Western Marxism is a term used to describe a wide variety of Marxist theoreticians based in Western and Central Europe (and more recently North America), in contrast with philosophy in the Soviet Union. While Georg Lukács's History and Class Consciousness [1] and Karl Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy [2], first published in 1923, are often seen as the works which inaugurated this current, the phrase itself was coined much later by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Its proponents have mostly (but not exclusively) been professional academics. The term is usually applied to thinkers, such as the Marxist humanists, who view Marx as primarily a philosopher and who stress the Hegelian and humanist elements of his thought, but sometimes to "anti-humanist" movements such as Structural Marxism as well. Certain strains of Western Marxism have tended to neglect economic analysis, emphasising instead the importance of the study of culture for an adequate Marxist understanding of society. Western Marxists have thus elaborated often-complex variations on the theories of ideology and superstructure, which are only thinly sketched in the writings of Marx and Engels themselves. On the other hand some schools of thought, such as the capital-logical school of Germany and Scandinavia, ended up in Hegel-influenced Economics through their engagement with Marx's Grundrisse and the Theorien manuscript.
Western Marxists have varied in terms of political commitment: Lukács, Gramsci and Althusser (famous for his supposed "anti-humanism") were all members of Soviet-aligned parties; Karl Korsch was heavily critical of Soviet Marxism, advocating council communism and later becoming increasingly interested in anarchism; the theorists of The Frankfurt School tended towards political quietism, although Herbert Marcuse became known as the 'father of the New Left'; Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Lefebvre were, at different periods, supporters of the Communist Party of France, but all would later become disillusioned with it; Ernst Bloch lived in and supported the Soviet Union, but lost faith in it towards the end of his life. Maoism and Trotskyism also influenced Western Marxism.
Western Marxists
Ordered chronologically, based on the period during which each thinker did his main writing.
Georg Lukács
Karl Korsch
Antonio Gramsci
Ernst Bloch
Franz Jakubowski
Bertolt Brecht
The Frankfurt School
oTheodor Adorno
oMax Horkheimer
oHerbert Marcuse
oWalter Benjamin
oErich Fromm
Galvano Della Volpe
Lucio Colletti
Henri Lefebvre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Lucien Goldmann
Louis Althusser
Nicos Poulantzas
Jürgen Habermas
Raymond Williams
Marshall Berman
Fredric Jameson
Viktor Chaim Blerot
 61.87.208.64 2 Western Marxism 1
20071020105834 2007-10-20.11:08:16 何云峰 
Structural Marxism was an approach to Marxist philosophy based on structuralism, primarily associated with the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser and his students. It was influential in France during the late 1960s and 1970s, and also came to influence philosophers, political theorists and sociologists outside of France during the 1970s. Another proponent of structural Marxism was the sociologist Nicos Poulantzas.
 61.87.208.64 2 Structural Marxism 1
20071020105834 2007-10-20.11:11:28 何云峰 Neo-Marxism is a loose term for various twentieth-century approaches in Marxism and Marxist theory. As with many uses of the prefix neo-, many theorists and groups designated "neo-Marxist" attempted to supplement the perceived deficiencies of orthodox Marxism or dialectical materialism.

One such approach might be a 20th century school that harkened back to the early writings of Marx before the influence of Engels which focused on dialectical idealism rather than dialectical materialism, and thus rejected the perceived economic determinism of the late Marx, focusing instead on a non-physical, psychological revolution. It was thus far more libertarian and related to strains of anarchism. It also put more of an emphasis on the evils of global capitalism. Many prominent Neo-Marxists such as Marcuse were sociologists and psychologists. It was bound up with the student movements of the 1960s. Neo-Marxism comes under the broader heading of New Left thinking. Neo-Marxism is also used frequently to describe the opposition to inequalities experienced by Lesser Developed Countries in a globalized world. In a sociological sense, neo-Marxism adds Max Weber's broader understanding of social inequality, such as status and power, to Marxist philosophy.

Strains of neo-Marxism include: Hegelian-Marxism, Critical Theory, Analytical Marxism, and French Structural Marxism (closely related to structuralism).

A closely related term is Western Marxism.

The Neo-Marxian Schools
("Radical Political Economy")
 
During the inter-war period, not much work on Marxian economics was done.  The practical political and economic problems of the inter-war period, the rise of Fascism, the "Red Scare" in America (and elsewhere), the widening of Marxian theory to sociology and philosophy, the Soviet-directed redefinition of what Marxism was, ensured that not too much theoretical work.   In fact, by the 1940s, most people (particularly in the United States and Great Britain) had already forgotten that Marx himself had been an economist at all!   

In the 1940s, several English-language works by prominent economists began to emerge which took Karl Marx seriously as an economist -- notably, by Maurice H. Dobb (1937, 1946), Joan Robinson (1942) and Paul Sweezy (1942).  This was followed up by two other influential works by Paul Baran (1957) and Ernst Mandel (1962), that finally began putting Marxian economics on the economics map. 

The works of Sweezy and Robinson are particularly notable for having resurrected Marx's theory of value -- thus leading to the re-emergence of the old "transformation problem" that had bedeviled the old Marxians. Joan Robinson (1942) was unimpressed and argued that that Marxian economics should do without the labour theory of value -- a proposition that Oskar Lange (1935) had earlier recommended.

Sweezy disagreed -- and several prominent economists, such as Ronald Meek (1956), Francis Seton (1957),  Nubuo Okishio (1963), Andras Br骴y (1970), Paul A.  Samuelson (1971), Michio Morishima (1973), William J. Baumol (1974), Domenico Nuti (1977) Anwar Shaikh, Gerard Dumenil (1980), Duncan Foley (1986) and many others have attempted to grapple with the formal and logical foundations of Marx's theory of value.  However, the appearance of Piero  Sraffa's (1960) work on the Classical Ricardian System has led some (e.g. Ian Steedman, 1977) to suggest that the Marxian labor theory of value can be subsumed in the more general "Neo-Ricardian" theory. 

Sweezy's 1942 book also set out the Bauer model of the breakdown of capitalism, which was subsequently corrected in the formal treatments of Evsey Domar (1948), Josef Steindl (1952) and  Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1960).  Fel'dman's work on two-sector growth models was resurrected by Alexander Erlich (1953) and Evsey Domar (1957) and were later taken up with gusto everywhere.

The work of the Americans Paul Baran (1957) and, later, Baran and Sweezy (1966) was particularly tailored to the post-war boom in the Western captalist economies, which seemed to invalidate the "chronic depression" which the older Marxists had anticipated.  Marx's law of diminishing rate of profit did not seem to be working.  What Baran and Sweezy proposed was that in situations of monopoly capitalism there is no such tendency as prices are based on "mark-up".  Consequently, the source of crises is in the tendency for a rise in surplus.  Under monopoly capitalism, there is a need for an external source of demand and profitable outlets for investment.  This makes monopoly capitalism more aggressively outwardly looking than competitive capitalism.  It is on this basis that Baran and Sweezy develop their distinct theory of imperialism and center-periphery dependency which accounts for the state of economic underdevelopment in the world today. 

In France, Ernest Mandel (1962) sought to embed to source of crises not in the rise of surplus but in the law of diminishing profit rate over Kondratiev long waves.  Profit rates, he claims, determine the rate of accumulation, and the rate of accumulation generates the waves. 

The line which Baran, Sweezy and Mandel initiated  is sometimes called "Neo-Marxist" school or simply "Radical Political Economy", which broke open a tidal wave of work in the 1960s and 1970s.  The main channels was the New Left Review, the Monthly Review Press, and later on, the Review of Radical Political Economy. 

