In this article, I will develop a critique of the main tendencies within Western Marxism since World War II as exemplified by the work of Jürgen Habermas, Henri Lefebvre, Herbert Marcuse, and Louis Althusser. Since the familiar interpreter of this tradition is Perry Anderson, I will begin by summarizing his account and establishing my own in contrast to it. My argument is, essentially, that the ungoverned theoretical contradiction of Western Marxism is its insistence upon an ontological theory of human nature and its failure to reconcile that theory with adequate conceptions of historical development and mode of pro-duction. Ultimately, I argue that such a reconciliation is not possible in the terms set by the Western Marxist debate, and that any further development of the relation between the subjective and objective conditions of society will have to return, in one way or another, to the historical perspective of classical Marxian theory.
The phrase “Western Marxism” was first used by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1973) in his Adventures of the Dialectic. He used it to identify a group of theorists concerned with the problematic of subjectivity that had been emphasized by Marx yet curiously rejected in the “orthodox” Marxism of the communist parties. The themes of this problematic were culture, consciousness, and everyday life. Merleau-Ponty was well aware of what was, and continues to be, at stake in this debate:
If we have undertaken to recall Lukacs’s attempt (very freely, and emphasizing certain points in his work were only indicated), it is because something of it remains in today’s Marxism or even because it is one of those truths which only by chance miss the historical record. We shall see, on the contrary, that there was something justified in the opposition it encountered. But it was necessary to recall this lively and vigorous attempt, in which the youth of revolution and Marxism lives again, in order to measure today’s communism, to realize what it has renounced and to what it has resigned itself. (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 57–78)
Nevertheless, while it is not entirely clear what he held the full theoretical contribution of “Western Marxism” to be, Merleau-Ponty’s use of the phrase served quite well to indicate a range of theoretical orientations quite at odds with that of the orthodox Marxists, and a shift away from the economism of the latter toward sociocultural studies.
Marxists are still interested in the question of how to reconcile an epistemologically defensible cultural analysis with a more traditional political economy. For Merleau-Ponty, the problem was that both were equally fundamental, and that communist Marxism had eliminated the former in favor of the latter. The result was a degeneration of theory in the directions of economic reductionism and a methodology entirely too mechanistic to do justice to the dynamism of history and the subtlety of social order found in the Western capitalist nations.
Perry Anderson’s Critique of Western Marxism
Perry Anderson’s (1976) use of the phrase is not directed specifically at the same problems of the relationship of base to superstructure and material life to culture. Nor is it intended to make the case that materialism has come to deny the historical force of culture. Instead, and on the contrary, he stresses the exaggerations that began to characterize the new orthodoxies of “critical theory,” as culture and consciousness became dominant themes in the literature of European neo-Marxism from 1918 to 1968.
Where Merleau-Ponty emphasized the problems of a one-sided political economy, Anderson points to the problems of a one-sided theory of culture and consciousness. Rather than treat this as no more than an intellectual defect, one that could be repaired by right thinking, Anderson tries to place it in the historical context of a depoliticized scholarly left, exiled to the academy, unable to assimilate the “failures” of the workers’ movements, and detached from or hostile to the politics of socialism. The authors whose works are the resources for this discussion are, among others, Lukacs, Korsch, Adorno, Hor-kheimer, Marcuse, Habermas, Sartre, Lefebvre, Althusser, and Colletti. His solution is Trotsky, insofar as Trotsky’s influence is understood as requiring detailed case studies of the history of proletarian revolutionary movements and the formations they have opposed.
Consistent with his argument, Anderson attempts to show the more general historical conditions of Western Marxism and the corresponding problems it addressed, and the institutional limitations of the academic disciplines upon the further development of historical materialism. The conditions and political problems have to do with the Russian Revolution, the rise of Fascism, and the apparent hegemony achieved by the capitalist class by the middle of the twentieth century. The institutional limitations have to do with the ghettoization of Marxism, the elevation of philosophy as the Marxian paradigm, and the practical divorce of intellectuals from the workers’ movement. The urgency of the former and the ambiguities inherent in the latter contributed to a one-sided analysis of society, compatible with divisions among academicized disciplines, as well as to the hermetic quality of much of the writing of that tradition and the vagueness and theoreticism with which Anderson seems to believe it is, more often than not, afflicted.
