Talk:Western Marxism
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[edit] comment
Western Marxism, a term defined in contrast to the official Eastern, or Soviet variety, and sometimes also referred to as Hegelian Marxism, represents the break from orthodoxy. It also, and this confuses the picture to some extent, represents the separation between theory and practice that Marxism has still to overcome. None of the thinkers usually classified as part of the Western Marxist tradition, including Gramsci even though he was General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, certainly not Lukacs, Korsch, Bloch, Adorno or the other members of the Frankfurt School, were ever in a position to integrate their theoretical insights into the practice of the workers movement to any significant degree. This practice on the other hand, in particular that of the Communist Parties, divorced as it was from the intellectual efforts of the best Marxist minds the century has produced, soon degenerated into an extension of the Foreign Ministry of the USSR, dressing up the zigzags of Soviet diplomacy in sterile formulas drawn from the language of Marxist terminology.
[edit] Sort of agree with comment above
Perry Anderson in Considerations on Western Marxism characterises it as basically the academic marxism that grew up between the wars at some distance from classical, orthodox Marxism - obsessed by philosophy, particularly epistemology, and language - ie topics somewhat remote from politics, economics and the class struggle. Anderson specifically names Deutscher, Roman Rosdolsky and Mandel as the foremost contemporary (in 1975) practitioners of the classical school inspired by Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg. Ironically of course this Wikipedia entry puts Anderson himself in the 'western marxism' category. Why not a 'the information on this page is contested' flag? --Duncan 15:43, 21 September 2006 (UTC)--[
[edit] Quietism
The political "quietism" of the frankfurt school needs to further defined.
[edit] Sidney Hook?
The case can be made that the American philosopher, Sidney Hook, in his earlier work, was a kind of Western Marxist. His 1933 book, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx was heavily influenced by and built upon the work of both Lukacs and Korsch. And the book he wrote after that, From Hegel to Marx, explored the Hegelian roots of Marxism. That's sort of ironic considering that later on, Hook was the scourge not only of Communists but also of the New Left including its intellectual heroes like Herbert Marcuse, who was a noted Western Marxist of the Frankfurt School.
--JimFarm 21:45, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