There have been numerous "offshoot" Neo-Marxist schools which have taken on many of the themes and conclusions of the Marxian school, although they should not be considered rigorous applications of classical Marxian theory.  We note only the related "Dependency School" of development associated with Raul Pr閎isch and Andre Gunder Frank, the "World Systems" school associated with Immanuel Wallerstein and the work on radical political economy of David M. Gordon, Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis and others.  A separate (and unrelated) school is the "Analytical Marxian" school, normally associated with the work of John E. Roemer and John Elster, which attempts to reduce some of the Marxian propositions to conventional, methodological individualism (i.e. with utility-maximizing rational agents, etc.).

There have also been post-war developments in Marxian economics in other countries which, although highly influential, have not yet broached the English-languange market.  Japanese Marxism, for instance, has long been a source for traditional work -- indeed, the Marxian school was almost the "orthodoxy" in Japanese academia for a while.  Besides Michio Morishima and Shigeto Tsuru, the work of Kozo Uno, Nubuo Okishio and Makoto Itoh are particularly notable.  The work of the French Regulation School (Robert Boyer, Michel Aglietta, Alain Lipietz, etc.)  is a bit more ecletic in its foundation, closer to the Post Keynesians  in its approach.

Immediate Predecessors

Adolph Lowe and the Kiel School
Oskar Lange, 1904-1965.
Viktor Novozhilov, Leonid Kantorovich and the Soviet Planning Economists
Karl Polanyi, 1886-1964.
Joan Robinson, 1903-1983.
Michal Kalecki, 1899-1970.
Henry Douglas Dickinson, 1899-1968.
Modern Marxian Economics

Maurice H. Dobb, 1900-1976.  
Paul M. Sweezy, 1910-
Ronald L. Meek, 1917-1978.
Francis Seton, 1920-
Piero Sraffa and the Neo-Ricardian School.
Andras Br骴y, 1924-
"A Simplified Growth Model", 1966, QJE
Proportions, Prices and Planning: A mathematical restatement of labor theory of value, 1970.
Applications of Input-Output Analysis, with A.P. Carter, 1970
Contributions to Input-Output Analysis, with A.P. Carter, 1970
Input-Output Techniques, with A.P. Carter, 1972
Slowdown: Global economic maladies, 1985
"Observations Concerning the Growth Cycle", in Vellupilai, editor, Nonlinaer and Multisector Macrodynamics
"On Measuring Growth", 1992, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics
"Money-Flow Computations", with W. Leontief, 1993, Econ Systems Research
Charles Bettelheim, 1913-
Donald J. Harris
Anwar Shaikh, 1945-
Duncan K. Foley, 1942-
Domenico M. Nuti, 1937-
Suzanne de Brunhoff, 1929-
Henri Denis
G閞ard Dumenil
G. Dostaler
Thomas Bottomore
Alfredo Medio
Neo-Marxism/Radical Political Economy

Paul A. Baran, 1910-1964.
Paul M. Sweezy, 1910-
Ernest Mandel, 1923-1995
Josef Steindl, 1912-1993.
Harry Magdoff
Samir Amin, 1931-
Andre Gunder Frank, 1929-
Immanuel Wallerstein
Arghiri Emmanuel
Giovanni Arrighi
Henry Braverman
Samuel Bowles, 1939-
Herbert Gintis,
David M. Gordon, 1944-1996.
Martin Bronfenbrenner, 1914-
Thomas Weisskopf
David Levine
Michael Piore
David Laibman
Ra鷏 Prebisch, 1901-1985.
Celso Furtado, 1920-
Analytical Marxism

Leif Johansen, 1930-
John Roemer
John Elster
Steven Marglin
Japanese Marxism

Shigeto Tsuru, 1912- (1)
"Economi Fluctuations in Japane, 1868-1893", 1941, REStat
"On Reproduction Schemes", 1942, in Sweezy, Theory of Capitalist Development
"Keynes versus Marx: the methodology of aggregates", 1954, in Kurihara, Post-Keynesian Economics
Essays on Japanese Economy, 1958
Has Capitalism Changed?, 1959.
"The Effects of Technology on Productivity", 1965, in Robinson, editor, Problem in Economic Development
Essays on Economic Development, 1968.
Towards a New Political Economy, 1976.
Institutional Economics Revisited, 1993
Japan's Capitalism: Creative defeat and beyond, 1993
Kozo Uno
Principles of Political Economy: theory of a purely capitalist society, 1964
Nubuo Okishio
"Conditions for Convergence and the Problem of Working", 1950, Kindai Keizai Riron Kenkyu (in Japanese)
"The Instability of Steady Advance", 1954, Econ Studies Quarterly (in Japanese)
"Technical Change and the Rate of Profit", 1961, Kobe Univ Econ Review
"A Mathematical Note on Marxian Theory", 1963, WWA
"Notes on Technical Progress and Capitalist Society", 1977, Cambridge JE
Shinzaburo Koshimura
Theory of Capital Reproduction and Accumulation, 1975
Makoto Itoh
Value and Crisis, 1980
The Basic Theory of Capitalism, 1988
The French Regulation School

Michel Aglietta
A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: the US Experience, 1976
La violence et la monnaie, with A. Orlean, 1982.
Robert Boyer
Accumulation, Inflation Crises, with J. Misral, 1978
La th閛rie de r間ulation: une analyse critique, 1986
"Les theories de regulation: Paris, Barcelone, New-York", 1989, Revue de Synthese
"Le transformation de conventions salariales entre theorie et histoire", with A. Orlean, 1991, Revue economique
Alain Lipietz
"The So-Called Transformation Problem Revisited", 1982, JET
Le monde enchant?/em>, 1983
Mirages et miracles, 1985.  61.87.208.64 2 Neo-Marxism 1
20071020105834 2007-10-20.11:19:11 何云峰 
Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at HeidelbergThe Frankfurt School is a school of neo-Marxist social theory, social research, and philosophy. The grouping emerged at the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) of the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany when Max Horkheimer became the Institute's director in 1930. The term "Frankfurt School" is an informal term used to designate the thinkers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research or influenced by them. It is not the title of any institution, and the main thinkers of the Frankfurt School did not use the term to describe themselves.

The Frankfurt School gathered together dissident Marxists, severe critics of capitalism who believed that some of Marx's followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx's ideas, usually in defense of orthodox Communist or Social-Democratic parties. Influenced especially by the failure of working-class revolutions in Western Europe after World War I and by the rise of Nazism in an economically, technologically, and culturally advanced nation (Germany), they took up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's thought might serve to clarify social conditions which Marx himself had never seen. They drew on other schools of thought to fill in Marx's perceived omissions. Max Weber exerted a major influence, as did Sigmund Freud (as in Herbert Marcuse's Freudo-Marxist synthesis in the 1954 work Eros and Civilization). Their emphasis on the "critical" component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, crude materialism, and phenomenology by returning to Kant's critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel's philosophy, with its emphasis on negation and contradiction as inherent properties of reality. A key influence also came from the publication in the 1930s of Marx's Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology, which showed the continuity with Hegelianism that underlay Marx's thought. Marcuse was one of the first to articulate the theoretical significance of these texts. Erich Fromm, a widely under-represented member of the school, is accredited with bringing the psychoanalytic focus to the school. However, members Adorno and Horkheimer attempted to belittle Fromm's contributions, even though a central theme, "The Authoritarian Character," developed directly from Fromm's research on the subject.[1]