The return to Trotsky is, then, not merely Anderson’s solution to the intellectual problem, but the correction of the political defect. It is also the way in which he believes intellectual work can be reconciled with the praxis of the working class. This is clear from Anderson’s list of “insistent” issues to which contemporary Marxists must address themselves:
What is the constitutive nature of bourgeois democracy? What is the function and future of the nation-state? What is the real character of imperialism as a system? What is the historical meaning of a workers’ state without workers’ democracy? How can a socialist revolution be made in the advanced capitalist countries? How can internationalism be made a genuine practice, not merely a pious ideal? How can the fate of previous revolutions in comparable conditions be avoided in the ex-colonial countries? How can established systems of bureaucratic privilege and oppression be attacked and abolished? What would be the structure of an authentic socialist democracy? These are the great unanswered problems that form the most urgent agenda for Marxist theory today. (Anderson 1976, 121)
A depressing agenda, since it seems to say that anything short of this degree of comprehensiveness must, given the urgency, represent total failure. On the other hand, the list can only be programmatic if it is taken as a cue to move to deeper theoretical issues, perhaps issues at the core of Marxism and at the core of Perry Anderson’s own apparent absolutism in the final passage of his book.
The question of theory and practice
Yet, to raise the theoretical problem again seems to place one among the writers who have abandoned politics and history. Somehow, it is necessary to recapture the urgency of theoretical work without falling between the cracks made by the uneven development of the workers’ movement, or, in the alternative, without reducing theory to matters of strategy alone. Anderson, however, seems to have thrown out the one in favor of the other.
To put it simply, Anderson’s criticism of the Western Marxists is a practical one: their work is irrelevant to a progressive or revolutionary movement. In this, he seems to be arguing either for a theory devised within the specific strategic contexts of revolutionary action, or one that contains within itself an adequate strategy for revolution whether or not a movement exists as such. If the former, then Marx himself can be condemned; if the latter, there is no way of gauging the relevance of the theory except through utopian speculation.
The problem is that Anderson has been able to locate a theoreticism within the Marxist tradition, but has failed to discover its internal cause. The failure, he seems to say, is a result of non-theoretical and easily remediable choices of perspective, political preference, and alliance, rather than something intrinsic to the theoretic formulations themselves that might even stem from an ambiguity in the classical Marxian texts. He seems to deny the legitimacy of critique in favor of case study, and hence seems to take entirely too much for granted so far as theory is concerned. In fact, at the heart of Anderson’s complaint may be precisely the sort of theoreticism he seems to decry, disguised, as it were, by the deceptively immediate plausibility of the final ques-tions that make up his agenda.
I want to show, for some of the same theorists listed as members of the tradition of Western Marxism, the intellectual basis of their practical irrelevance. The value of this inquiry lies, beyond its disclosure of a fundamental meta-theoretical problem, in its capacity to make a case for the relative autonomy of theoretical work within the epistemological requirements of an adequate relation of theory and practice.
If this is so, then one need not reject as elitist the use of technical language in theoretical works, condemn altogether the apparent dis-tance of theoretical formulations from strategic considerations, or lament without hope the institutional isolation of Marxist scholarship. To return to “history” at the most fundamental level of theory is, ipso facto, a return to relevance. What then can be discussed are the mediations of that achievement – the ways in which theorists and their work become implicated in real organizational politics, a problem not addressed in this essay but of obvious significance if my central argument holds.
In order to retain the significance of the subjective within the framework of historical materialism, it is necessary to re-examine the concept of the mode of production within the context of the forces and relations that account for the contemporary reproduction of capitalist society. Because of its comprehensiveness to this very project, classical Marxian theory is at the very least a reasonable point of departure and one for which no equally comprehensive alternative theory has yet been devised.
