(Redirected from Marxist theory):''See also
Marxian economics,
Marxism''
'Marxist philosophy' or 'Marxist theory' are terms which cover work in
philosophy which is strongly influenced by
Karl Marx's
materialist approach to
theory or which is written by
Marxists. It may be broadly divided into
Western Marxism, which drew out of various sources, and the official
philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of Marx called "''
diamat''" (for "dialectical materialism"), in particular during the 1930s. The phrase "Marxist philosophy" itself does not indicate a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as diverse as
aesthetics,
ethics,
ontology,
epistemology, and
philosophy of science, as well as its obvious influence on
political philosophy and the
philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought.
Louis Althusser, for example, defined philosophy as "
class struggle in theory", thus radically disjoining himself from those who claimed philosophers could adopt a "
God's eye view" as a purely neutral judge. Just as the
young Marx had left
university and
German Idealism to encounter the
proletariat, which permitted him to modify his perspective on practice and theory, "
intellectuals" couldn't content themselves with instructing from their chairs the masses (as the "
organic intellectual" conception denounced by
Antonio Gramsci) but had themselves to take part in the social struggles of their times.
Marxism and philosophy
The philosopher
Étienne Balibar wrote in
1993 that "''there is no Marxist philosophy and there never will be''; on the other hand, ''Marx is more important for philosophy than ever before.''"
[1] So even the existence of Marxist philosophy is debatable (the answer may depend on what is meant by "philosophy," a complicated question in itself). Balibar's remark is intended to explain the significance of the final line of
Karl Marx's eleven ''
Theses on Feuerbach'' (
1845), which can be read as an epitaph for philosophy: "''The philosophers have only 'interpreted' the world, in various ways; the point is to 'change' it''".
If this claim (which Marx originally intended as a criticism of
German Idealism and the more moderate
Young Hegelians) is still more or less the case in the
twenty-first century, as many
Marxists would claim, then
Marxist theory is in fact the practical continuation of the philosophical tradition, while much of philosophy is still politically irrelevant. Many critics, both philosophers outside Marxism and some Marxist philosophers, feel that this is too quick a dismissal of the post-Marxian philosophical tradition. Much sophisticated and important thought has taken place after the writing of Marx and
Engels; much or perhaps even all of it has been influenced, subtly or overtly, by Marxism. Simply dismissing all philosophy as sophistry might condemn Marxism to a simplistic
empiricism or
economism, crippling it in practice and making it comically simplistic on the level of theory.
Nonetheless, the force of Marx's opposition to
Hegelian idealism and to any "philosophy" divorced from
political practice remains powerful even to a contemporary reader. Twentieth-century Marxist and Marx-influenced theory, such as (to name a few examples at random) the
critical theory of the Frankfurt School, the political writing of
Antonio Gramsci, and the
neo-Marxism of
Fredric Jameson, must take Marx's condemnation of philosophy into account, but many such thinkers also feel a strong need to remedy the perceived theoretical problems with
orthodox Marxism. Such problems might include a too-simple
economic determinism, an untenable theory of
ideology as "
false consciousness," or a simplistic model of state power rather than
hegemony. So Marxist philosophy must continue to take account of advances in the theory of politics developed after Marx, but it must also be wary of a descent into
theoreticism or the temptations of
idealism.
Etienne Balibar claimed that if one philosopher could be called a "Marxist philosopher", that one would be doubtlessly
Louis Althusser: "Althusser proposed a 'new definition' of philosophy as "class struggle in theory"... marxism had proper signification (and original "problematic") ''only'' in so far as it was the theory of ''the'' tendency towards communism, and ''in view'' of its realization. The criteria of acceptation or rejectal of a 'marxist' proposition was always the same, whether it was presented as 'epistemological' or as 'philosophical': it was in the act of rendering intelligible a ''communist policy'', or not." (''Ecrits pour Althusser'', 1991, p.98). However, "Althusser never ceased to put in question the ''images of communism'' that Marxist theory and ideology carried on: but he did it in the name of communism itself." Althusser thus criticized the
evolutionist image which made of communism an ultimate stage of history, as well as the apocalyptic images which made it a "society of transparence", "without contradiction" nor ideology. Balibar observes that, in the end, Althusser joined the most sober definition of communism, exposed by Marx in ''
The German Ideology'': ''Communism is "not a state of the future, but the real movement which destroys the existing state of being.".''
