Marxist humanism
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.
[4] Contrary to the official dialectical materialism of the Soviet Union and to the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser, Marxist humanists argue that Marx's work was an extension or transcendence of enlightenment humanism.
[15] 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.
[25] Scholars such as Roman Rosdolsky have noted how the Grundrisse revealed the ongoing influence of alienation and Hegelian dialectics in shaping Marx’s later theories, including his magnum opus.
This shift was marked by the creation of the journal Arguments, edited by Lefebvre, Edgar Morin, Jean Duvignaud, Kostas Axelos, and Pierre Fougeyrollas — all former or current members of the PCF.
Kostas Axelos and Pierre Fougeyrollas, for example, followed Heidegger in viewing Marxism as flawed by its traditional metaphysical assumptions, and questioned the "less-than-human" values of Marxist humanism.
It combined grassroots demands for workers’ control with the philosophical insights of early Marxist texts, creating a vision of socialism that transcended Khrushchev’s cautious rejection of Stalin’s "cult of personality.
These merged in 1959 to form the New Left Review, a bi-monthly publication committed to "socialist humanism" until its founding editors (E. P. Thompson, John Saville, and Stuart Hall) were replaced by Perry Anderson’s editorial team in 1962.
[37] The Frankfurt School, emerging from the Institute for Social Research in 1923, developed critical theory, a philosophical approach that sought to integrate Marxist critique with insights from psychoanalysis, sociology, and cultural analysis.
Key figures such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and later Jürgen Habermas, aimed to analyze the conditions that maintained social domination and impeded human emancipation.
[38] Unlike classical Marxism, which emphasized the economic base and revolutionary agency of the proletariat, the Frankfurt School expanded the scope of critique to include the role of culture, ideology, and mass communication in sustaining capitalist domination.
[42] Unlike Horkheimer and Adorno, who became more skeptical of revolutionary possibilities, Marcuse's ideas gained traction with the New Left in the 1960s, emphasizing personal liberation, direct political action, and critiques of bureaucratic rationality.
Instead of positing an essentialist notion of human nature, critical theorists argued that subjectivity itself was historically conditioned and mediated by ideology, culture, and power relations.
Marxist humanism echoes earlier cultural trends, particularly the Romantic reaction against Enlightenment rationalism, and draws heavily from the German idealist traditions, including the works of Kant, Hegel, and hermeneutic philosophy.
Instead, they argue that human social practice has a purposive, transformative character, and thus requires a mode of understanding different from the detached, empirical observation of the natural sciences.
[76] The main influence on Marx's thinking in this regard is Ludwig Feuerbach, who in his Essence of Christianity aims to overcome an inappropriate separation of individuals from their essential human nature.
[89] Liberation will come when people recognize what God really is and, through a community that subjects human essence to no alien limitation, reclaim the goodness, knowledge and power they have projected heavenward.
Where Hegel identifies human essence with self-consciousness,[76] Marx articulates a concept of species-being (Gattungswesen),[96] according to which Man's essential nature is that of a free producer, freely reproducing his own conditions of life.
[113] For communism to positively abolish private property and self-alienation, it must affirm humanity’s essence as a social being, reconciling individual and collective existence, freedom, and necessity.
[114] In The German Ideology (1845), Marx and his co-author Friedrich Engels identify the division of labor as the fundamental source of alienation, again placing private property as a secondary phenomenon.
Marx and Engels argue against abstract notions of "Man" and "human essence," asserting that real individuals, within specific historical contexts, are the true agents of history.
[119] By historicizing economic categories, Marx argues that alienation is neither natural nor inevitable but rather a product of specific social relations that can be overcome through revolutionary transformation.
[130] In the Grundrisse, Marx introduces a speculative perspective on ancient tribal property, reflecting a broader theoretical continuity with insights from his earlier Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843).
First systematically developed by György Lukács in History and Class Consciousness (1923), reification extends Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, highlighting how capitalist social structures transform human activity into impersonal forces that dominate individuals.
[154] Influenced by Max Weber and Hegel, Lukács argues that capitalist rationalization fosters a fragmented consciousness, wherein individuals perceive society as a collection of static, unchangeable structures rather than a historically dynamic totality.
Whereas Aristotle viewed praxis primarily in the context of ethical and political life, Marx saw it as revolutionary activity, emphasizing that human beings transform both their environment and themselves through labor.
While Hegel saw history as the unfolding of Absolute Spirit through rational necessity, Marx sought to "demystify" this abstraction by grounding historical development in human labor and social relations.
Althusser holds that Marx's thought is marked by a radical epistemological break, to have occurred in 1845[176] – The German Ideology being the earliest work to betray the discontinuity.
"[187] Contra Althusser, Leszek Kołakowski argues that although it is true that in Capital Marx treats human individuals as mere embodiments of functions within a system of relations apparently possessed of its own dynamic and created independently, he does so not as a general methodical rule, but as a critique of the dehumanizing nature of exchange-value.
[188] When Marx and Engels present individuals as non-subjects subordinated to structures that they unwittingly support, their intention is to illuminate the absence of control that persons have in bourgeois society.