It is appropriate to identify “classical” Marxism with the “classical” Marxian text, the first volume of Capital. This is the most complete and authoritative statement of Marx’s mature position. Its analysis is familiar; the central focus is capitalist production. This provides a concept adequate to the analysis of the totality of capitalist society and to a history of the social relations by which capitalism develops. Colletti has summarized Marx’s definition of capitalist society in terms of the specific characteristics of class relations within the mode of production:
The historical subject then is neither Idea, World-Spirit, Vico’s Providence, nor a transcendental subject. Nor is the subject conceived as Evolution, Struggle for Existence, Societal Instinct, Race, etc. Against these generic abstractions, all equally fruitless, Marx produces a new concept of the subject as a historical-natural entity, as a species or collectivity of empirical formation – such, pre-cisely, as are social classes. (Colletti 1972, 14)
This gives analytic, but by no means necessarily empirical, priority to politics and economics rather than to culture, and methodological priority to action rather than to ideas. In its reversal of these priorities, Western Marxism, as Anderson describes it, has lost its capacity to clarify the distinctiveness of capitalism and the significance of the class relations that the Western Marxists nevertheless insisted, in their asides, were fundamental to capitalism and its transformation. They were left with the abstractions of domination and liberation and an implicit philosophical anthropology placed, by virtue of the moralism of these abstractions, beyond suspicion.
This reversal finally gained intellectual support from an emphasis on language, consciousness, and everyday life. It is doubtless one of the virtues of Western Marxism that it has restored subjectivity to the Marxian tradition. But it has floundered on the untheorized conception of human nature, or essence, that it formulated to legitimate that interest. The result has been an ahistorical view of capitalism and a romantic view of history. It is not only that Being has replaced Becoming, but human nature has insinuated itself, replacing collective action, as the bed-rock of a history without historical dynamism. In their extended formulations, the Western Marxist analyses of language, consciousness, and everyday life – subjectivity – are ontological in a way that departs markedly from the Marxism of Capital, and from the enduring Marxist critique of idealism and ideology. The subtle projection by the Western Marxists of an ontology of human nature had the immediate effect of preventing an epistemological solution to the problem of the relation of theory and practice and therefore an historical materialist theory of society. This, rather than a choice of perspective, political preference, and alliance, is their ungoverned contradiction.
Social change, understood by classical Marxism as epistemologically central to historical materialism, required that social phenomena be understood in connection with the existing mode of social and material production, itself taken as a product of struggle within and in relation to material life. From that point of view, consciousness in capitalist society was part of class relations and thus was inevitably divided, volatile, and in process. Neither consciousness nor the everyday life which was its local and temporary realization could be, in this view, autonomous or a reflection of a universal human essence without obliterating the very notion of history as human activity and collective accomplishment.
For an adequate Marxist formulation of subjectivity, including everyday life, consciousness, and language, there would have to be a recognition of the centrality to those topics of the historical transformation and reconstitution of class relations. As is well known, this involves building analytic links to the contradictions of the existing forces and relations of production, with a focus on the relations of commodity production and capitalist accumulation. These class relations and contradictions constitute, as a theoretical matter, the capitalist mode of production. They define both its internal logic, capital accumulation through the exploitation of labor, and its historical dynamic, the incessant tensions of class struggle.
According to this formulation, neither the accumulation of capital nor the existence of class struggle, nor contradiction itself, can be viewed as independent factors shaping modern society. They are, instead, themselves determinate aspects of the structure and history of the capitalist mode of production. The labor theory of value attempts rigorously to establish the relationship between accumulation and exploitation on the one hand, and the contradiction of production and society on the other. And it does this within the conceptual limitations required by the relation of theory and practice in Marxist epistemology.
Analyzing capitalism in terms of the development and internal logic of production does not exclude the analysis of subjectivity. Nor does it inhibit or necessarily distort the analyses of language, consciousness, or everyday life. In fact, all three were central to Marx’s critique of capitalism. Consider the importance he placed upon alienation, fetishism, and reification. But it must be stressed that these concepts are specific to the analysis of the ramifications of capitalist production and are not simply the result of a prior insight into human affairs divorced from their history and the history of theory itself. “Fetishism” refers specifically to the fetishism of the commodity, “alienation” to the obligatory and unconditional sale of labor power on the capitalist market, and “reification” to one aspect of the subjective side of universal commodity exchange.
