for Gramsci in prison, and then again for radicals as they discovered Gramsci, especially in English, into the 1970s. The greatest strategic breakthrough for Gramsci consisted in the acceptance that, left to itself, history would not lead to socialism but to the defeat of the left. The battle for ideas, for a new culture and ideology, would become central in this way of thinking. Written in a private Marxist language to escape the scissors of the censors, the Prison Notebooks remained a disjointed but fascinating catalogue of Gramsci’s daily thinking on Italy, the present, the past, the crisis, and the difference between not only North and South but also East and West, all this mediated by the mysterious spectre of the Modern Prince, or new Communist Party, Gramsci combining the thought of Machiavelli and Lenin here (Gramsci, 1971). Was the later Gramsci then a Leninist? Here another bifurcation takes place, at least in the subsequent reception of Gramsci’s thinking. Under the influence of cultural studies and the politics of Eurocommunism, Gramsci becomes the theorist of superstructures, language, culture, and ideology. Alongside this process of domestication, another stream of Gramsci studies seeks to keep up the revolutionary intent, though here it remains unclear just what precise configuration a revolution today might take (Thomas, 2009).
Critical Theory
Gramsci died after his release from prison in 1937. Various other developments took place in the interwar period, perhaps most significantly the rise of the Frankfurt School. While the Frankfurt School was never really revolutionary, its origins and inspirations were certainly caught up with classical Marxism and the hopes of the workers’ movement. Into the 1930s, its informing motif was the idea that the German workers movement had missed its moment. As in the Italian case, the enemy were better organized, ideologically and practically, as well as being more adept at brutal persuasion.
These days it is customary to narrate the history of the Frankfurt School as consisting of three phases or generations. The first phase is dominated by the figures of Horkheimer and Adorno; the second by Habermas; and the third by Honneth. Many other figures were associated with the serious infrastructure of the Frankfurt School, including Fromm, Marcuse, Benjamin, Pollock, Lowenthal, Neumann, and Korsch. How to summarize the thought and impact of this major school of Critical Theory? Several major motifs emerge: for the founders, the critique of instrumental reason, a kind of Marx–Weber synthesis anticipated by Lukács in 1923; an interest in Freud, and in combining Marx and Freud to explain the crisis of the 1930s; a more pessimistic fear that reason had turned against itself, in the dialectic of enlightenment, and that we may have indeed entered the totally administered society; yet there was also a hope that Critical Theory might stand against traditional theory. For Habermas, this took the form of an earlier interest in theory and praxis, knowledge and human interests, and Critical Theory as a theory oriented by emancipatory interests; all of this led him to the project of reconstructing historical materialism, a strong interest in the state and in legitimation, then the theory of communicative action, and on to the pragmatics of communication: throughout all of which he retained a strong commitment to constant intervention in matters of public life (Wiggershaus, 1994). Then there was Honneth, and the newly reformed enthusiasm for the politics of recognition, which added Mead and Winnicott to the mix and focused on the spirit of American pragmatism rather than Freud. The School’s interests encompassed all this and so much more, from philosophy to music and aesthetics: a long way from the culture of the workers’ movement, and yet not so far from the wealth of interests of classical social democracy. The extent of the transformation was nevertheless like that of Gramsci, from Italian Communist to poster boy for cultural studies. And in each case, the leading figures of Critical Theory also undergo significant transformation: Habermas in particular, as the most responsive to worldly change as it followed on from the postwar period. Perhaps the simple point here is that Critical Theory was also bound to become a tradition, and in this sense traditional. Yet traditions also disable, at the same time that they enable intellectual vision.
The path of the Frankfurt School was both interrupted and boosted by the emergence of the New Left, the movement against the Vietnam War, and the revival of Trotskyism and Western Maoism, still today defended by serious philosophers like Badiou. The image of the Cultural Revolution was apparently irresistible. New Leftism came together with Third Worldism; there were new poster boys, Che Guevara along with Trotsky and Jimi Hendrix. And then there was something that actually looked like a revolution in Paris, in May 1968 (but there was also the Soviet invasion of Prague, following on from the murder of millions of Communists in Indonesia). Paris was notorious for intellectual fads, but the most toxic of them, well dredged critically by Simon Leys, was the French cult of Mao. No one, at first, could here utter the name of Solzhenitsyn. This uniformity was loosened by the tragedy of Pol Pot. Who could defend this nightmare under the name of socialism after Kampuchea? For the New Left overlapped the Old Left in its blindness to Stalinism, but it also revived the anti-authoritarianism of the romantic left, as evidenced for example in the Little Red School Book.
Socialism, now, was as much concerned with sex, drugs, and rock and roll as with the black leather of the avant-garde. Adorno and Horkheimer were looking old-fashioned. Socialist argument in the West in the 1960s was likely at its discursive peak again. The emancipatory work of the early Marx arrived in English just in time to intersect with the Anglo New Left, though in a different sense the late discovery of the young Marx was also too late; Marxism was too much bloodied by the Soviet experience to march unconditionally together with the flag of freedom. The presenting challenge was not only to turn Marx against Marx, but also to turn Marx against Marxism. Stalinism always shouted louder. But there were always more critical voices.