The Philosophy of Marx
G.W.F. Hegel was an important figure in the development of Marxism.
There are endless interpretations of the "philosophy of Marx", from the interior of the Marxist movement as well as in its exterior. Although some have separated Marx's works between a "
young Marx" (in particular the ''
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844'') and a "mature Marx" or also by separating it into purely philosophical works, economics works and political and historical interventions,
Etienne Balibar (1993) has pointed out that Marx's works can't be divided into "economical works" (''
Das Kapital'', 1867), "philosophical works" and "historical works" (''
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte'', the 1871 ''
Civil War in France'' which concerned the
Paris Commune and acclaimed it as the first "
dictatorship of the proletariat", etc.) Marx's philosophy is thus inextricably linked to his
critique of political economy and to his historical interventions in the
workers' movement, such as the 1875 ''
Critique of the Gotha Program'' or the ''
The Communist Manifesto'', written with
Engels (whom was observing the
Chartist movement) a year before the
Revolutions of 1848. Both after the defeat of the French socialist movement during
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's 1851 coup and then after the crushing of the 1871
Paris Commune, Marx's thought transformed itself.
Marxism's philosophical roots were thus commonly explained as derived from three sources: English
political economy, French
republicanism and
radicalism, and German idealist philosophy. Although this "three sources" model is an oversimplification, it still has some measure of truth. On the other hand,
Costanzo Preve (1990) has assigned four "masters" to Marx:
Epicurus (to whom he dedicated his thesis, ''Difference of natural philosophy between
Democritus and Epicurus'', 1841) for his materialism and theory of
clinamen which opened up a realm of
liberty;
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from which come his idea of
egalitarian democracy;
Adam Smith, from whom came the idea that the grounds of
property is
labour; and finally
Hegel.
"Vulgar Marxism" (or codified
dialectical materialism) was seen as little other than a variety of
economic determinism, with the alleged determination of the
ideological superstructure by the economical
infrastructure. However, this
positivist reading, which mostly based itself on
Engels' latter writings in an attempt to theorize "
scientific socialism" (an expression coined by Engels) has been challenged by Marxist theorists, such as Lukacs, Gramsci, Althusser or, more recently, Etienne Balibar.
Hegel
Friedrich Hegel proposed a form of
idealism in which the progress of
freedom is the guiding theme of human history. Freedom progresses by the development of ideas into their contraries. That is, material circumstances in the world are dictated by a series of conflicts and subsequent compromises between ideas. Hegel believed that for every thesis in the history of humanity there arises an antithesis to counter it. In the conflict that follows a synthesis is formed. For example, in France during the 18th century that divine right
absolutism of
King Louis XIV would be a thesis on government. The radical liberalism of
Robespierre would be an antithesis. Finally, the enlightened despotism of
Napoleon would be a synthesis of the two. This process,
dialectic, sometimes involves gradual accretion but at other times requires discontinuous leaps -- violent upheavals of previously existing status quo. World-historical figures such as
Napoleon Bonaparte are, on the Hegelian reading, servants of a World Spirit (''
Weltgeist'') whose Freedom has reconciled with the Necessity of History. Hegel's dialectical process included the personal as well as the natural, the ideal as well as the material.