The First Phase
The intellectual influences on and theoretical focus of the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists appear in the following diagram:

<A HREF=http://www.studyplace.net/myfiles/greatman/marxism/Crittheory1.jpg TARGET=_blank><IMG border=0 title=开新窗口浏览 SRC=http://www.studyplace.net/myfiles/greatman/marxism/Crittheory1.jpg onload="javascript:if(this.width>screen.width-366)this.width=screen.width-366"></A>

The Institute made major contributions in two areas relating to the possibility of rational human subjects, i.e. individuals who could act rationally to take charge of their own society and their own history. The first consisted of social phenomena previously considered in Marxism as part of the "superstructure" or as ideology: personality, family and authority structures (its first book publication bore the title Studies of Authority and the Family), and the realm of aesthetics and mass culture. Studies saw a common concern here in the ability of capitalism to destroy the preconditions of critical, revolutionary consciousness. This meant arriving at a sophisticated awareness of the depth dimension in which social oppression sustains itself. It also meant the beginning of critical theory's recognition of ideology as part of the foundations of social structure. The Institute and various collaborators had a gigantic effect on (especially American) social science through their work The Authoritarian Personality, which conducted extensive empirical research, using sociological and psychoanalytic categories, in order to characterize the forces that led individuals to affiliate with or support fascist movements or parties. The study found the assertion of universals, or even truth, to be a hallmark of fascism. By calling into question any notion of a higher ideal, or a shared mission for humanity critical theory undermined its own ultimate justification, and failed to provide an objective basis by which to denounce fascism. The Authoritarian Personality hypothesis which proceded from this contributed greatly to the emergence of the counterculture.

The nature of Marxism itself formed the second focus of the Institute, and in this context the concept of critical theory originated. The term served several purposes - first, it contrasted from traditional notions of theory, which were largely either positivist or scientific. Second, the term allowed them to escape the politically charged label of "Marxism." Third, it explicitly linked them with the "critical philosophy" of Immanuel Kant, where the term "critique" meant philosophical reflection on the limits of claims made for certain kinds of knowledge and a direct connection between such critique and the emphasis on moral autonomy. In an intellectual context defined by dogmatic positivism and scientism on the one hand and dogmatic "scientific socialism" on the other, critical theory meant to rehabilitate through such a philosophically critical approach an orientation toward revolutionary agency, or at least its possibility, at a time when it seemed in decline.

Finally, in the context of both Marxist-Leninist and Social-Democratic orthodoxy, which emphasized Marxism as a new kind of positive science, they were linking up with the implicit epistemology of Karl Marx's work, which presented itself as critique, as in Marx's "Capital: a critique of political economy", wanting to emphasize that Marx was attempting to create a new kind of critical analysis oriented toward the unity of theory and revolutionary practice rather than a new kind of positive science. In the 1960s, Jürgen Habermas raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his "Knowledge and Human Interests" (1968), by identifying critical knowledge as based on principles that differentiated it either from the natural sciences or the humanities, through its orientation to self-reflection and emancipation.

Although Horkheimer's distinction between traditional and critical theory in one sense merely repeated Marx's dictum that philosophers have always interpreted the world and the point is to change it, the Institute, in its critique of ideology, took on such philosophical currents as positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, and pragmatism, with an implied critique of contemporary Marxism, which had turned dialectics into an alternate science or metaphysics. The Institute attempted to reformulate dialectics as a concrete method, continually aware of the specific social roots of thought and of the specific constellation of forces that affected the possibility of liberation. Accordingly, critical theory rejected the materialist metaphysics of orthodox Marxism. For Horkheimer and his associates, materialism meant the orientation of theory towards practice and towards the fulfillment of human needs, not a metaphysical statement about the nature of reality.

The Second Phase
The second phase of Frankfurt School critical theory centres principally on two works that rank as classics of twentieth-century thought: Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) and Adorno's Minima Moralia (1951). The authors wrote both works during the Institute's American exile in the Nazi period. While retaining much of the Marxian analysis, in these works critical theory has shifted its emphasis. The critique of capitalism has turned into a critique of Western civilization as a whole. Indeed, the Dialectic of Enlightenment uses the Odyssey as a paradigm for the analysis of bourgeois consciousness. Horkheimer and Adorno already present in these works many themes that have come to dominate the social thought of recent years: the domination of nature appears as central to Western civilization long before ecology had become a catchphrase of the day.

The analysis of reason now goes one stage further. The rationality of Western civilization appears as a fusion of domination and of technological rationality, bringing all of external and internal nature under the power of the human subject. In the process, however, the subject itself gets swallowed up, and no social force analogous to the proletariat can be identified that will enable the subject to emancipate itself. Hence the subtitle of Minima Moralia: "Reflections from Damaged Life". In Adorno's words,

"For since the overwhelming objectivity of historical movement in its present phase consists so far only in the dissolution of the subject, without yet giving rise to a new one, individual experience necessarily bases itself on the old subject, now historically condemned, which is still for-itself, but no longer in-itself. The subject still feels sure of its autonomy, but the nullity demonstrated to subjects by the concentration camp is already overtaking the form of subjectivity itself."
Consequently, at a time when it appears that reality itself has become ideology, the greatest contribution that critical theory can make is to explore the dialectical contradictions of individual subjective experience on the one hand, and to preserve the truth of theory on the other. Even the dialectic can become a means to domination: "Its truth or untruth, therefore, is not inherent in the method itself, but in its intention in the historical process." And this intention must be toward integral freedom and happiness: "the only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption". How far from orthodox Marxism is Adorno's conclusion: "But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters."

Adorno, a trained musician, wrote The Philosophy of Modern Music, in which he, in essence, polemicizes against beauty itself -- because it has become part of the ideology of advanced capitalist society and the false consciousness that contributes to domination by prettifying it. Avant-garde art and music preserve the truth by capturing the reality of human suffering. Hence:

"What radical music perceives is the untransfigured suffering of man... The seismographic registration of traumatic shock becomes, at the same time, the technical structural law of music. It forbids continuity and development. Musical language is polarized according to its extreme; towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks... Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked."
This view of modern art as producing truth only through the negation of traditional aesthetic form and traditional norms of beauty because they have become ideological is characteristic of Adorno and of the Frankfurt School generally. It has been criticized by those who do not share its conception of modern society as a false totality that renders obsolete traditional conceptions and images of beauty and harmony.

The Third Phase
From these thoughts only a short step remained to the third phase of the Frankfurt School, which coincided with the postwar period, particularly from the early 1950s to the middle 1960s. With the growth of advanced industrial society under Cold War conditions, the critical theorists recognized that the structure of capitalism and history had changed decisively, that the modes of oppression operated differently, and that the industrial working class no longer remained the determinate negation of capitalism. This led to the attempt to root the dialectic in an absolute method of negativity, as in Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man and Adorno's Negative Dialectics. During this period the Institute of Social Research re-settled in Frankfurt (although many of its associates remained in the United States), with the task not merely of continuing its research but of becoming a leading force in the sociological education and democratization of West Germany. This led to a certain systematization of the Institute's entire accumulation of empirical research and theoretical analysis.