The Frankfurt School was not the only school of Critical Theory in this landscape, though it was clearly the most dominant. In 1971 the ageing Lukács founded the Budapest School, its leading figures Agnes Heller, Ferenc Feher, Gyorgy Markus, and Mihaly Vajda. Together with Maria Markus and Ivan Szelenyi, the first three took exile in Australia, having exhausted the prospects of a reform Communism or Marx Renaissance in Hungary. Heller’s work on radical needs, and Markus’ on the idea of Marxian anthropology certainly both drew inspiration from the early Marx, as well as the Grundrisse (Heller, 1974; Markus, 1978). Both followed enthusiasms for the idea of separating out the paradigm of language from that of production, finally moving on into broader fields of philosophical concern. Vajda did fine work on the critique of fascism, itself a kind of samizdat critique of Communism, and Feher, Heller, and Markus together published a strong critique of Soviet-type societies, Dictatorship over Needs (1982). Having likewise taken a one-way exit visa from Poland, Zygmunt Bauman went into exile in Leeds, scattering his energies and ideas across all kinds of fields and issues to do with socialism and culture, from the Holocaust to the postmodern and then the idea of liquid modernity, where, much as Marcuse saw it, consumption and then the new individualism was taken to be the major pathology of modern times. When looking at the path of Bauman’s oeuvre it may also seem that there are two Baumans, before and after the postmodern, the two mediated by his major work Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman, 1989; Beilharz, 2000a; 2000b). Critical Marxism had other advocates, such as the heroic urban advocate, early surrealist, later Marxist Henri Lefebvre, later still to become the doyen of Marxist geography; or the humanist Raya Dunayevskaya in Detroit; and the younger advocates of Hegelian Marxism settled around the journal Telos. New Left Review in London became the major alternative for the English-speaking left in these times, combining an enthusiasm for continental Marxist philosophy with a residual reliance on the revolutionary grammar of Trotskyism. Perry Anderson’s own extraordinary contribution seemed always to combine orthodoxy of political thinking with an astonishing ambition of scope and clarity of detail. Other Marxist journals, which would become progressively less orthodox or which were post-Marxist, such as Thesis Eleven were yet to emerge.
Structuralist Marxism, and After
In Paris, the figure of Jean-Paul Sartre stood tall as the crossover point between Marxism and existentialism (Poster, 1975). Marxist philosophy, via the Hegelian adventures of Hyppolite and Kojève and the dialectical adventures of Merleau-Ponty, sows the seedbed for a later generation, including Althusser, Foucault, and Derrida, and later Poulantzas, where the analytical interest shifts to class and state. In the context of this chapter, Althusser’s moment was most auspicious, as it signalled a return to the claims to philosophical certainty and scientificity from the previous generation, which humanists including Sartre had struggled against. Althusser sought to reinstate the distinction between the early and the later Marx, between ideology and science, with the premium placed heavily on reading Capital. Here the subject was a sitting duck; humanism was a projection of godly capacities on to mortals whose fate it was rather to reproduce the system. There was more to Althusser, of course, but his enthusiastic reception looks in the rearview mirror like the last sigh of revolutionary defeatism. This diminution of the subject brought out the dissent, by way of argument or by example, of the Marxist historians, from Hobsbawm and Thompson to Bernard Smith in the antipodes. At this point of recent Marxist history there emerged two great warring camps—historians and structuralists. Feminists became active on both sides of this divide, defending the idea of experience in history or developing more sophisticated philosophical or psychoanalytical claims, though Marxist feminism also became known as the unequal marriage.
Structuralist Marxism was a major intellectual force in this period, as structuralism had been throughout the history of twentieth-century critical inquiry (Dosse, 1997). Viewed in retrospect, structuralism was inspired by the interest in in-depth analysis of the phenomenal social world, as in Marx and Freud, but pushed further by the publication of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics in 1914. Here the interest in words shifted to the systems that animated them. The interest in reading the diachronic prevailed over the synchronic; and the logic of this view spread powerfully across the humanities, not least to anthropology and history writing in France and then England. It found an elective affinity with one stream in Anglo sociology, for which structure was always privileged over action. There are many exemplary thinkers here, from Levi-Strauss to the Annales School, but the most eminent and original came to be Michel Foucault. Foucault was a party member early in his career, and certainly on occasion thought like a Marxist, focusing on the critique of power. This was another fascinating tendency of the time, which the frequent earlier identification of Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School opened up. There was a proliferation of critical theories.
