Marxist humanism

Marxist humanism is an international body of thought and political action rooted in an interpretation of the works of Karl Marx. It is an investigation into "what human nature consists of and what sort of society would be most conducive to human thriving" from a critical perspective rooted in Marxist philosophy. Marxist humanists argue that Marx himself was concerned with investigating similar questions.

Marxist humanism was born in 1932 with the publication of Marx's ''Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844'' and reached a degree of prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. Marxist humanists contend that there is continuity between the early philosophical writings of Marx, in which he develops his theory of alienation, and the structural description of capitalist society found in his later works such as '' Capital''. They hold that it is necessary to grasp Marx's philosophical foundations to understand his later works properly.

Contrary to the official dialectical materialism of the Soviet Union and to interpretations of Marx rooted in the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser, Marxist humanists argue that Marx's work was an extension or transcendence of enlightenment humanism. Where other Marxist philosophies see Marxism as a natural science, Marxist humanism reaffirms the doctrine of "man is the measure of all things" – that humans are essentially different to the rest of the natural order and should be treated so by Marxist theory.

Origins

The beginnings of Marxist humanism lie with the publication of György Lukács's '' History and Class Consciousness'' and Karl Korsch's ''Marxism and Philosophy'' in 1923. In these books, Lukács and Korsch proffer a Marxism that emphasizes the Hegelian element of Karl Marx's thought. Marxism is not simply a theory of political economy that improves on its predecessors, nor a scientific sociology, akin to the natural sciences. Marxism is primarily a critique – a self-conscious transformation of society.

Korsch's book underscores Marx's doctrine of the unity of theory and practice, viewing socialist revolution as the "realization of philosophy". Marxism does not make philosophy obsolete, as "vulgar" Marxism believes; instead Marxism preserves the truths of philosophy until their revolutionary transformation into reality.

The most salient essay in Lukács's collection introduces the concept of " reification". In capitalist societies, human properties, relations and actions are transformed into properties, relations and actions of Man-produced things, which become independent of Man and govern his life. These Man-created things are then imagined to be originally independent of Man. Conversely, human beings are transformed into thing-like beings that do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing-world. Lukács argues that elements of this concept are implicit in the analysis of commodity fetishism found in Marx's magnum opus '' Capital''. Bourgeois society loses sight of the role of human action in the creation of social meaning. It thinks value is immanent in things and regards persons as commodities.

The writings of Antonio Gramsci are also extremely influential on the development of a humanist understanding of Marxism. Insisting on Marx's debt to Hegel, Gramsci sees Marxism as a "philosophy of praxis" and an "absolute historicism" that transcends traditional materialism and traditional idealism.

The first publication of Marx's '' Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts'' in 1932 greatly changed the reception of his work. This early work of Marx was written in 1844, when Marx was twenty-five or twenty-six years old. The ''Manuscripts'' situated Marx's reading of political economy, his relationship to the philosophies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach, and his views on communism, within a new theoretical framework. In the ''Manuscripts'', Marx borrows philosophical terminology from Hegel and Feuerbach to posit a critique of capitalist society based in " alienation". Through his own activity, Man becomes alien from his human possibilities: to the products of his own activity, to the nature in which he lives, to other human beings and to himself. The concept is not merely descriptive, it is a call for de-alienation through radical change of the world.

On publication, the significance of the ''1844 Manuscripts'' was recognized by Marxists such as Raya Dunayevskaya, Herbert Marcuse and Henri Lefebvre. In the period after the Second World War, the texts were translated into Italian and discussed by Galvano Della Volpe. The philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre were also drawn to Marxism by the ''Manuscripts'' at this time. In 1961, a volume containing an introduction by Erich Fromm was published in the US.

As they provided a missing link between the Hegelian philosophical humanism of Marx's early writings and the economics of the later Marx, Marx's ''Grundrisse'' were also an important source for Marxist humanism. This 1,000-page collection of Marx's working notes for ''Capital'' was first published in Moscow in 1939 and became available in an accessible edition in 1953. Several analysts (most notably Roman Rozdolsky) have commented that the ''Grundrisse'' shows the role played by the early Marx's concerns with alienation and the Hegelian concept of dialectic in the formation of his magnum opus.

Currents

In the aftermath of the occupation of France and the Second World War, the independent leftist journal '' Les Temps modernes'' was founded in 1946. Among its original editorial board were the existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. While both lent support to the politics and tactics of the French Communist Party and the Soviet Union during this period, they concurrently attempted to formulate a phenomenological and existential Marxism that opposed the Stalinist version. In their view, the failure of the Western Communist Parties to lead successful revolutions and the development of an authoritarian state structure in the Soviet Union were both connected to the " naturalism" and " scientism" of the official orthodox Marxist theory. Orthodox Marxism is not a theory of revolutionary self-emancipation but a self-proclaimed science that imposes a direction upon history from above in the name of irrefutable "iron laws". Against this, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty argued for a subject-centered view of history that emphasized the lived experience of historical actors as the source of cognition.

In 1939, Henri Lefebvre, then a member of the French Communist Party, published ''Dialectical Materialism''. This book, written in 1934–5, advanced a reconstruction of Marx's oeuvre in the light of the ''1844 Manuscripts''. Lefebvre argued here that Marx's dialectic was not a "Dialectics of Nature" (as set forth by Friedrich Engels