More importantly, however, the Frankfurt School attempted to define the fate of reason in the new historical period. While Marcuse did so through analysis of structural changes in the labor process under capitalism and inherent features of the methodology of science, Horkheimer and Adorno concentrated on a re-examination of the foundation of critical theory. This effort appears in systematized form in Adorno's Negative Dialectics, which tries to redefine dialectics for an era in which "philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed". Negative dialectics expresses the idea of critical thought so conceived that the apparatus of domination cannot co-opt it. Its central notion, long a focal one for Horkheimer and Adorno, suggests that the original sin of thought lies in its attempt to eliminate all that is other than thought, the attempt by the subject to devour the object, the striving for identity. This reduction makes thought the accomplice of domination. Negative Dialectics rescues the "preponderance of the object", not through a naive epistemological or metaphysical realism but through a thought based on differentiation, paradox, and ruse: a "logic of disintegration". Adorno thoroughly criticizes Heidegger's fundamental ontology, which reintroduces idealistic and identity-based concepts under the guise of having overcome the philosophical tradition.

Negative Dialectics comprises a monument to the end of the tradition of the individual subject as the locus of criticism. Without a revolutionary working class, the Frankfurt School had no one to rely on but the individual subject. But, as the liberal capitalist social basis of the autonomous individual receded into the past, the dialectic based on it became more and more abstract. This stance helped prepare the way for the fourth, current phase of the Frankfurt School, shaped by the communication theory of Habermas.

Habermas's work takes the Frankfurt School's abiding interests in rationality, the human subject, democratic socialism, and the dialectical method and overcomes a set of contradictions that always weakened critical theory: the contradictions between the materialist and transcendental methods, between Marxian social theory and the individualist assumptions of critical rationalism between technical and social rationalization, and between cultural and psychological phenomena on the one hand and the economic structure of society on the other. The Frankfurt School avoided taking a stand on the precise relationship between the materialist and transcendental methods, which led to ambiguity in their writings and confusion among their readers. Habermas' epistemology synthesizes these two traditions by showing that phenomenological and transcendental analysis can be subsumed under a materialist theory of social evolution, while the materialist theory makes sense only as part of a quasi-transcendental theory of emancipatory knowledge that is the self-reflection of cultural evolution. The simultaneously empirical and transcendental nature of emancipatory knowledge becomes the foundation stone of critical theory.

By locating the conditions of rationality in the social structure of language use, Habermas moves the locus of rationality from the autonomous subject to subjects in interaction. Rationality is a property not of individuals per se, but rather of structures of undistorted communication. In this notion Habermas has overcome the ambiguous plight of the subject in critical theory. If capitalistic technological society weakens the autonomy and rationality of the subject, it is not through the domination of the individual by the apparatus but through technological rationality supplanting a describable rationality of communication. And, in his sketch of communicative ethics as the highest stage in the internal logic of the evolution of ethical systems, Habermas hints at the source of a new political practice that incorporates the imperatives of evolutionary rationality.

Frankfurt School critical theory has influenced some segments of the Left wing and leftist thought (particularly the New Left). Herbert Marcuse has occasionally been described as the theorist or intellectual progenitor of the New Left. Their critique of technology, totality, teleology and (occasionally) civilization is a little-recognized influence on anarcho-primitivism. Their work also heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies.

Major Frankfurt school thinkers and scholars
 the Institut in FrankfurtAlfred Schmidt
Alfred Sohn-Rethel
Axel Honneth
Erich Fromm
Franz Neumann
Franz Oppenheimer
Friedrich Pollock
Herbert Marcuse
Jürgen Habermas
Karl A. Wittfogel
Leo L&ouml;wenthal
Max Horkheimer
Oskar Negt
Siegfried Kracauer
Susan Buck-Morss
Theodor W. Adorno
Walter Benjamin

Critics of the Frankfurt School
Several camps of criticism of the Frankfurt School have emerged.

Some critics accuse that the intellectual perspective of the Frankfurt School is a romantic, elitist critique of mass culture with a contrived neo-Marxist guise.
Another criticism, originating from the Left, is that critical theory is a form of bourgeois idealism that has no inherent relation to political practice and is totally isolated from any ongoing revolutionary movement.
Both of these criticisms were captured in Georg Lukács's phrase "Grand Hotel Abyss" as a syndrome he imputed to the members of the Frankfurt School.

Notable critics of the Frankfurt School
Henryk Grossman
Georg Lukács
Umberto Eco
Mike Godwin

References
George Friedman. The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School, Ithaca & New York, Cornell University Press, 1981 ISBN 0-8014-1279-X.
Martin Jay. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research 1923-1950, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996 ISBN 0-520-20423-9.
Jeremy J. Shapiro. "The Critical Theory of Frankfurt", in: Times Literary Supplement, No. 3, Oct. 4, 1974, 787. (Material from this publication has been used or adapted for the present article with permission).
Rolf Wiggershaus. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1995 ISBN 0-262-73113-4.
Neil McLaughlin - Origin Myths in the Social Sciences: Fromm, the Frankfurt School and the Emergence of Critical Theory [1]
 61.87.208.64 2 Frankfurt School 1
20071020105834 2007-10-20.11:20:05 何云峰 Marxist humanism is a branch of Marxism that primarily focuses on Marx's earlier writings, especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in which Marx exposes his theory of alienation, as opposed to his later works, which are considered to be concerned more with his structural conception of capitalist society. It was opposed by Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser's "antihumanism", who qualified it as a revisionist movement. The Praxis School, which called for radical social change in Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia in the 1960s, was one such Marxist humanist movement.

The underlying theory of "Marxist Humanism"
The term "Marxist humanism" has as its foundation Marx's conception of the "alienation of the labourer" as he advances it in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844—an alienation that is born of a capitalist system in which the worker no longer functions as (what Marx terms) a "Free Productive" being. And although many scholars consider late Marx less of a humanist than the Marx who wrote pre-Das Kapital, as his later works are rather bereft of references to this alienation, others argue that the notion of alienation remains a part of Marx's philosophy.

There is, as is assumed under the very notion of alienation, a human who, when disenfranchised by his own labour, becomes less human—in fact, Marx says he becomes objectified. (this could be disputed: many interpretations of Marx hold that alienation entails objectification, while objectification does not entail alienation. In fact, man, in producing, always objectifies himself.)

According to Marx, man naturally produces for his own benefit—and, furthermore, he freely produces—however, under a capitalist society in which the means of production give rise to "fettering" productive relations—i.e. there is a single capitalist employing an army of workers at wages just sufficient to provide for their mere subsistence—the worker becomes a slave. He is no longer a free productive being, but instead he absolutely must produce to simply meet his most basic needs.

However, there is more to this. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx writes: "A forcing-up of wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that it would only be by force, too, that the higher-wages, being an anomaly, could be maintained) would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not conquer either for the worker or for labour their human status and dignity." It is here that Marx as a humanist is well evinced.

This quote is intended to convey that it is not the 12-hour work-day alone that enslaves man, forcing him to give his entire productive being—his natural skills, or that which constitutes his essence as a man—over to another. Rather, it is the very (philosophic) condition behind the capitalist structure that enslaves man—basically, capitalism is not conducive to democracy on Marx's conception. On his conception, capitalism inherently gives rise to an elite bourgeoisie for whom the rest of society—the proletariat—must work. Insofar as this is the case, the proletarian himself will never be able to dictate the conditions of his work, they will always be determined by the capitalist himself. So even if the capitalist pays the worker higher wages than he himself incurs (from his profits made off the labourer's efforts), he still controls the terms of the worker's production.