The rupture with German Idealism and the Young Hegelians
Marx did not study directly with Hegel, but after Hegel died Marx studied under one of Hegel's pupils,
Bruno Bauer, a leader of the circle of
Young Hegelians to whom Marx attached himself. However, Marx and Engels came to disagree with Bruno Bauer and the rest of the Young Hegelians about socialism and also about the usage of Hegel's dialectic. Having achieved his thesis on the ''Difference of natural philosophy between
Democritus and
Epicurus'' in 1841, the
young Marx progressively broke away with the
Prussian
university and its teachings impregnated by
German Idealism (
Kant,
Fichte,
Schelling and Hegel). Along with Engels, who observed the
Chartist movement in the
United Kingdom, he cut away with the environment in which he grew up and encountered the
proletariat in France and Germany. He then wrote a scathing criticism of the Young Hegelians in two books, "The Holy Family" (1845), and ''
The German Ideology'' (1845), in which he criticized not only Bauer but also
Max Stirner's ''
The Ego and Its Own'' (1844), considered as one of the founding book of
individualist anarchism. Max Stirner claimed that all ideals were inherently
alienating, and that replacing God by the Humanity, as did
Ludwig Feuerbach in ''
The Essence of Christianity'' (1841), was not sufficient. According to Stirner, any ideals, God, Humanity, the
Nation, or even the
Revolution alienated the "Ego". Marx also criticized
Proudhon, whom had became famous with his cry "
Property is theft!", in ''
The Poverty of Philosophy'' (1845).
Marx's early writings are thus a response towards Hegel, German Idealism and a break with the rest of the Young Hegelians. Marx, "stood Hegel on his head," in his own view of his role, by turning the idealistic dialectic into a materialistic one, in proposing that material circumstances shape ideas, instead of the other way around. In this, Marx was following the lead of Feuerbach. His
theory of alienation, developed in the ''
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844'' (published in 1932), inspired itself from Feuerbach's critique of the alienation of Man in God through the
objectivation of all his inherent characteristics (thus man projected on God all qualities which are in fact man's own quality which defines the "
human nature"). But Marx also criticized Feuerbach for being insufficiently materialistic, as Stirner himself had point out, and explained that the alienation described by the Young Hegelians was in fact the result of the structure of the economy itself. Furthermore, he
criticized Feuerbach's conception of human nature in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach as an abstract "kind" which incarnated itself in each singular individual: "Feuerbach resolves the essence of
religion into the essence of man (''menschliche Wesen'', human nature). But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations." Thereupon, instead of founding itself on the singular, concrete individual
subject, as did classic philosophy, including
contractualism (
Hobbes,
Locke and
Rousseau) but also
political economy, Marx began with the totality of social relations: labour, language and all which constitute our human existence. He claimed that
individualism was an essence the result of
commodity fetishism or alienation. Although some critics have claimed that meant that Marx enforced a strict
social determinism which destroyed the possibility of
free will, Marx's philosophy in no way can be
reduced to such determinism, as his own personal trajectory makes clear.
Criticisms of the "human rights"
In the same way, following
Babeuf, considered as one of the founder of communism during the
French Revolution, he criticized the 1789
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen as a "bourgeois declaration" of the rights of the "egoistic individual", ultimately based on the "right to private property", which
economism deduced from its own implicit "philosophy of the subject", which asserts the preeminence of an individual and
universal subject over social relations. On the other hand, Marx also criticized
Bentham's
utilitarianism. Alongside
Freud and
Nietzsche, Marx thus takes a place amongst the trio of 19th century philosophers who criticized this pre-eminence of the subject and its
consciousness. Instead, Marx saw
consciousness as political. According to Marx, the recognition of these individual rights was the result of the universal extension of market relations to all of society and to all of the world, first through the
primitive accumulation of capital (including the first period of European
colonialism) and then through the
globalization of the capitalist sphere. Such individual rights were the symmetric of the "right for the labourer" to "freely" sell his
labor force on the marketplace through juridical contracts, and worked in the same time as an ideological means to discompose the collective grouping of producers required by the
industrial revolution: thus, in the same time that the Industrial Era requires masses to concentrate themselves in
factories and in
cities, the individualist, "bourgeois" ideology separated themselves as competing
homo economicus. Marx's critique of the ideology of the human rights thus departs from the
counterrevolutionary critique, by
Edmund Burke, whom dismissed the "rights of Man" in favour of the "rights of the Englishman": it is not grounded on an opposition to the
Enlightenment's
universalism and
humanist project on behalf of the right of
tradition, as in Burke's case, but rather on the claim that the ideology of economism and the ideology of the human rights are the reverse sides of the same coin. However, as
Etienne Balibar puts it, "the accent put on those contradictions can not not ring out on the signification of "human rights", since these therefore appears ''both'' as the language in which
exploitation masks itself and as the one in which the exploited' class struggle express itself: more than a truth or an illusion, it is therefore a ''stake''".