From the perspective of classical Marxism, everyday life, consciousness, and language must be identified and analyzed in relation to the existing mode of production and its local realizations and variations. In turn, subjectivity must be formulated as a feature of the historical process of the development of the capitalist mode of production as a whole, as a feature of its necessary social relations, rather than as an empirical category that specifies data to which theory must then conform.
The abandonment of classical Marxism by Habermas, Lefebvre, Marcuse and Althusser
In one way or another, the Western Marxists have minimized or abandoned the concept of the mode of production as the key to socio/historical analysis. Occasionally, this is a matter of theoretic prin-ciple, as with some writers who have been influenced by Lefebvre. More often, it is an abandonment de facto, in which society and economy are placed at so great a conceptual distance from one another that their relationship ceases to provide any basis whatsoever for practical representation. The dominance of the economic and its historical operation “in the last instance” become, at best, formalisms in which the position of that “last instance,” and therefore the economic itself, can no longer be represented in concrete research. What is lost, finally, is the determinate character of society and its aspects. Economy comes, instead, at best, to indicate a notion of finality that is cosmological, since it has become a “last instance” only when every other “instance” is said and done.
HABERMAS. The work of Habermas (1975), despite early and casual acknowledgment of the conflict of classes, represents the latter sort of departure from classical Marxism. Communication and the imperatives of system and social “integration” provide Habermas with a theory adequate to his description of “late capitalism,” and, to some extent, with an account of an historical process. But the contradiction of system and social integration (policy and consensus) that he attempts to establish as the basis of his account only explains crisis at the level of policy. It accounts for little more than policy and the ephemerae of social movements. There is no notion of struggle and none of revolution possible in this formula. Human beings are read out of history because groups are excluded as a matter of theoretic principle. What is left is an extra-human subjectivity, a discursive agency that makes history by reading it, and presumably by being read. Inevitably, historical agency makes its appearance as media, channels, dialogue, and an intellectual elite, and one is thrown back to the idealism that Marx had so long ago laid to rest.
Or the dynamic of social change is ultimately found by psychology, where the distortion of communication lies in the incompatibility of the message with the irrepressibility of human need. Liberation is, then, to be found in the ideal speech situation, the dialogue, that is presumed by all communication, distorted or not; and the dominated is definitely not something that feels the weight of power, wealth, and capital. It suffers and works only in the abstract. Habermas mistakes logical con-ditions of speaking (exchange) with a domain of being (intersubjectivity) underlying in fact every speech act. Thus, in this sense, there is tautology at the heart of his analysis of freedom that makes the idea of freedom itself suspect. Moreover, the theory that provided a philosophical basis for recognizing the corruption of language, the Marxist critique of ideology, is ignored, as if that corruption is obvious to anyone who would look, listen, and feel. Thus the condition of making sense of Habermas’s notions of domination and liberation is a theory, Marxism, for which he makes no discernible place in his account of late capitalism; either his work is a microanalysis, in which case the hard work of connecting it to Marxism has yet to be done, or it is ad hoc, in which case, he needs to begin again.
It is true that Habermas develops his perspective out of an interpretation of classical Marxism, as entirely too instrumentalist to account for the forms of cultural life and social hegemony characteristic of late capitalism. In any case, the result is an intuitively-based emphasis upon freedom taken as essential to all successful human development, an expressive theory of need-governed communication that begs entirely too many questions, and an unjustified yet appealing idea of an emancipatory human interest capable of motivating social change through a praxis that has no clear historical force. His interpretation of Marx is so convenient to the characterization of late capitalism as posing a problem of communication, that one suspects that Haber-mas projected his Marx from the standpoint of a society the description of which he was already led to by an unaccountably casual methodology. The psychological reduction necessary for a theory of change based on the repression of need begs, as well, the problem of power, and with that the historical role of classes, collectivities, systems, empires, and modes of production.
Above all, the return to a vitalist essentialism, and ontology of human nature, bodes ill for the development within Habermas’s thought of an adequate description and a genuine history of late capitalism. The archaic stage theory presented in his (1975) Legitimation Crisis is no more than a preliminary outline of an approach to such a history, at best of vaguely heuristic and pedagogical value. Habermas leaves his readers with too much psychology, an ontology of human nature, not enough history, and a methodology that substitutes the illustration of an idea for a rigorous historical materialism.