Marx held that insofar as man only has his liberty to produce, and produce according to his own conceived ideas (e.g. he designs a very fancy shoe and wants to see this shoe materialize), capitalism, as a system, will be an eternal stymie to man's natural freedom. This is Marx's humanism. Marxist Humanism is the political, or philosophic, association that assumes this as its premise.

Criticism
The most potent criticism of Marxist Humanism has come from within the Marxist movement. Louis Althusser, the French Structuralist Marxist, criticises Marxist Humanists for not recognising the dichotomy between 'Young Marx' and 'Mature Marx'. Of the Humanist reliance's on the 1844 Economic and Philosophic manuscripts Althusser wrote "we do not publish our own drafts, that is, our own mistakes, but we do sometimes publish other people's" (cited in Gregory Elliot’s “introduction: In the Mirror of Machiavelli” an introduction for Althusser’s “Machiavelli and us”, p. xi). The Humanists contend that ‘Marxism’ developed lopsided because Marx’s early works were unknown until after the orthodox ideas were in vogue — the Manuscripts of 1844 were published only in 1932 — and it is necessary to understand Marx’s philosophical foundations to understand his latter works properly. Althusser, however, did not defend orthodox Marxism’s economic reductionism and determinism; instead, he developed his own theories regarding ideological hegemony and conditioning within class societies, through the concept of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) and interpellation which constitutes the subject.

Marxist humanists
Notable thinkers associated with Marxist humanism include:

S.Popov
Georg Lukács
Raya Dunayevskaya
C. L. R. James
Erich Fromm
David McReynolds
Herbert Marcuse
Lucien Goldmann
Jean-Paul Sartre
The Praxis School
John Lewis
E.P. Thompson
Marshall Berman
Frantz Fanon
Paulo Freire
Lewis Gordon  61.87.208.64 2 Marxist humanism 0
20071020105834 2007-10-20.11:21:50 何云峰 
Analytical Marxism refers to a style of thinking about Marxism that was prominent amongst English-speaking philosophers and social scientists during the 1980s. It was mainly associated with the September Group of academics, so called because of their biennial September meetings to discuss common interests. The group also dubbed itself "Non-Bullshit Marxism",[1] and was characterized, in the words of David Miller, by "clear and rigorous thinking about questions that are usually blanketed by ideological fog."[2] The most prominent members of the group were G. A. Cohen, John Roemer, Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski, Erik Olin Wright, Philippe van Parijs, and Robert-Jan van der Veen.

Beginnings
Analytical Marxism is usually understood to have taken off with the publication of G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978). More broadly conceived, it might be seen as having originated in the post-war period in the work of political philosophers such as Karl Popper, H. B. Acton, and John Plamenatz, who employed the techniques of analytical philosophy in order to test the coherence and scientificity of Marxism as a theory of history and society.

Those thinkers were all hostile to Marxism. Cohen's book was, from the outset, intended as a defence of historical materialism. Cohen painstakingly reconstructed historical materialism through a close reading of Marx's texts, with the aim of providing the most logically coherent and parsimonious account. For Cohen, Marx's historical materialism is a technologically deterministic theory, in which the economic relations of production are functionally explained by the material forces of production, and in which the political and legal institutions (the "superstructure") are functionally explained by the relations of production (the "base"). The transition from one mode of production to another is driven by the tendency of the productive forces to develop. Cohen accounts for this tendency by reference to the rational character of the human species: where there is the opportunity to adopt a more productive technology and thus reduce the burden of labour, human beings will tend to take it. Thus, human history can be understood as the gradual development of human productive power.

Exploitation
At the same time as Cohen was working on Karl Marx's Theory of History, American economist John Roemer was employing neoclassical economics in order to try to defend the Marxist concepts of exploitation and class. In his General Theory of Exploitation and Class (1982), Roemer employed rational choice and game theory in order to demonstrate how exploitation and class relations may arise in the development of a market for labour. Roemer would go on to reject the idea that the labour theory of value was necessary for explaining exploitation and class. Value was in principle capable of being explained in terms of any class of commodity inputs, such as oil, wheat, etc., rather than being exclusively explained by embodied labour power. Roemer was led to the conclusion that exploitation and class were thus generated not in the sphere of production but of market exchange. Significantly, as a purely technical category, exploitation did not always imply a moral wrong (see section Justice below).

Rational Choice Marxism
By the mid-1980s, "analytical Marxism" was being recognised as a "paradigm".[3] The September group had been meeting for several years, and a succession of texts by its members were published. Several of these appeared under the imprint of Cambridge University Press's series "Studies in Marxism and Social Theory", including Jon Elster's Making Sense of Marx (1985) and Adam Przeworski's Capitalism and Social Democracy (1986). Elster's account was an exhaustive trawl through Marx's texts in order to ascertain what could be salvaged out of Marxism employing the tools of rational choice theory and methodological individualism (which Elster defended as the only form of explanation appropriate to the social sciences). His conclusion was that – contra Cohen – no general theory of history as the development of the productive forces could be saved. Like Roemer, he also rejected the labour theory of value and, going further, virtually all of Marx's economics. The "dialectical" method is savaged as a form of Hegelian obscurantism. The theory of ideology and revolution continued to be useful to a certain degree, but only once they had been purged of their tendencies to holism and functionalism and established on the basis of an individualist methodology and a causal or intentional explanation.

Przeworski's book uses rational choice and game theory in order to demonstrate that the revolutionary strategies adopted by socialists in the twentieth century were likely to fail, since it was in the rational interests of workers to strive for the reform of capitalism through the achievement of union recognition, improved wages and living conditions, rather than adopting the risky strategy of revolution. Przeworski's book is clearly influenced by economic explanations of political behaviour advanced by thinkers such as Anthony Downs (An Economic Theory of Democracy, 1957) and Mancur Olson (The Logic of Collective Action, 1971).

Justice
The analytical (and rational choice) Marxists held a variety of leftist political sympathies, ranging from communism to reformist social democracy. Through the 1980s, most of them began to recognise that Marxism as a theory capable of explaining revolution in terms of the economic dynamics of capitalism and the class interests of the proletariat had been seriously compromised. They were largely in agreement that the transformation of capitalism was an ethical project. During the 1980s, a debate had developed within Anglophone academic Marxism on whether Marxism could accommodate a theory of justice. This debate was clearly linked to the revival of normative political philosophy after the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971). While analytic moral philosophy holds that one is free in all situations to make a moral judgement that is in the interests of all equally, some commentators remained hostile to the idea of a Marxist theory of justice, arguing that Marx saw "justice" as little more than a bourgeois ideological construct designed to justify exploitation by reference to reciprocity in the wage contract.[4] The analytical Marxists, however, largely rejected this point of view. Led by G. A. Cohen (a moral philosopher by training), they argued that a Marxist theory of justice had to focus on egalitarianism. For Cohen, this meant an engagement with moral and political philosophy in order to demonstrate the injustice of market exchange, and the construction of an appropriate egalitarian metric. This argument is pursued in Cohen's most recent books, Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality (1995) and If You're an Egalitarian How Come You're So Rich? (2000b).

In contrast to traditional Marxism, Cohen rejects the argument that capitalism is unjust because under it workers experience alienation, or a lack of self-fulfilment as workers. For Cohen, this thesis is based on an untenable metaphysical account of human nature and historical development: the claim that all persons have one purpose and aim toward one end, productive labour. Because such a claim cannot be inferred from a priori truths of logic or from experience, it is not justifiable by the restricted means available to analytic philosophy.

