Western Marxism: Lukács, Gramsci, Frankfurt, and Althusser

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the revolution was expected to spread across industrialized Europe. It did not: the German and Hungarian uprisings of 1918–1919 were crushed, and Western capitalism survived. Out of that defeat was born one of the richest traditions of twentieth-century thought — Western Marxism. Faced with the failure of revolution in the West and the hardening of Soviet Marxism into a state dogma, a group of thinkers reopened the questions that orthodoxy had closed: why did the masses not rebel? How do culture, ideology, and consciousness sustain domination? What place do philosophy and aesthetics have in political struggle? This article surveys that tradition, from its founders in 1923 to Althusser’s structural turn.

1. What is “Western Marxism”?

The phrase was used by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) and made canonical by the British historian Perry Anderson in Considerations on Western Marxism (1976). It designates a current distinct both from classical Marxism (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky — tied directly to revolutionary praxis) and from the official Marxism-Leninism of the communist parties.

Its marks, according to Anderson: a shift from economics and politics toward philosophy and aesthetics; development in an academic setting rather than in the heat of party struggle; the recovery of the Hegelian heritage of Marx and of the theme of alienation in the “young Marx”; and open dialogue with non-Marxist thinkers — Weber, Freud, phenomenology, later structuralism.

2. The origin: 1923 and the return to Hegel

Two books of 1923 found the tradition: History and Class Consciousness, by Georg Lukács, and Marxism and Philosophy, by Karl Korsch. Both were condemned by the Communist International in 1924, accused of “idealism” — a sign that they had touched a nerve. Against the economism of the Second International (which saw socialism as the near-automatic result of economic laws) and against the positivist materialism of orthodoxy, Lukács and Korsch reaffirmed the philosophical and dialectical dimension of Marxism, its Hegelian origin, and the centrality of consciousness and praxis.

The movement gained decisive reinforcement in 1932, with the publication of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in which the young Marx develops the theory of the alienation of labor. Notably, Lukács had reconstructed the Hegelian core of Marx’s thought before those manuscripts came to light.

3. Lukács: reification and totality

Lukács’s central contribution is the concept of reification (Verdinglichung). Extending Marx’s commodity fetishism and crossing it with Max Weber’s rationalization, Lukács shows that under capitalism the commodity form penetrates all of social life and consciousness itself: relations between persons take on the appearance of relations between things, and the world fragments into isolated, quantifiable facts.

To this reified world Lukács opposes the category of totality — the capacity to grasp society as a dynamic whole, which is the proper “standpoint” of the proletariat. By becoming conscious that it is itself a commodity, the proletariat might become the “identical subject-object” of history — a Hegelian-inspired thesis that Lukács himself would later temper.

4. Gramsci: hegemony and civil society

Imprisoned by Italian fascism, Antonio Gramsci wrote in the Prison Notebooks (1929–1935) the most influential answer to the question of why revolution failed in the West. His key is the concept of hegemony: the ruling class governs not only by force but above all by intellectual and moral leadership, winning the consent of the ruled through civil society (schools, churches, the press).

Hence his strategy: in the West, with its dense civil society, revolution requires a long cultural “war of position,” not a frontal assault on the state. And hence his correlated concepts — organic intellectuals, the historical bloc, the philosophy of praxis, and the work upon the common sense of the masses. Gramsci is the Marxist who took the autonomy of culture and politics most seriously.

5. The Frankfurt School and critical theory

The best-known strand of Western Marxism is the Frankfurt School, gathered around the Institute for Social Research: Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and, in the following generation, Jürgen Habermas. In dialogue with Freud and Weber, these authors developed critical theory: the critique of instrumental reason (reason reduced to the calculation of means), the analysis of the culture industry that integrates and lulls the masses, and the diagnosis, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), of how the Enlightenment project turned against itself. (The Frankfurt tradition is treated in its own article on this site.)

6. Other strands: Bloch, Lefebvre, Sartre

The tradition is plural. Ernst Bloch, in The Principle of Hope, thought the utopian dimension and the “anticipation” of a better future inscribed in culture. Henri Lefebvre developed the critique of everyday life and, later, the theory of the production of space. And Jean-Paul Sartre, in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), tried to fuse existentialism and Marxism, thinking how human freedom petrifies into the “practico-inert” and how a “group in fusion” can reconquer history. In all of them the theme of alienation and the reconquest of a non-reified life returns.

7. Althusser and the structural turn

In the 1960s, Louis Althusser broke with this whole Hegelian and humanist lineage. In For Marx (1965) and Reading Capital (1965), he proposed a scientific and structural Marxism: there is an “epistemological break” between the young, still ideological Marx and the mature Marx, who founds the science of social structures. Against humanism, Althusser held that history is a “process without a subject” and that ideology operates through the interpellation of individuals as subjects. His theory of the Ideological State Apparatuses renewed the Marxist analysis of culture and the school.

8. The great divide: Hegelians vs. scientists

Western Marxism is crossed by a central tension. On one side, the Hegelian and humanist current — Lukács, Gramsci, Frankfurt, Sartre, Bloch, Lefebvre — centered on alienation, consciousness, praxis, and the subject. On the other, the anti-Hegelian and scientistic current — Althusser in France, Galvano Della Volpe and Lucio Colletti in Italy — which rejects the concept of alienation as an idealist residue and seeks in Marx a science of structures, without a subject. This debate over the place of humanism in Marxism was one of the most intense in twentieth-century philosophy.

9. Criticism and limits

Perry Anderson, in mapping the tradition, also criticized it. Western Marxism was born of a defeat and never overcame it: divorced from working-class praxis and from concrete political strategy, it took refuge in the university, in philosophy, and in aesthetics, cultivating an esoteric language and an often pessimistic tone. Its theoretical richness was the flip side of a practical impotence. Other critics questioned Althusser’s functionalism, Adorno’s cultural elitism, and the obscurity of much of the output.

10. Legacy

Despite its limits, Western Marxism shaped the contemporary humanities. From it descend cultural studies (via Gramsci and the Birmingham School), present-day critical theory (Habermas, Honneth), the post-Marxism of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (who generalize Gramscian hegemony), Fredric Jameson’s cultural criticism, and the renewal of the theory of reification. By contrast, so-called analytical Marxism (G. A. Cohen, Jon Elster) would seek, in the Anglophone world, an opposite path: to reconstruct Marx with the tools of analytic philosophy and rational choice theory. To understand Western Marxism is, in large part, to understand how twentieth-century left thought reinvented itself in the face of defeat — making culture, and not only economics, a battlefield.

Essential reading

• Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923).
• Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (1929–1935).
• Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947).
• Louis Althusser, For Marx (1965).
• Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (1976) — the critical map of the tradition.

← Articles