Marxism

Few nineteenth-century thinkers cast a longer shadow over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries than Karl Marx. Philosopher, economist, journalist and militant, Marx did not merely found a philosophical school: he supplied a vocabulary — class, ideology, surplus value, mode of production — that seeped into sociology, history, economics and cultural criticism, even among authors who reject him. This article focuses on three axes of his mature thought: historical materialism, the critique of political economy and the theory of ideology. Alienation, the central concept of the young Marx, is the subject of a separate study, and is mentioned here only where indispensable. ...

The Institut für Sozialforschung In 1923, the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) was founded in Frankfurt am Main — the first independent Marxist research institution attached to a German university. Associated with the University of Frankfurt (today Goethe-Universität), the Institute would gather, over the following decades, thinkers who gave rise to what became known as the Frankfurt School and its Critical Theory. The term “Critical Theory” was used by the members themselves — particularly Max Horkheimer — to distinguish their project from “traditional theory” (positivist, oriented toward description and prediction) and from purely normative theory (prescribing without analyzing the conditions for realization). Critical Theory aims to unite social analysis with an emancipatory interest: to understand society from the contradictions it generates, contradictions that point toward the possibility of transformation. ...

Antonio Gramsci Antonio Gramsci (22 January 1891, Ales, Sardinia — 27 April 1937, Rome) was an Italian philosopher, journalist, and Communist leader, one of the most original figures of twentieth-century Marxism. In Turin he founded the journal L’Ordine Nuovo (1919) during the factory-council movement, and in 1921 he helped found the Italian Communist Party, of which he became general secretary. Elected to parliament, he was arrested by the Fascist regime in 1926; at his trial the prosecutor declared that “we must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.” It was in prison, under harsh conditions, that Gramsci wrote his decisive work — the Prison Notebooks — composed between 1929 and 1935 and published after his death. ...

Gayatri Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942, Calcutta) is an Indian theorist and professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. Her English translation of De la grammatologie (1976) made Derrida available to the Anglophone world and marked the beginning of one of the most influential — and resolutely non-synthetic — bodies of work in contemporary theory. Spivak combines deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and postcolonial critique. She was associated with the Subaltern Studies Group, a collective of South Asian historians who, drawing on Gramsci and Ranajit Guha, proposed to rewrite colonial and national history from the standpoint of the subaltern classes. Her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) became a canonical reference of the field. In later works, Spivak extended her reflection to globalisation, pedagogy, and world literature. ...

Georg Lukács Georg (György) Lukács (13 April 1885, Budapest — 4 June 1971, Budapest) was a Hungarian philosopher and literary critic who, with his 1923 work, founded what would come to be called Western Marxism. Born into a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family, he was formed in German neo-Kantian culture — he was close to Georg Simmel and Max Weber — before joining communism in 1918. He was People’s Commissar for Education and Culture in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 and, decades later, minister of culture in Imre Nagy’s government during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. His path, crossed by successive self-criticisms and a tense relationship with Stalinism, runs from a pre-Marxist aesthetics to a Hegelian Marxism and, finally, to a vast Ontology of Social Being. ...

Herbert Marcuse Born in Berlin in 1898, Herbert Marcuse fought in the First World War, studied philosophy with Heidegger and Husserl at Freiburg, and joined the Institute for Social Research. Exiled in the United States during Nazism — where he would live for the rest of his life — he became a university professor and, in the 1960s, the “guru of the New Left”: his ideas directly inspired the student movements of 1968, and Angela Davis was his student. ...

Born in Moquegua, Peru, in 1894, José Carlos Mariátegui overcame a poor childhood and fragile health — which would cost him a leg and later confine him to bed — to become, as a self-taught thinker, the most original Marxist of Latin America. A combative journalist, he spent some years in Italy, where he absorbed Marxism and the ideas of Croce and Sorel; back in Peru, he founded the influential journal Amauta and the Socialist Party. He died in 1930, at only 35, leaving a brief and dazzling body of work. ...

Karl Marx Born in Trier, in the Prussian Rhineland, in 1818, Karl Marx studied law and philosophy in Bonn and Berlin, where he drew close to the Young Hegelians. Barred from an academic career by his radical positions, he turned to journalism and, hounded by censorship, went into exile in Paris, Brussels, and finally London, where he lived through decades of poverty, sustained by his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels and poring over the economists in the Reading Room of the British Museum. More than to interpret the world, he wanted to transform it: “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (Thesis 11 on Feuerbach). ...