Cohen further departs from previous Marxists by arguing that capitalism is a system characterised by unjust exploitation not because the labour of workers is "stolen" by employers, but because it is a system wherein "autonomy" is infringed and which results in a distribution of benefits and burdens that is "unfair". In the traditional account, exploitation and injustice occur because non-workers appropriate the value produced by the labour of workers, something that would be overcome in a socialist society wherein no class would own the means of production and be in a position to appropriate the value produced by labourers. Cohen argues that underpinning this account is the assumption that workers have "rights of self-ownership" over themselves and thus, should "own" what is produced by their labour. Because the worker is paid a wage less than the value he or she creates through work, the capitalist is said to extract a surplus-value from the worker's labour, and thus to steal part of what the worker produces, the time of the worker and the worker's powers.

Cohen argues that the concept of self-ownership is favourable to Rawls's difference principle as it ensures "each person's rights over his being and powers"[5] - i.e. that one is treated as an end always and never as a means - but also highlights that its centrality provides for an area of common ground between the Marxist account of justice and the right-wing libertarianism of Robert Nozick. However, much as Cohen criticises Rawls for treating people's personal powers as just another external resource for which no individual can claim merit, so does he charge Nozick with moving beyond the concept of self-ownership to his own right-wing "thesis" of self-ownership. In Cohen's view, Nozick's mistake is to endow people's claims to legitimately acquire external resources with the same moral quality that belongs to people's ownership of themselves. In other words, libertarianism allows inequalities to arise from differences in talent and differences in external resources, but it does so because it assumes that the world is "up for grabs"[6], i.e. to be appropriated as private property.

Criticisms
Analytical Marxism came under fire from a number of different quarters, both Marxist and non-Marxist.

Method
A number of critics argued that analytical Marxism proceeded from the wrong methodological and epistemological premises. While the analytical Marxists dismissed dialectically oriented Marxism as "bullshit", many Marxists would maintain that the distinctive character of Marxist philosophy is lost if it is understood non-dialectically. The crucial feature of Marxist philosophy is that it is not a reflection in thought of the world, a crude materialism, but rather an intervention in the world concerned with human praxis. According to this view, analytical Marxism wrongly characterises intellectual activity as occurring in isolation from the struggles constitutive of its social and political conjuncture, and at the same time does little to intervene in that conjuncture. For dialectical Marxists, analytical Marxism eviscerated Marxism, turning it from a systematic doctrine of revolutionary transformation into a set of discrete theses that stand or fall on the basis of their logical consistency and empirical validity.

Analytical Marxism's non-Marxist critics also objected to its methodological weaknesses. Against Elster and the rational choice Marxists, it was argued that methodological individualism was not the only form of valid explanation in the social sciences, that functionalism in the absence of micro-foundations could remain a convincing and fruitful mode of inquiry, and that rational choice and game theory were far from being universally accepted as sound or useful ways of modelling social institutions and processes.[7]

History
Cohen's defence of a technological determinist interpretation of historical materialism was, in turn, quite widely criticised, even by analytical Marxists. Together with Andrew Levine, Wright argued that in attributing primacy to the productive forces (the development thesis), Cohen overlooked the role played by class actors in the transition between modes of production. For the authors, it was forms of class relations (the relations of production) that had primacy in terms of how the productive forces were employed and the extent to which they developed. It was not evident, they claimed, that the relations of production become "fetters" once the productive forces are capable of sustaining a different set of production relations.[8] Other non-Marxist critics argued that Cohen, in line with the Marxist tradition, underestimated the role played by the legal and political superstructure in shaping the character of the economic base. Finally, Cohen's anthropology was judged dubious: whether human beings adopt new and more productive technology is not a function of an ahistorical rationality, but depends on the extent to which these forms of technology are compatible with pre-existing beliefs and social practices.[9] Cohen recognised and accepted some, though not all, of these criticisms in his History, Labour, and Freedom (1988).

Justice and Power
Many Marxists would argue that Marxism cannot be understood as a theory of justice in the rather narrow sense intended by the analytical Marxists. The question of justice cannot be seen in isolation from questions of power, or from the balance of class forces in any specific conjuncture. Non-Marxists may employ a similar criticism in their critique of liberal theories of justice in the Rawlsian tradition. Most of these theories fail to address problems about the configuration of power relations in the contemporary world, and by so doing appear as little more than exercises in logic. "Justice", on this view, is whatever is produced by the assumptions of the theory. It has little to do with the actual distribution of power and resources in the world.

Denouement
As a project, analytical Marxism had largely disappeared by the end of the 1990s. Most of its practitioners agreed that the Marxism that in the beginning they had set out to interrogate and, to an extent, defend, was not theoretically or politically defensible. They concluded that as a theory for the explanation of human action, Marxism was a failure on both theoretical and practical grounds.

The leading lights of analytical marxism now focus their energies in other areas – such as moral and political philosophy (Cohen, van Parijs), and democratic theory employing economic models (Roemer, Elster).

Notes
^  Cohen 2000a.
^  Miller 1996.
^  Roemer 1986.
^  Wood 2004.
^  Cohen 1995.
^  Cohen 1995.
^  Carver and Thomas 1995; Roberts 1997.
^  Levine and Wright 1980.
^  Hirst 1985.

Bibliography
Carver, T. and Thomas, P. (eds.) (1995) Rational Choice Marxism. London: MacMillan. ISBN 0-271-01463-6
Cohen, G. A. (1978) Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-691-02008-6
Cohen, G. A. (1988) History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-824816-4
Cohen, G. A. (1995) Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-47751-4
Cohen, G. A. (2000a) Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (Expanded Edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-924206-2
Cohen, G. A. (2000b) If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-00218-0
Elster, J. (1985) Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29705-2
Elster, J. (1986) An Introduction to Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-33831-X
Gordon, D. (1991) Resurrecting Marx: The Analytical Marxists on Freedom, Exploitation, and Justice. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0-88738-390-4
Hirst, P. (1985) 'G. A. Cohen's Theory of History', in Marxism and Historical Writing. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-7100-9925-8
Levine, A. and Wright, E. O. (1980) 'Rationality and Class Struggle', New Left Review 123.
Mayer, T. F. (1994) Analytical Marxism. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage. ISBN 0-8039-4681-3
Miller, D. (1996) London Review of Books, October 31, 1996.
Parijs, P. (1993) Marxism Recycled. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 2-7351-0536-9
Przeworski, A. (1985) Capitalism and Social Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-26742-0
Roberts, M. (1996) Analytical Marxism: A Critique. London: Verso. ISBN 1-85984-855-9
Roemer, J. (1982) A General Theory of Exploitation and Class. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-674-34440-5
Roemer, J. (ed.) (1986) Analytical Marxism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-31731-2
Wood, A. (2004) Karl Marx. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-31698-7
Wright, E. O. (2003) 'Autobiographical Essay', in Stephen Turner and Alan Sica (eds.), A Disobedient Generation. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications. ISBN 0-7619-4275-0  61.87.208.64 2 Analytical Marxism 0
20071020105834 2007-10-20.11:22:49 何云峰 Cultural Marxism is a form of Marxism that adds an analysis of the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society, often with an added emphasis on race and gender in addition to class. The term "Cultural Bolshevism" or in German "Kulturbolschewismus" has been used in a similar meaning. As a form of political analysis, Cultural Marxism gained strength in the 1920s, and was the model used by a group of intellectuals in Germany known as the Frankfurt School; and later by another group of intellectuals at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England. The fields of Cultural Studies and Critical theory are rooted in (and remain influenced by) Cultural Marxism.