LEFEBVRE. “Need” also figures in Lefebvre’s (1971) most popular works, where it serves to identify a source of ambivalence in everyday life: one acts, but cannot tell whether the act flows from need or is a result of external norm or imposition. Lefebvre’s influence among the situationists and some Freudian Marxists has been largely in the direction of a subjectivist reductionism whose intelligibility relies on an allegory of the violation of human nature by a guilty social order. This is more the expression of moral indignation and outrage than an historical materialism of capitalist society. Like Habermas, Lefebvre explicated his ontology through a set of familiar empirical studies – of consumerism, urbanism, mass communication, the corruption of leisure, and bureaucracy. Change reflects an upsurge of expression by human nature, or it represents the success of an unnamed therapeutic intervention. The assumption of abundance, and with it the arbitrariness of any control over need – from there a short way to “Anti-Oedipus and the hero-schizophrene” (Deleuse and Guattari, 1977) – is possible only on condition that radical political economy has become irrelevant as a fact and as theory.
Both Habermas and Lefebvre place human nature prior to capitalism. Their metaphorical figure, so familiar to the hopeful, nostalgic, and then cynical politics of non-radical reform is “the quality of life.” Instead of developing new historical categories justifying their rejection of the mode of production, and instead of acknowledging historical limits to analysis itself, they employ ontological categories to account for the most general sort of liberatory movement conceivable. This relies on several interdependent assumptions: that an adequate theory of social change must begin with the absolute and empirically interpretable poles of domination and liberation; that prior movements toward socialism have therefor failed to liberate people, not from within capitalism or feudalism, but totally; that the dynamic of social change cannot be in capitalism but must be in people regardless of where they find themselves; and, that an adequate theory of social change must grade revolutionary movements by their immediately visible results and by the most obvious forms they take. Thus a desire to develop a theory of total liberation, the reliance on an interpretation of Marxism as instrumentalist, and a consequent identi-fication of areas in which the project of devising liberation can be fulfilled without what is normally taken to be praxis, characterize the plunge into an ontology of human nature, and with it, in some cases, cynicism and/or a politics of the gut or the mind.
MARCUSE. Herbert Marcuse (1964) shared some of these same concerns and problems. Consciousness, domination, and liberation are the figures of his drama without history. His conception of consciousness is grounded in his interpretation and sociological trans-formation of Freudian psycho-analysis. For Marcuse, this expresses the transhistorical nature of human consciousness. His conception of emancipation depends on the possibility of the total emancipation of the libido from a repressive social order. Late capitalism is distinctive only by virtue of being the most repressive, yet least coercive, society, a society of indefinite scale and infinitely reduced dimension. Yet, Marcuse’s refusal to give up on praxis, displaced to the margins of the material order and rendered exemplary, marks a difference from the more strict idealism of most of the other Western Marxists. But a politics of opposition cannot provide the articles of praxis necessary for an account of domination and liberation consistent with a theory of capitalist development and compatible with the historical possibility of such a theory. If Lefebvre and Habermas were excessively subjectivist, Marcuse, despite his use of psychology, has lost both subjectivity and objectivity. Analysis drifts undialectically between the poles of disparate action and an unavoidable domination. Here, it is both of these that are granted absolute Being, rather than human nature by itself.
Marcuse’s position is more useful to historical materialism than that of Habermas or Lefebvre. It does not deny the significance of social conflict. Nor does it leave conflict as a merely formal operation. It does not obliterate, though it leaves obscure, the dynamic of capital-ism and the relevance of capitalism to the existence of the most familiar forms of repression and strife. Marcuse’s work serves classical Marxism by its elaborate though idealized description of an unimpeded and monolithic capitalist control. There, capitalism does what Marx supposed it could never do: it completes itself. At the same time, Marcuse leaves room for political struggle and therefore some sort of history. Nevertheless, like the work of Lefebvre and Habermas, his can only be comprehended as part of an analysis of history if it is placed within the more familiar Marxist formulations. Otherwise, domination is inexplicable, and the universal interest in liberation becomes an ideal. Its major use can only be the rejection of all past instances of struggle, all incomplete or inchoate acts of resistance within capitalism, all forms of class struggle. Otherwise, critical theory as what would be left of Marxism would become hostile to its own possibility and, perhaps, finally reactionary.