Louis Althusser Louis Althusser (16 October 1918, Birmendreïs, French Algeria — 22 October 1990, La Verrière) was a French Marxist philosopher, the leading name of structural Marxism. A professor at the École Normale Supérieure on rue d’Ulm for decades, he trained and influenced an entire generation (Foucault, Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar, Alain Badiou). A member of the French Communist Party from 1948, he devoted himself to a rigorous, “scientific” rereading of Marx against the humanist and historicist readings then dominant. His life was marked by severe mental illness: in 1980, during a psychotic episode, he killed his wife, Hélène Rytmann, and was declared unfit to stand trial. ...

Paulo Freire Born in Recife in 1921, amid the poverty of the Brazilian Northeast, Paulo Freire is the most cited and translated Brazilian thinker in the world, and the Patron of Brazilian Education. His philosophy was born of practice: in 1963, in the pioneering Angicos experiment, he taught rural workers to read in a few weeks with a method that joined the reading of the word to the reading of the world. Seen as a threat, he was imprisoned and exiled after the 1964 coup, passing through Bolivia, Chile, the United States, and Switzerland; he would return to Brazil only in 1980. He brought together phenomenology, Marxism, and existentialism in a theory that is at once a pedagogy and a political philosophy of emancipation. ...

Slavoj Žižek Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist, researcher at the University of Ljubljana. He combines the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan with the dialectic of Hegel and the critique of ideology in the Marxist tradition. Prolific and provocative, he is known for analyzing pop culture phenomena (cinema, jokes, advertising) as illustrations of deep ideological structures. A critic of both liberal capitalism and identity-based leftism, he defends an emancipatory universalism. Key Concepts Ideology as fantasy: ideology is not false consciousness (an illusion dispelled by knowledge) but a structuring fantasy — “they know what they are doing, and yet they do it” (cynicism as the dominant ideological form) The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary: takes up the Lacanian triad — the Real is what resists symbolization; irruptions of the Real destabilize the symbolic order (trauma, social antagonism) Jouissance (enjoyment): the subject is trapped in paradoxical modes of satisfaction that sustain the ideological order — ideology functions not through belief but through the enjoyment invested in social practices Parallax (parallax view): a shift in perspective that reveals the object is constituted by the very displacement of the gaze — there is no neutral point of view; antagonism is irreducible The big Other (grand Autre): the symbolic order (language, law, social norms) — the subject constitutes itself in relation to the Other, but the Other is inconsistent, barred The barred subject: the subject is not a full identity but a constitutive lack — it is what emerges in the failure of the symbolic order Pop culture as philosophy: films (The Matrix, Hitchcock), jokes, and anecdotes are read as enactments of Lacanian and Hegelian structures Influenced by Hegel — dialectic, negativity, contradiction as the motor of thought Jacques Lacan — structural psychoanalysis; Real, Symbolic, Imaginary Marx — critique of ideology and commodity fetishism Kant — transcendental subject and antinomies Schelling — freedom and the abyss of the ground Influenced Contemporary critical theory Cultural studies and ideological analysis of cinema Post-Marxist left and contemporary political debate Alain Badiou — interlocution on subject and event Works The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989); For They Know Not What They Do (1991); The Parallax View (2006); Living in the End Times (2010); Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012); How to Read Lacan (2006). ...

Stuart Hall Stuart Henry McPhail Hall (3 February 1932, Kingston, Jamaica — 10 February 2014, London) was a Jamaican-born British cultural theorist and sociologist, regarded as one of the founding figures of British Cultural Studies. He came to England in 1951 as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He was the founding editor of New Left Review (1960), a central organ of the English New Left, and from the late 1960s to 1979 he directed the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, succeeding Richard Hoggart; he then became professor of sociology at the Open University. Hall made culture — understood not as entertainment but as the terrain on which meaning and power are contested — a legitimate object of political analysis, within an open, anti-reductionist Marxism that he described as practising “without guarantees.” ...

Walter Benjamin Born in Berlin in 1892, Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and unclassifiable figures of twentieth-century thought — philosopher, literary critic, translator, and essayist, peripherally linked to the Frankfurt School and a friend of Adorno. His academic career failed (his habilitation thesis was rejected), and he lived by his writing, always in difficulty. In 1940, fleeing the Nazis, he found himself blocked at the Franco-Spanish border, in Portbou, and took his own life — one of the most tragic fates of the European intelligentsia. ...