Conservatives, especially paleoconservatives, have long been critical of Cultural Marxism, claiming it was formulated as a way to subvert western civilization using methods other than direct political action. Further to the political right, William S. Lind, Patrick J. Buchanan and others state that Cultural Marxists seek to control society by manipulating language, the media, and academia by way of political correctness by employing the Frankfurt School's "Critical theory." Cultural Marxists scoff at these charges.[1] The term "Cultural Marxism" was also used by the left to describe a particular critique of culture (especially fascist culture). In this sense, "Cultural Marxism" does not refer to the culture itself, but to the criticism of that culture.

Background
The Frankfurt School is shorthand for the members and allies of the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt. In the 1930s the Frankfurt School was forced out of Germany by the rise of the Nazi Party and moved to New York. After 1945 a number of these surviving Marxists returned to both West and East Germany. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer were thus responsible of allowing for hibernation of cultural Marxism throughout the early years of the Cold War. In West Germany, in the late 1950s and early 1960s a revived interest in Marxism produced a new generation of Marxists engaging with the cultural transformations taking place in Fordist capitalism. One of the most prominent of these Western Marxists has been the German philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug, who taught philosophy at the Free University Berlin until his retirement in 2001. Haug coined the term commodity aestheticism (in German "Waren&auml;sthetik"). His "Critique of Commodity Aestheticism" has been translated into numerous languages. Since 1958, Haug has also been the chief editor of Das Argument, the successor to the legendary Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (1933-1941) of the Institute of Social Research (founded by Max Horkheimer). Since 1994, Haug also edits the Historisch-kritische W&ouml;rterbuch des Marxismus, the Historical Critical Dictionary of Marxism, which is published through the Berlin Institute of Critical Theory.

According to Marxist professor Douglas Kellner, "Many 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life." The Frankfurt School also influenced scholars such as Max Horkheimer, Wilhelm Reich, Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. [1] [2]

Kellner explains:

Cultural Marxism was highly influential throughout Europe and the Western world, especially in the 1960s when Marxian thought was at its most prestigious and procreative. Theorists like Roland Barthes and the Tel Quel group in France, Galvano Della Volpe, Lucio Colletti, and others in Italy, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and cohort of 1960s cultural radicals in the English-speaking world, and a large number of theorists throughout the globe used cultural Marxism to develop modes of cultural studies that analyzed the production, interpretation, and reception of cultural artifacts within concrete socio-historical conditions that had contested political and ideological effects and uses. One of the most famous and influential forms of cultural studies, initially under the influence of cultural Marxism, emerged within the Centre for contemporary cultural studies in Birmingham, England within a group often referred to as the Birmingham School.[3]

See also: Marxism, Frankfurt School, Critical theory (Frankfurt School), Postmodernity, Cultural hegemony, Cultural studies, and Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

Critique of Cultural Marxism from the political right
After World War I many reactionaries and conservatives viewed “Modern art” as a form of cultural degeneration which they linked with Marxism. Some of these attacks were influenced by Max Nordau's Entartung (Degeneration). Bauhaus, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, and other art movements were attacked as forms of "Cultural Bolshevism." Anton Webern's music was denounced as "Cultural Bolshevism." This became a major theme of the German Nazis. In 1933 Paul Renner published an anti-Nazi pamphlet titled “Kulturbolschewismus?” (Cultural Bolshevism?), attacking the German government's campaign against modern art and architecture, called Degenerate art by the German government. [2]

In 1932 Pope Pius XI advised the Centre Party to work with Hitler's Nazi Party in a coalition to stop what was called the "cultural Bolshevizing" of Germany.

After World War II, conservatives remained suspicious of socialism and what was called "social engineering," and an argument was made that Cultural Marxists and the Frankfurt School helped spark the radical left social movements of the 1960s as part of a continuing plan of transferring Marxist subversion into cultural terms in the form of Freudo-Marxism.[3]

Conservatives note that Gyorgy Lukacs once asked “Who will free us from Western civilization?”[citation needed] Their conclusion is that Cultural Marxists seek to undermine western civilisation by attacking its moral and ideological basis because (conservatives claim) "Cultural Marxists think that the Christian religion and its values, particularly sexual morality, demotivate the working classes from rising up and revolting against the class system, and that such values need to be rejected." [4] According to Patrick J Buchanan; "...what I called cultural Marxism and militant secularism are clearly winning in the United States of America." According to Buchanan, the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, led an offensive to de-Christianize and destroy the values of western civilization that has been largely successful. [5]

Patrick J Buchanan in his book The Death of the West, provides a criticism of the Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxism:

The four horsemen of the school were music critic Theodor Adorno, psychologist Erich Fromm, sociologist Wilhelm Reich and professor Herbert Marcuse. Their ideas, echoing through the halls of academia and from the ink stained hands of writers and journalists, would lead to, as Buchanan calls it, the establishment of today’s politically correct catechism. ...

The original strategy to destroy America, employed by the Frankfurt School, came from Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci who realized that in order to achieve a Socialist victory, cultural institutions would have to be infiltrated and subverted. Gramsci realized that America, steeped in traditions of freedom and liberty, would never to succumb to a frontal assault....

Brandeis professor Herbert Marcuse, was the pied piper of the sixties as he fostered the development of, as Buchanan points out, 'radical youth, feminists, black militants, homosexuals, the alienated, the asocial, Third World revolutionaries, all the angry voices of the persecuted ‘victims’ of the West.' .... He calls for 'Repressive Tolerance' which means 'intolerance against movements from the right, and toleration of movements from the left.'

Paul Gottfried in his book, The Strange Death of Marxism, states Marxism survived and evolved since the fall of the Soviet Union in the form of Cultural Marxism:

Neomarxists called themselves Marxists without accepting all of Marx’s historical and economic theories but while upholding socialism against capitalism, as a moral position …. Thereafter socialists would build their conceptual fabrics on Marx’s notion of “alienation,” extracted from his writings of the 1840s …. [they] could therefore dispense with a strictly materialist analysis and shift … focus toward religion, morality, and aesthetics. ...

Is the critical observation about the Frankfurt School therefore correct, that it exemplifies ‘cultural Bolshevism,’ which pushes Marxist-Leninist revolution under a sociological-Freudian label? To the extent its practitioners and despisers would both answer to this characterization, it may in fact be valid … but if Marxism under the Frankfurt School has undergone [these] alterations, then there may be little Marxism left in it. The appeal of the Critical Theorists to Marx has become increasingly ritualistic and what there is in the theory of Marxist sources is now intermingled with identifiably non-Marxist ones …. In a nutshell, they had moved beyond Marxism … into a militantly antibourgeois stance that operates independently of Marxist economic assumptions.[6]

Criticism of Marcuse
Instead of using direct political action, Herbert Marcuse argued in his 1965 essay "Repressive Tolerance", that what is needed is a form of tolerance against intolerance, to break the "Repressive Establishment." Marcuse, in his 1954 book Eros and Civilization, had already argued for a form of utopianism based on an individual's striving towards pleasure, because that would break the struggle between "eros" and "thanatos." This striving for pleasure is a form of absolute egalitarianism though, because the "needs" and "wants" and "demands" of each individual are absolute in terms of critical theory. The moral and cultural relativist language by the "Establishment" does not allow for any notion of "good" and "bad," and thus in the present epoch, cannot decide upon which individual "needs" and "wants" are "good" or "bad." Marcuse on the other hand is a nihilist, he sees no "nature of man," instincts are beyond "good" and "evil." Thus without notions of "good" and "evil" Marcuse allows for Nietzschean notions of ethics which serve to exacerbate the same fascist phenomena he thought he was opposing.[4][citation needed]

Criticism of the concept
According to Bill Berkowitz, "It's not clear whether this diffusion of the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory into the mainstream will continue. Certainly, the anti-Semitism that underlies much of the scenario suggests that it may be repudiated in the coming years. But for now, the spread of this particular theory is a classic case of concepts that originated on the radical right slowly but surely making their way into the American mind." [5]

The Southern Poverty Law Center states that "Lind's theory was one that has been pushed since the mid-1990s by the Free Congress Foundation — the idea that a small group of German philosophers, known as the Frankfurt School, had devised a cultural form of Marxism that was aimed at subverting Western civilization".