The hitherto missing figure here was not that of Marx or Freud, but of Nietzsche. Others, like Edward Said, helped to fuel a postcolonial turn which also returned, in its Indian variant, to the example of Gramsci’s interest in subaltern studies, and took on powerful presence in work like that of Spivak. Literature, and Jameson, now ruled. For in more general terms, Marxism had since its inception always been cosmopolitan, and this meant that in a world of imperialism and colonialism Marxism was always ubiquitous, even if its universal mask sometimes disguised its European origins. Thus Marxism was to make a powerful intervention in the work of Fanon, the latter’s reliance on the insights of psychoanalysis echoing out through African thinking like that of Achille Mbembe, and in brilliant Indian scholarship such as that of Ashis Nandy. It was also a presence in the spirit of Brazilian street Marxist, Paolo Freire. Buenos Aires, that other great home of psychoanalysis, delivered the work of Ernesto Laclau, itself to combine with that of Chantal Mouffe to make one of the strongest contributions to post-Marxism (Laclau and Mouffe, 1980; Susen, 2016). Alongside these trends there are enduring examples of the perennials, from Walter Benjamin to Raymond Williams and Catherine and Stuart Hall. The proliferation and continuity of the influence of Marxism itself is an astonishing demonstration of cultural diffusion and traffic.
So where is the academic action now? Marxism has become, for better and worse, a way of thinking that, in the West from the 1960s onwards, has mainly lived in and around the universities. Three figures predominate today. Badiou is a scholar of Marxian reach, stretching from mathematics to ontology, set theory, event and subject. Žiźek, the Slovenian contrarian, is a creature of his times, televisual, a celebrity philosopher and clown, combining Hitchcock, Lacan, Marx, and Hegel in a manner that sometimes resembles free association. Jameson, the literary critic, in some senses the most like Marx here, continues and extends the interest in postmodern culture and political economy, totality, and utopia. And next? As critical spaces in the universities shrink, future Marxist intellectuals may well be working more peripherally, through other genres and media forms from sci-fi to the Internet.
Conclusions
By the 1990s, the postmodern was all the rage, and post-Marxism was often in its slipstream (Beilharz, 1994). Post-Marxism involved a doubling; the pluralization of the patterns of radical thinking was further urged on by a distinct political process, which involved the dissolution of the Soviet world itself. Finally the dead hand of Stalinism was released; or was it? Perhaps less for the denizens of the old Soviet Union than for the intellectuals of the West. The spectres of Stalinism persist in the old Soviet Empire. Marxism had always been plural, before the conformist demand for compliance and service of the Party came to rule via the Russian Revolution and its anti-politics. The collapse of the Soviet Union indicated the final collapse of the Soviet hold on the left’s imagination. Except that the association of socialism and Stalinism was by now so widespread, that the presence of the libertarian alternative was the stuff of the Wunderkammer. Stalin won the argument by virtue of his will to power; Castoriadis was to become a new source for a rising generation of socialists and radicals for whom the core value was autonomy, a fine value but not necessarily one with the critical power of earlier claims to socialism and freedom.
Part of the tag team responsible for moving the terms of reference on from modern to postmodern was Castoriadis’ erstwhile collaborator, Lyotard. After the Fall of the Wall, the new buzzword was less the postmodern than globalization. And just as the postmodern was both enthusiasm for and critique of the new present, so did globalization-talk bifurcate into critique of global inequality and its alternate, sometimes called glossy globalization. New movements like Occupy came into play. Older established autonomist Italian Marxists like Antonio Negri gained new audiences for claims about the immanent revolution of the anti-capitalist multitudes. Established philosophers such as Derrida called for the remembering of Karl Marx and Chris Hani, and the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in sociology always had its Marxist element. The renewed inequality of global capital called out the revival, or transformation of Marx’s Capital into Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty, 2013). Other stalwarts like David Harvey, Terry Eagleton, John Pilger, Tariq Ali, and Naomi Klein kept banging the Marxist drum. It was as though the Manchester experienced so apocalyptically by Engels in 1844 was back with a vengeance; maybe it had never really gone away, just been globally relocated and made more or less invisible to tourist eyes. By these criteria, Marxism in the twenty-first century still had its critical, diagnostic work cut out.
Viewed in retrospect, the story of the Marxist legacy involves promise followed by tragedy. The idea of bifurcation or splitting is one way to characterize its history, or at least the history of some of its more interesting thinkers. The lazy view of this is to see it as some kind of process of growing up, or as a hardening of the arteries. Plainly there is some pattern of a loss of hope and a later realization of the power of domination in these cases of bifurcation or shifting, from Marx to Habermas and beyond. The more suggestive approach is likely to inquire into what the change of circumstances across time and place brought about in the diagnostic repertoire of its best thinkers. The longer trend, from Marx to the present, indicates the submergence of the libertarian movement by the will to power of Stalinism. The detail of the stories hinted at here suggests rather a process of diffusion, as the actors in distinct paths of cultural traffic select and appropriate insights and categories which seem to become useful when at hand. Marx’s work, itself the product of a fusion of existing insights, claims, and categories, in this way returns to the culture which first created it. All this time on, we may after all be none the wiser. Or else, it may be the case that more of us are wiser, but none of us are able to be as clear as our predecessors were about claiming to read the way forward. Marx’s original sensibility, that knowledge had some clear relation to action, these days seems more opaque. Overwhelmed by scale and complexity, by the tedium and weight of everyday life, the challenge of understanding and even changing our world remains before us.