[2] ''
Das Kapital'' ironizes on the "pompous catalogue of the human rights" in comparison to the "modest ''Magna Charta'' of a day work limited by law":
"''The creation of a normal working-day is, therefore, the product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and the working-class... It must be acknowledged that our labourer comes out of the process of production other than he entered. In the market he stood as owner of the commodity "labour-power" face to face with other owners of commodities, dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the capitalist his labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no "free agent," that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him "so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited." For "protection" against "the serpent of their agonies," the labourers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling. by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death. In place of the pompous catalogue of the "inalienable rights of man" comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear "when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins.'' Quantum mutatus ab illo!''" [3]
But the communist revolution does not end with the negation of individual liberty and equality ("
collectivism"
[4]), but with the "negation of the negation": "individual property" in the capitalist regime is in fact the "expropriation of the immediate producers." "Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring-individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor... The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production."
[5]
Criticisms of Feuerbach
What distinguished Marx from Feuerbach was his view of Feuerbach's
humanism as excessively abstract, and so no less ahistorical and idealist than what it purported to replace, namely the reified notion of God found in institutional Christianity that legitimized the repressive power of the Prussian state. Instead, Marx aspired to give
ontological priority to what he called the "real life process" of real human beings, as he and Engels said in ''
The German Ideology'' (1846):
''In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their real existence, their thinking, and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.''
Also, in his ''
Theses on Feuerbach'' (1845), in which the young Marx broke with Feuerbach's idealism, he writes that "the philosophers have only described the world, in various ways, the point is to change it," and his materialist approach allows for and empowers such change. This opposition between various subjective interpretations given by philosophers, which may be, in a sense, compared with ''
Weltanschauung'' designed to legitimize the current state of affairs, and effective transformation of the world through ''
praxis'', which combines theory and practice in a materialist way, is what distinguish "Marxist philosophers" with the rest of philosophers. Indeed, Marx's break with German Idealism involves a new definition of philosophy;
Louis Althusser, founder of "
Structural Marxism" in the 1960s, would define it as "
class struggle in
theory". Marx's movement away from university philosophy and towards the
workers' movement is thus inextricably linked to his rupture with his earlier writings, which pushed Marxist commentators to speak of a "
young Marx" and a "mature Marx", although the nature of this cut poses problems. A year before the
Revolutions of 1848, Marx and Engels thus wrote ''
The Communist Manifesto'', which was prepared to an imminent revolution, and ended with the famous cry: "
Proletarians of all countries, unite!". However, Marx's thought changed again following
Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's
December 2, 1851 coup, which put an end to the
French Second Republic and created the
Second Empire which would last until the 1870
Franco-Prussian War. Marx thereby modified his theory of alienation exposed in the ''Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844'' and would latter arrive to his theory of
commodity fetishism, exposed in the first chapter of the first book of ''
Das Kapital'' (1867). This abandon of the early theory of alienation would be amply discussed, several Marxist theorists, including
Marxist humanists such as the
Praxis School, would return to it. Others, such as Althusser, would claim that the "
epistemological break" between the "young Marx" and the "mature Marx" was such that no comparisons could be done between both works, marking a shift to a "scientific theory" of society.
