Karl Marx may not be universally
accepted as the greatest political philosopher who ever lived, but he is
unquestionably the most consequential. Therefore, there is an abundance of Karl
Marx entries in different sections of this book. There is obviously a series of
such entries in the present Magnificent
Shadows section, and unsurprisingly, most of them have been posted by now. I
am therefore pointing the reader’s attention to such entries as A Mighty Prophet. (posted on ;June 8th,
2012); Marxian Prophesies Analyzed (June 7th, 2012); Trotskyism
And Marxism (February 8th, 2012); Marxism Today (February 9th, 2012). It makes no sense to
overwhelm this entry by citing some two dozen more entries directly related to
Karl Marx in such sections of this book as A
Contradiction In Terms (Economics); Tikkun
Olam (Judaica); God By Postulate (Philosophy); and others. I suggest that
the interested reader may run the key word Marx
through my blog, or else look through the titles of my entries from 2009 through
2014, but perhaps this suggestion is largely trivial. There is no problem
finding Marxian entries in my well-organized book, but unfortunately, I have
been posting my blog entries out of order, and it will take some doing picking
and choosing which is which in the current order of blog postings. The best way
to read my blog would still be going through it up or down the chronological
chain. But in the final analysis it is up to the reader how he or she wishes to
proceed. Enough said about it, though!
In addition to this, there is a related,
but still unposted entry Neo-Marxian Idealism Of Herbert Marcuse in the Collective
section. It is important to understand why the present entry is part
of the Marxian series in the Shadows while Bernstein has a
separate entry in the Significant Others. The key reason for the inclusion
of this entry here is that it relates to Marxism more than to its individual
promoters. It is here that Lukács’s definition of Orthodox Marxism is
given which identifies the Marxist method as being above the Marxist
dogma, and this generalization makes this clearly a Marxian entry,
and not otherwise.
***
A strange fate befell Marx and
Marxism. While he himself was organically mellowing toward what would become
Bernsteinianism (this would’ve made him feel at home with modern European
social-democracy), the Marxist mantle was picked up by Europe’s extremist
revolutionary radicals, or shamelessly appropriated by Lenin, with whom Marx
would never have felt at home. Today as we are talking of the Marxian Revisionism
of the Epigones, such as Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), György
Lukács (1885-1971), and Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937),--- their
pointed criticism of capitalism makes them legitimate followers of Karl Marx,
but their description as revisionists is less explicable, as it would be much
more proper for someone like Lenin, and hardly descriptive of our esteemed trio
in the actual situation where “pure Marxism” is virtually indefinable,
while no ‘legal’ heir of Karl Marx has been produced and anointed, thus all his
“followers” can be rightfully called revisionists of sorts, making the
term itself irrelevant and trivial.
We have already discussed Marcuse
in the entry mentioned above. Herbert Marcuse believed that Western society was
unfree and repressive, that its technology bought the complacency of the masses
with material goods, and kept them intellectually and spiritually captive. He
was not too kind to the Soviet Union either, as he was an enemy of any kind of
frozen establishment. In a sense, he can be put alongside Adorno, whom we also
had a chance to discuss in some detail.
In so far as György Lukács is
concerned, his most interesting work published back in 1923 was History and
Class Consciousness, where he defines Marxist orthodoxy as the fidelity to the Marxist method, and not
to the dogma.
“Orthodox Marxism does not imply the
uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the
belief in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a sacred book. On the
contrary, ‘orthodoxy’ refers wholly to method. It is a scientific conviction
that dialectical materialism is the road to truth, and that its methods can be
developed, expanded, and deepened only along the lines laid down by its
founders.”
For Lukács, ideology is
really a projection of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie, which
functions to prevent the proletariat from attaining a real consciousness of its
revolutionary position. Ideology determines the “form of objectivity,”
thus the structure of knowledge itself. Real science must attain, according to
him, the concrete totality through which only it is possible to think
the current form of objectivity as a historical period. Thus, the so-called
eternal laws of economics are dismissed as the ideological illusion projected
by the current form of objectivity. He also writes: “It is only when the core of being has showed
itself as social becoming, that the being can appear as a product, so far
unconscious, of human activity and this activity, in turn, as the decisive
element of the transformation of being.”
He presents the category of reification,
whereby, due to the commodity nature of capitalist society, social
relations become objectified, precluding the ability for a spontaneous
emergence of class consciousness. It is in this context that the need for a
party in the Leninist sense emerges.
In his later career, Lukács
repudiated the ideas of History and Class Consciousness, in particular,
the belief in the proletariat as a subject-object of history, but he wrote a
defense of them as late as 1925 or 1926. This unfinished manuscript, which he
called Tailism and the Dialectic, was only published in Hungarian in
1996 and in English in 2000 under the title A Defense of History and Class
Consciousness. It is perhaps the most important “unknown” Marxist text of
the twentieth century.
The Italian Communist leader Antonio
Gramsci was a highly original Marxist who, working from Leninist
principles, developed a new and controversial conception of hegemony in Marxist
theory. Ironically, his intellectual work written in prison did not see the
light of day until several years after World War II, when scattered sections of
his Prison Notebooks and some of the approximately 500 letters he wrote
from prison were first published. In the 1950’s his writings attracted interest
and critical commentary in many countries, not only in the West, but in the
so-called third world as well. Some of his terminology became household words
on the left, the most important of which, and the most complex, is the term “hegemony”
as he used it in his writings and applied to the twin task of understanding the
reasons underlying both the successes and the failures of socialism on a global
scale, and elaborating a program for the realization of a socialist vision
within the really existing conditions that prevailed in the world. Among these
conditions were the rise and triumph of fascism and the disarray on the left,
which had ensued as a result of that triumph. Also extremely pertinent, both
theoretically and practically, were such terms and phrases as “organic
intellectual,” “national popular,” and “historical bloc,”
which, even if not originally coined by Gramsci, acquired such radically new
and original implications in his writing as to constitute effectively new
formulations in the realm of political philosophy.
So far, this is going to be the
extent of this admittedly undeveloped entry, which is placed here in its
current form not for the reader’s edification, but as a prompt for myself,
compelling me to develop it in the future. As in many similar instances, this
substantial work will be done in the next phase of this project, when all loose
ends and unfinished businesses will be hopefully set on the right track and
radically revised, some expanded and some made shorter and sharper, and
eventually all finished to my satisfaction.
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