[10] He argues that the tradition represents a divorce between socialist theory and working-class practice that resulted from the defeat and stagnation of the Western working class after 1920.
[1] The Prison Notebooks of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, written during this period, but not published until much later, are also classified as belonging to Western Marxism.
[16] After the Second World War, a French Western Marxism was constituted by theorists based around the journals Arguments, Les Temps Modernes and Socialisme ou Barbarie such as Lucien Goldmann, Henri Lefebvre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
[1] Western Marxism often emphasises the importance of the study of culture, class consciousness, and subjectivity for an adequate Marxist understanding of society.
[1] Western Marxists have thus tended to heavily use Marx's theories of commodity fetishism, ideology, and alienation,[19] and they have expanded on these with new concepts such as reification and cultural hegemony.
[22] Concepts taken from German Lebensphilosophie, Weberian sociology, Piagetian psychology, French philosophy of science, phenomenology, and existentialism have all been assimilated and critiqued by Western Marxists.
[24] While Engels sees dialectics as a universal and scientific law of nature, Western Marxists do not view Marxism as a general science, but as a theory of the cultural and historical structure of society.
Some have offered qualified support, others have been highly critical, and still others have changed their views over time:[29] Lukács, Gramsci, and Della Volpe were members of Soviet-aligned parties; Korsch, Herbert Marcuse, and Guy Debord were inimical to Soviet Communism and instead advocated council communism; Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser, and Lefebvre were, at different periods, supporters of the Soviet-aligned Communist Party of France, but all would later become disillusioned with it; Ernst Bloch lived in and supported the Eastern Bloc, but lost faith in Soviet Communism towards the end of his life.