In 1844-5, when Marx was starting to settle his account with Hegel and the Young Hegelians in his writings, he critiqued the Young Hegelians for limiting the horizon of their critique to religion and not taking up the critique of the state and civil society as paramount. Indeed in 1844, by the look of Marx's writings in that period (most famous of which is the "
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844", a text that most explicitly elaborated his
theory of alienation), Marx's thinking could have taken at least three possible courses: the study of law, religion, and the state; the study of natural philosophy; and the study of
political economy. He chose the last as the predominant focus of his studies for the rest of his life, largely on account of his previous experience as the editor of the newspaper ''
Rheinische Zeitung'' on whose pages he fought for freedom of expression against Prussian censorship and made a rather idealist, legal defense for the Moselle peasants' customary
right of collecting wood in the forest (this right was at the point of being criminalized and privatized by the state). It was Marx's inability to penetrate beneath the legal and polemical surface of the latter issue to its materialist, economic, and social roots that prompted him to critically study political economy.
Historical materialism
Marx summarized the materialistic aspect of his theory of history, otherwise known as
historical materialism (this term was coined by Engels and popularised by
Kautsky and
Plekhanov), in the 1859 preface to ''
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy'':
''In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.''
In this brief popularization of his ideas, Marx emphasized that social development sprang from the inherent contradictions within material life and the social
superstructure. This notion is often understood as a simple historical narrative: primitive communism had developed into slave states. Slave states had developed into feudal societies. Those societies in turn became capitalist states, and those states would be overthrown by the self-conscious portion of their working-class, or proletariat, creating the conditions for socialism and, ultimately, a higher form of communism than that with which the whole process began. Marx illustrated his ideas most prominently by the development of capitalism from
feudalism, and by the prediction of the development of socialism from
capitalism.
The base-superstructure and stadialist formulations in the 1859 preface took on canonical status in the subsequent development of orthodox Marxism, in particular in
dialectical materialism (''diamat'', as it was
known in the Soviet Union). They also gave way to a vulgar Marxism as plain
economic determinism (or
economism), which has been criticized by various
Marxist theorists. "Vulgar Marxism" was seen as little other than a variety of
economic determinism, with the alleged determination of the
ideological superstructure by the economical
infrastructure. However, this
positivist reading, which mostly based itself on Engels' latter writings in an attempt to theorize "
scientific socialism" (an expression coined by Engels) has been challenged by Marxist theorists, such as
Antonio Gramsci or Althusser.
Some believe that Marx regarded them merely as a short-hand summary of his huge ongoing work-in-progress (which was only published posthumously over a hundred years later as ''
Grundrisse''). These sprawling, voluminous notebooks that Marx put together for his research on political economy, particularly those materials associated with the study of "primitive communism" and pre-capitalist communal production, in fact, show a more radical turning "Hegel on his head" than heretofore acknowledged by most mainstream Marxists and Marxiologists. In lieu of the
Enlightenment belief in historical progress and stages that
Hegel explicitly stated (often in a
racist,
Eurocentric manner, as in his ''Lectures on the Philosophy of History''), Marx pursues in these research notes a decidedly empirical approach to analyzing historical changes and different modes of production, emphasizing without forcing them into a
teleological paradigm the rich varieties of communal productions throughout the world and the critical importance of collective working-class antagonism in the development of capitalism.
Moreover, Marx's rejection of the necessity of bourgeois revolution and appreciation of the
obschina, the communal land system, in Russia in his letter to
Vera Zasulich; respect for the egalitarian culture of North African Muslim commoners found in his letters from
Algeria; and sympathetic and searching investigation of the global commons and indigenous cultures and practices in his notebooks, including the ''Ethnological Notebooks'' that he kept during his last years, all point to a historical Marx who was continuously developing his ideas until his deathbed and does not fit into any pre-existing ideological straitjacket, including that of Marxism itself (a famously telling anecdote is the one in which Marx quipped to
Paul Lafargue "All that I know is that I'm not a Marxist").