At a major Holocaust denial conference put on by veteran anti-Semite Willis Carto in Washington, D.C., Lind gave a well-received speech before some 120 "historical revisionists," conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis and other anti-Semites, in which he identified a small group of people who he said had poisoned American culture. On this point, Lind made a powerful connection with his listeners.

'These guys,' he explained, 'were all Jewish.' [6]

According to Richard Lichtman, a social psychology professor at the Wright Institute at Berkeley, the Frankfurt School is "a convenient target that very few people really know anything about...."By grounding their critique in Marxism and using the Frankfurt School, [cultural conservatives] make it seem like it's quite foreign to anything American. It takes on a mysterious cast and translates as an incomprehensible, anti-American, foreign movement that is only interested in undermining the U.S." Lichtman says that the "idea being transmitted is that we are being infected from the outside." Lichtman quoted in "Reframing the Enemy."

References
^ Douglas Kellner, "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," circa 2004.
^ Douglas Kellner, "Herbert Marcuse," Illuminations, University of Texas, online.
^ Douglas Kellner, "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," circa 2004.
^ Eidelberg, Paul (1969). "The Temptation of Herbert Marcuse". Review of Politics 31 (4): 442-458. 
^ Bill Bekowitz, "Reframing the Enemy: 'Cultural Marxism,' a conspiracy theory with an anti-Semitic twist, is being pushed by much of the American right," Intelligence Report, Summer 2003. online
^ "Mainstreaming Hate: A key ally of Christian right heavyweight Paul Weyrich addresses a major Holocaust denial conference," Intelligence Report, Fall 2002.online

Further reading
Marcuse, Herbert (1955). Eros and civilization; a philosophical inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press. 
Wolff, Robert Paul; Marcuse, Herbert (1964). A critique of pure tolerance. Boston: Beacon Press. 
Leiss, William (1974). "Critical Theory and Its Future". Political Theory 2 (3): 330-349. 
Eidelberg, Paul (1969). "The Temptation of Herbert Marcuse". Review of Politics 31 (4): 442-458. 
Eidelberg, Paul (1970). "Intellectual and Moral Anarchy in American Society". Review of Politics 32 (1): 32-50. 
Stokes, Jr., William S. (1980). "Emancipation: The Politics of West German Education". Review of Politics 42 (2): 191-215. 
Davies, Ioan (1991). "British Cultural Marxism". International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 4 (3): 323-344. DOI:10.1007/BF01386507. 
Gottfried, Paul (2005). The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press. ISBN 0-8262-1597-1. 
Dworkin, Dennis (1997). Cultural Marxism in Post War Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies. ISBN 0-8223-1914-4. 
 61.87.208.64 2 Cultural Marxism 2
20071020105834 2007-10-20.11:27:02 何云峰 Post-Marxism has two related but different uses. Post-marxism can be used to refer to the situation in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union after the fall of communism, or it can be used to represent the theoretical work of philosophers and social theorists who have built their theories upon those of Karl Marx and Marxists but exceeded the limits of those theories in ways that puts them outside of Marxism.

History of post-Marxism
Post-marxism began in the late 1960s with the weakening of the soviet paradigm of communism, the rise of Maoist theory, and the advent of commercial television, which broadcast events from Vietnam and the student riots of 1968. The withering away of the grand narratives of revolution, mass culture and communism made it impossible for many theorists to use those concepts to ground their work.

Semiology and discourse
When Roland Barthes began his sustained critique of mass culture through the science of signs and specifically looking at the Mythologies of modern society, the possibility to ground social critique in linguistic, semiotic, or discursive practices began to be pursued by some Marxists. Baudrillard's For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign and much of his work around that built out from Barthes's work and criticized then current Marxism for not seeing the sign value within their own discourse.

Important post-Marxists
Alain Badiou
Etienne Balibar
Paul Hirst
Barry Hindess
Ernesto Laclau
Chantal Mouffe
Moishe Postone
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 61.87.208.64 2 Post-Marxism 1
20071020105834 2007-10-20.11:29:11 何云峰 Marxist feminism is a sub-type of feminist theory which focuses on the dismantling of capitalism as a way to liberate women. Marxist feminism states that capitalism, which gives rise to economic inequality, dependence, political confusion and ultimately unhealthy social relations between men and women, is the root of women's oppression.

According to Marxist theory, in capitalist societies the individual is shaped by class relations; that is, people's capacities, needs and interests are seen to be determined by the mode of production that characterises the society they inhabit. Marxist feminists see gender inequality as determined ultimately by the capitalist mode of production. Gender oppression is class oppression and women's subordination is seen as a form of class oppression which is maintained (like racism) because it serves the interests of capital and the ruling class. Marxist feminists have extended traditional Marxist analysis by looking at domestic labour as well as wage work in order to support their position.

Radical Women, a major Marxist-feminist organization, bases its theory on Marx' and Engels' analysis that the enslavement of women was the first building block of an economic system based on private property. They contend that elimination of the capitalist profit-driven economy will remove the motivation for sexism, racism, homophobia and other forms of oppression. [1]

Critiques of Marxist Feminism
Gayle Rubin, who has written on a certain range of subjects including sadomasochism, prostitution, pornography and lesbian literature as well as anthropological studies and histories of sexual subcultures, first rose to prominence through her 1975 essay "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex", in which she coins the phrase "sex/gender system" and takes Marxism to task for what she claims is its incomplete analysis of sexism under capitalism, without dismissing or dismantling Marxist fundamentals in the process.

Radical feminism, which emerged in the 1970s, also took issue with Marxist feminism. Radical feminist theorists stated that modern society and its constructs (law, religion, politics, art, etc) are the product of males and therefore have a patriarchal character. According to those who subscribe to this view, the best solution for women's oppression would be to treat patriarchy not as a subset of capitalism but as a problem in its own right (see identity politics). Thus eliminating women's oppression means eliminating male domination in all its forms. Like most feminists, however, radical feminists believe in replacing such domination with a culture and policy of equality.

Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises ridiculed the Marxist account of the experience of women. He argued that the women's movement was an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, step that furthered gains that Capitalism had secured for women. His argument was based on a detailed historical analysis claimed to show that women gained along with the rise of classical liberalism. Under this analysis, the marriage contract was actually a first, albeit imperfect, step toward liberating women from the subservient position they had held since the age of violence.

Proponents of Socialist feminism have also criticized the Marxist Interpretation for failing to find an inherent connection between patriarchy and classism.

See also
The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
Radical Women

References
^ The Radical Women Manifesto: Socialist Feminist Theory, Program and Organizational Structure[1], Red Letter Press, 2001, ISBN 0-932323-11-1, pages 21-26.