Abstract
The recent outpouring of social theory, social criticism and historical writing from a Marxist perspective is a development unparalleled in the history of the United States. Even the upsurge of radical and socialist practice in the first decades of the century and in the brief “red” decade, the 1930’s, failed to produce the volume and sweep of intellectual activity that began to emerge in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. Certainly there were notable works during the earlier years: the translations by Daniel De Leon and Ernest Untermann of the writings of Marx, Engels, Kautsky and other European socialists; the pioneering Theoretical System of Karl Marx by an American lawyer, Louis Boudin; and finally, the monumental corpus of Thorstein Veblen, whose Marxism was always coded in a language that might be called specifically American. If Veblen was not a self-proclaimed Marxist, even a cursory reading of his Theory of Business Enterprise and Absentee Ownership would reveal his debt to the Marxist tradition.
Theorists have interpreted Marxism in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
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Notes
Edward Kirkland, A History of American Economic Life (New York: Appleton Century, 1939)
Charles Beard, Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York, 1924).
See especially Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966)
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) and other books
Stewart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).
Martin Jay, Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little Brown, 1973
Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974)
Susan Buck-Morse, Origins of Negative Dialectics (New York: Macmillan, 1977)
Paul Breines and Andrew Arato, The Young Georg Lukacs (New York: Seabury Press, 1978).
Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)
Ronald Aronson, Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World (London: New Left Books, 1980).
Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 25.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of Dialectic (Evanston: North-western University Press, 1973). This text is perhaps one of the most important symptomatic readings of Marxism influenced by the Cold War. Although Merleau-Ponty was by no means on the right in the manner, for instance, of a Raymond Aron (whose conception of Marxism was at once deformed and marred by a lack of intellectual depth), his ultimate defense of individual liberty was conditioned by his conception of Communism as among its leading opponents. Thus, Merleau speaks forcefully against Stalinism, particularly against its French form. But he is most eloquent when he accuses Marxism of a priorism in its assessment of the proletariat as historical subject. According to Merleau, this is merely a mask for the statement that the theoretician — i.e. the party — is the true Marxist subject. While there is much truth in this charge when applied to Leninism after Lenin, the question remains whether Leninism is Marxism in the twentieth century. See my own contribution to this issue in the second part of the present volume.
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971). A careful reading of the section on State and Civil Society reveals Gramsci’s remarkable contribution to Marxist theory in its most powerful expression. Here Gramsci argues that the discourses of politics, culture, and philosophy are not merely expressions of this or that ideology representing various classes in society, but are material practices that configure the chances for social power. His concept is of civil society as the site where fractions of various classes, including the subaltern classes, fight out the struggle for power. Gramsci is the first Marxist after Marx to stress the importance of the ideological dimension of domination. His argument that cultural hegemony is a central feature of the rise of class fractions to power over society, that discursive hegemony signals power, prefigures the work of contemporary writers such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and others.
Actually, Pannakoek and Korsch were deeply interested in the relation of Marxism and culture. As John Gerber has argued, the early writings of Pannakoek are devoted to explicating a Marxist theory of science on the basis of the scientific materialism of one of Marx’s followers, Joseph Deitzgen. Gerber shows that Pannakoek propounded a theory according to which culture — i.e. ideologies, beliefs and art — were formed in the mind as a part of the past’s legacy upon consciousness. Thus there was no correspondence between ideas and the material world, no chance of reflection theory. Ideas referred to the past as well as the present. The transformation of the material world produces a revolution in ideas, but they are obliged to contend with “false consciousness” inherited from the past. Korsch’s book on Marx is, in a large measure, a work of historical materialist method. His concept of historical specification as the mediation that conditions the social totality is certainly directed against what he regarded as the metaphysical appropriation by Stalinism. Nevertheless, Pannakoek’s major work in philosophy is completed before the First World War, even if Korsch remained interested in the scientific issues within Marxism until his death, John Gerber, Introduction, in Serge Bricanier, Pannakoek and the Councils (St. Louis, Telos Press, 1978).
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© 1990 Stanley Aronowitz
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Aronowitz, S. (1990). Introduction. In: The Crisis in Historical Materialism. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20696-4_1
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