Differences within Marxist philosophy
Some varieties of Marxist philosophy are strongly influenced by
G.W.F. Hegel, emphasizing totality and even
teleology: for example, the work of
Georg Lukács, whose influence extends to contemporary thinkers like
Fredric Jameson. Others consider "totality" merely another version of Hegel's "spirit," and thus condemn it as a crippling, secret idealism.
Theodor Adorno, a leading philosopher of the
Frankfurt School, who was strongly influenced by Hegel, tried to take a middle path between these extremes: Adorno contradicted Hegel's motto "the true is the whole" with his new version, "the whole is the false," but he wished to preserve
critical theory as a negative, oppositional version of the utopia described by Hegel's "spirit." Adorno believed in totality and human potential as ends to be striven for, but not as certainties.
The status of
humanism in Marxist thought has been quite contentious. Many Marxists, especially Hegelian Marxists and also those committed to political programs (such as many
Communist Parties), have been strongly humanist. These humanist Marxists believe that Marxism describes the true potential of human beings, and that this potential can be fulfilled in collective freedom after the Communist revolution has removed capitalism's constraints and subjugations of humanity. The
Praxis school based its theory on the writings of the
young Marx, emphasizing the humanist and dialectical aspects thereof.
However, other Marxists, especially those influenced by
Louis Althusser, are just as strongly
anti-humanist. Anti-humanist Marxists believe that ideas like "humanity," "freedom," and "human potential" are pure ideology, or theoretical versions of the bourgeois economic order. They feel that such concepts can only condemn Marxism to theoretical self-contradictions which may also hurt it politically.
References
1. Etienne Balibar, 1993. ''La philosophie de Marx'', La Découverte, Repères (English edition, ''The Philosophy of Marx''. Verso, 1995)
2. Etienne Balibar, ''The Philosophy of Marx'', 1993, p.74 original edition
3. Karl Marx, ''Das Kapital'', chapter X, section 7
4. Louis Dumont argued that Marx represented exacerbated individualism instead of holism as the popular interpretation of Marxism as "collectivism" would have it
5. Karl Marx, ''Das Kapital'', chapter XXXII, section 1
Bibliography
★
Balibar, Étienne, ''The Philosophy of Marx''. Verso, 1995 (French edition: ''La philosophie de Marx'', La Découverte, Repères, 1991)
★
Bottomore, Thomas, ed.. ''A Dictionary of Marxist Thought''. Blackwell, 1991.
Key works and authors
★ the writings of
Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels: especially the earlier writings such as ''
The 1844 Manuscripts'', ''
The German Ideology'' and "
Theses on Feuerbach," but also the ''
Grundrisse'', ''
Capital'' and other works.
★
V.I. Lenin
★
Rosa Luxemburg
★
Karl Korsch
★
Georg Lukács: ''
History and Class Consciousness'' developed the theory of
ideology to include a more complex model of
class consciousness
★
Antonio Gramsci
★
Ernst Bloch
★
The Frankfurt School, esp.
Theodor Adorno,
Herbert Marcuse and
Jürgen Habermas
★
Walter Benjamin
★
Bertolt Brecht
★
Socialisme ou Barbarie (
Cornelius Castoriadis,
Claude Lefort, etc.)
★
Louis Althusser and his students (e.g.
Etienne Balibar,
Alain Badiou)
★
Praxis school
★
Situationist International
★
Fredric Jameson
★
Antonio Negri and
autonomist Marxism
★
Slavoj Zizek
See also
★ and
List of contributors to Marxist theory
★
Critical theory
★
Dialectical materialism
★
Frankfurt School's
critical theory
★
Freudo-Marxism
★
Post-Marxism
★ ''
Rethinking Marxism'', a review
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