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A Truncated Marxism: On the Ideological Structure of Western Marxism

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Abstract

This study presents an overview of the ideological framework of “Western Marxism.” This framework has a number of components, which are described in terms of a series of reductions, determinations, and the suspicions entertained by Western Marxists. The result was a truncated type of Marxism that cut itself off from the Marxist–Leninist tradition. It did so by reducing Marxism to the works of Marx alone and calling this “historical materialism,” which entailed a rejection of Engels’s significant contributions in history, science, and theory, and thus entailed a rejection of the subsequent developments of Marxism. This Western Marxism has been primarily promoted by “freelance intellectuals” with virtually no connection to Workers’ or Communist Parties and was determined by an assumed ideological position before a proletarian revolution, was shaped by Western liberalism and imperialism, and has been constantly tempted into religiously inspired utopian versions of socialism. With deep suspicions of the state and national liberation, of science and technology, and of the importance of productive forces, this Western Marxism was always hoping for the ideal revolution (or even better, a peaceful transition) that would very quickly produce a utopian socialist society organised only by the people and without a state. This ideological framework also entailed a dismissal of the actual experience in developing countries of successful proletarian revolutions and the construction of socialism.

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Notes

  1. Since this study may also be read by Chinese scholars, where necessary and possible I include references to both the English text (at times translated from another language) and to the Chinese text.

  2. Lukács’s charge that Engels’s approach to dialectics is inadequate indicates the significant residues of idealist philosophy in Lukács’s thought at the time.

  3. We may think here of Althusser’s persuasive arguments concerning ideology, the semi-autonomous realms of capitalist society in which the economic base is determinative in the last instance, and his late turn to an “aleatory” Marxism of the chance encounter.

  4. Althusser deployed “dialectical materialism” in an idiosyncratic manner, as the philosophy that follows the scientific discovery of history, which then becomes “historical materialism” (Althusser 1972, 165, 1990, 109).

  5. Curiously, Anderson neglects the enormous sacrifice of the Soviet Red Army in defeating fascism in the European theatre of the Second World War.

  6. Needless to say, this suggestion that Stalin invented “socialism in one country” goes against all of the facts (Van Ree 1998, 2015).

  7. Marxist engagements with, efforts to understand, and criticisms of Western religion have a much longer history (Boer 2014). My interest here is with specific features of more recent Western Marxist engagements with religion.

  8. This has been a recurring theme in Jameson’s work (Jameson 1991, 260–278), but I refer here to talk delivered in China and published in the Chinese collected works of Jameson. One may also consult the collation of essays on science fiction and utopia, with a lengthy closing reflection, in Archaeologies of the Future (Jameson 2005).

  9. Since the Western Marxist literature on these questions is rather voluminous, see the full discussion in the first chapter of Friedrich Engels and the Foundations of Socialist Governance (Boer 2021b, 9–24).

  10. It is this primary sense that has come through in the Chinese minzu, although as the Cihai notes two overlapping senses may now be found: the first is a group with common characteristics within a state (so that China has 56 minzu), while the other sense is due to Western influences, so that one also finds the “Chinese nation” and even “minzu-guojia” (Xia and Chen 2009, 2734).

  11. See further, Socialism in Power (Boer 2023).

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    Roland Boer

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Boer, R. A Truncated Marxism: On the Ideological Structure of Western Marxism. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. 16, 145–170 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-023-00366-0

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