ALTHUSSER. It is significant that one stream of Western Marxism derives from an explicit reliance on the labor theory of value. Yet, perhaps because of the desire of its major figures to do too much too soon, to counter all manner of modern idealism on the left in one fell swoop, it too succumbs to an ontology – this time of levels, practices, and practitioners. That stream derives from the work of Althusser (1977) and his early associates. On the surface, it appears diametrically opposed to the rest of what has here been referred to as Western Marxism. Where the others speak of literature, culture, and society, Althusser speaks of practices, apparatuses, and a history (and therefore, presumably, a social order) devoid of subjectivity. Where they speak of and do philosophy, he invokes the spirit of science and objectivity capable of closing in on final truths, or at least finally refuting falsehood. Along the way, Althusser raises the fundamental critical question that must be asked of the Western Marxists: if what is important is subjectivity, in the form stated, and if what is of greatest practical urgency is the freeing of individual subjects, in what way is the Marxist version of these problems distinct from other versions and approaches? What has Marx told us that is new?
Despite criticisms of his strategy for addressing this question, criticisms of a primarily historiographic form that argue with his periodizations of Marx’s writings into immature and mature stages, the question remains a serious one. And this is so regardless of one’s position on the status and significance of Althusser’s thought. Yet, the extreme character of Althusser’s own response has left a legacy of scientism, positivism, and a fairly standard idealism of reason and its putative agencies. On the other hand, it seems to be a gain over revolutionary idealism, the idealism of the adventure, to state that history has no subject. But is it a gain for Marxism? It is so only if “history” refers to totality and structure rather than to dynamism and process. Althusser’s “discovery” is not, then, a result of a clearer reading of Marx (in the light of Saussure), but a redefinition of the term “history” that, itself, constitutes a radical departure from the dialectical character of historical materialism. Althusser wants history, but only one that Marx himself rejected – the succession of events along an absolute time line. He wants History without history, just as the humanists he decries want Change without change. He is left with an ontology of the whole, and in justification of theory, an ontology of scientific reason. The latter dis-closes the former; but to whom? Not only history, but reason as well, lacks subjectivity. Althusser ends without a real subject because he began without a real history.
The virtue of his work lies in its devastatingly critical character, and in the fact that it continually provokes his readers with questions of great moment. But its flaw is so deep that it cannot be relevant to anything that one might suppose to be praxis, something of which Althusser himself expressed a nagging but marginal awareness. When the attempt is made to transform Althusserian Marxism into pol-itically relevant theory, the Marxism withers away. One sees this clearly in the works of Hindess et al. (1977), in the extreme skepticism that reflects the unhappiness of a consciousness for whom reason is both necessary and beyond its grasp.
Classical Marxism establishes an objective conception of human subjectivity compatible with the requirements of historical materialism and adequate to the analysis of capitalism and its transformation. While the burden remains to show its capacity to comprehend the present situation, the possibility can no longer be denied in advance. In fact, it is the collapse of Western Marxism that brings us back to the question of value, classes, exploitation, uneven development, and the specific contradictions of capitalism, early or late.
Western Marxism, motivated by the difficulty of reconciling theory with the practice of the parties and by the dread of fascism, nevertheless found itself possessed of an intuitionist methodology and a subjectivism incompatible with the recognition of the role of social forces and relations in history. It had been led to its critique by Marxism, and led by its critique to deny Marxism in all respects. It could no longer explain its own development, due to this attempt to divorce itself from its origins. It always relied on literary strategies to demonstrate insight but inevitably found itself without grounds and without a sense of its own, as well as everything else’s, historicity. In losing track of its way, it finally lost its point.
Nevertheless, Western Marxism has left a legacy of terms, problems, and concepts that have revived a concern with the theoretical representation of resistance and opposition, and an interest in the basic works of Marxism and their philosophical underpinnings. More-over, it has provided the most sustained and elaborate critique of capitalist culture and politics in the modern literature of social studies. The attempt to move beyond those accomplishments, to find a more general sociology than Marx and Marxism seemed to have provided, fell victim to the overly strong formulae, ontological, psychological, structuralist, that were, perhaps, necessary to regain the critical sensibility during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. What had been gained in the appreciation of suffering and in the phenomenology of domination was, however, lost when Western Marxism attempted to read its literature as theory. That this would occur among such an otherwise diverse group may seem odd; yet it is less so when we consider what had come to be at stake for all of them, as us: the possibility of critique, of radical transformation, of Marxism, in the context of what all recognized as a capitalism of previously unimagined power, scale, and freedom.
How are we to evaluate Western Marxism since World War II? One possibility would be to discard the whole tradition as representing a regression to a pre-Marxist idealism. Anderson seems to follow this route. However, this overlooks the relationship between social theory and its history, as Anderson did even as he acknowledged that relationship. The subjectivist, and ultimately utopian, vision of Western Marxism was developed in relation to the political circumstances and historical conditions of the post-war period. Western Marxism is, itself, a product of late capitalism whose scale and pace of development could not help but raise questions about all theory, including Marxism, as well as it should.
Western Marxism cannot be understood outside of this context. Its development and formulation of an analysis of late capitalism was embedded within a cold war ideology and language over which it had little control. It attempted to transcend the structures of its situation by means of an ontologically grounded social theory. It is this that accounts for the isolation of Marxism under the auspices of the Western Marxists, for the ghettoization, the lack of connection with working class movements, the hermetic quality of the work, and the elitism and utopianism of both method and vision.
To be sure, the formulation of a language of resistance, for which Marcuse must be given the major credit, had a progressive role in the context of the social crises of the 1960s. However, the economic crisis of the 1970s and the political crisis ever since then have cast doubt on the capacity of a subjectivist critical theory to play an informing and strategic role in the struggles to come. What now appears to be a global crisis of capital, no longer merely the domination of consciousness in the industrial nations, has made class a crucial concept once again; and with it, the status of classical Marxism is being reevaluated in the light of the philosophical requirements of an historical material-ism. One sees this in an enormous literature, divided and argumentative though it may be, accumulating in a variety of fields, and in the richness of the argumentation by which that literature is characterized. Culture and everyday life are no longer represented merely as areas of individual experience, but as arenas of struggle – in studies of language, media, child development, social organization, law, and social movements (Ollman and Vernoff have provided a useful survey of some of the relevant literature, 1982; see also Raymond Wil-liams, 1977).
One is tempted to conclude that Western Marxism accomplished more in its demise than it had in its early and isolated appearance. Its strain toward a final conception of human affairs, its eclecticism, and the sheer weight of its pages, made it a force with which to contend, all the more so in the context of what now appears to be a world-wide struggle against capitalism, this time from within the global capital. What it finally accomplished for Marxism in this context is a more reflective return to a newly historical materialism and a subject–object dialectic of political economy capable of dealing with the global volatility of what continues to be the uneven development of capitalism.
Althusser, Louis, 1977. For Marx. London: New Left Books.
Anderson, Perry, 1976. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: New Left Books, 121.
Colletti, Lucio, 1972. From Rousseau to Lenin. New York: Monthly Review Press, 14.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, 1977. Anti-Oedipus. New York: Viking. Habermas, Jürgen, 1975. Legitimation Crisis. Boston: Beacon Press.
Hindess, Mary et al. 1977. Marx’s Capital and Capitalism Today. London: Routle-
Lefebvre, Henri, 1971. Everyday Life in the Modern World. New York: Harper Torch Books.
Marcuse, Herbert, 1964. One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1973. Adventures of the Dialectic. Chicago: Northwestern.
Ollman, Bertell and Vernoff, Edward, eds. 1982. The Left Academy. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Williams, Raymond, 1977. Marxism and Literature. London: Oxford University Press.
1. This article originally appeared in Psychology and Social Theory, No. 4, 1984, and was reviewed for publication in the current content.
