This is not the easy-to-read primer I was hoping for but instead a challenging and sophisticated analysis which chews through the tradition of Western Marxism from its origins in Hegel right up to the time of publication (1986) in highly technical and sometimes incomprehensible jargon. Also, it is spikey and opinionated, so much so that you begin to realise that other scholars might drastically disagree with his conclusions. And it is often so witheringly dismissive of the Great Thinkers it discusses, that it is laugh-out-loud funny.

The state capitalism thesis adopted by the Frankfurt School stood almost as a pretext for a posture of Kulturpessimismus so emphatically asserted that it made previous prophets of cultural doom, like Burckhardt or Spengler seem, by contrast, positively cheery. (p.115)

Well, it made me laugh.

José Guilherme Merquior

José Guilherme Merquior (1941 to 1991) was a Brazilian diplomat, academic, writer, literary critic and philosopher. He was a prolific writer with about 22 books to his name, including studies of Foucault (1985) and structuralism (1987). He had a doctorate in sociology from the London School of Economics, which was directed by Ernest Gellner, and also studied under Claude Lévi-Strauss (whose ideas he largely rejected).

‘Western Marxism’ was part of the Paladin Movements and Ideas series. Merquior was a foreigner and it shows. What I mean is he had a non-Brit’s feel for a very wide range of European philosophy which is rare in the Anglo-Saxon world. Even when British and American academics know the names and the theories of European philosophers, they tend to present them in an Anglo context, which is all pragmatism and common sense, and so makes them look a bit silly.

Merquior, by contrast, is not only extraordinarily familiar with a very wide range of Continental philosophers going back as far as Leibnitz (and at times, to Plato and Aristotle), but conveys a real feel for the way the tradition they come from – especially the huge system of philosophical idealism created by George Hegel (1770 to 1831) – and how everyone who came after him reacted to his vast legacy (what he calls ‘Hegel and Marx country’, p.11).

This is good because you feel like you really are entering an alien world but, then again, bad, because it means substantial chunks of the book are incomprehensible. Partly this is because he tosses around names and references to philosophy which, for me at any rate, require a lot more explanation than he gives.

Adler tried to ground Marxist social science on Kantian epistemology, just as Bernstein had tried to base socialism on Kantian ethics. (p.9)

Where I’d have benefited from even a passing sentence explaining what Kantian epistemology or Kantian ethics actually are…

But mostly it’s because every sentence, every paragraph, assumes a degree-level knowledge of German philosophy and beyond. Here he is describing the different types of theology which were popular at the University of Tübingen when Hegel was a student there, namely the God of negative theology and the God of Gnosis:

In both cases the strength of objective reality stems from the same source: it derives from a ‘labour of negation’ operating within an objectivity subjectively grounded, since it bears at each step the imprint of the Absolute-as-subject, acting as a historical process, or at the very least the mark of man’s consciousness, striving to restore the divine amid the evil of the world. (p.16)

Or:

The nodal point in this connection is the problem of the ontological status of the present. (p.18)

Or:

The autotelic state is the actuality of the moral idea ‘clear to itself’ in its capacity as a ‘will thinking and knowing itself’. (p.28)

The first chapter is all written like this as Merquior goes about explaining the origins, evolution and implications of Hegel’s philosophy, for only if you have a good grasp of Hegel can you begin to understand 1) what Marx did to Hegel’s vision and terminology and 2) how subsequent critics of Marx returned to Hegel to revive aspects of his thought implicit in traditional Marxism but which they felt had been smothered by materialist and positivist currents.

There are 11 or so chapters. The first two cover Hegel and Marx, the others move on to consider individual thinkers of WM. They each have the same structure: the first part of the chapter gives a brisk explanation of the thought of the thinker in question, the second part gives an assessment.

The assessments are often even harder to follow than the summaries. This is for at least 2 reasons:

1. Because he rushes pretty quickly through a gallery of critics of the thinker he’s just summarised, so you need to have a working knowledge of the position and approach of a large number of modern scholars and commentators, some of whom are mentioned only for a sentence i.e. you don’t really get to understand where they’re coming from.
2. This blizzard of perspectives is simply too much to process – while you’re still reeling from trying to understand Hegel’s view on half a dozen philosophical topics, you’re then bombarded by ten or 15 critiques which come from all sides of the spectrum, which redefine Hegel in a bewildering variety of ways, from a prophet of arch-conservatism to a defender of real philosophical freedom, and every possible position in between.

See what I mean when I say it is emphatically not a handy little primer? The opposite – it’s a very hard read indeed. Nonetheless, some key points emerge which can be translated into normalspeak. I’ll summarise what we learn about Western Marxism as a whole and then give notes on what I picked up, or understood, about the individual thinkers Merquior profiles.

1. Key aspects of Western Marxism

Western Marxism (WM) rebels against, or is distinct from, the tradition of Marxist thought enshrined in the Soviet tradition and associated with Lenin and the most noted early exponent of Soviet-style Marxist-Leninism, Nikolai Bukharin.

It’s difficult defining WM by beliefs since there’s a lot of diversity, but it’s easy to point to who the main exponents of Western Marxism were:

• György Lukács (1885 to 1971)
• Ernst Bloch (1885 to 1977)
• Karl Korsch (1886 to 1961)
• Antonio Gramsci (1891 to 1937)
• the Frankfurt School — Max Horkheimer (1895 to 1973), Theodor Adorno (1903 to 1969)
• Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 to 1980)
• second generation Frankfurt – Jurgen Habermas (b.1929)
• structuralist Marxism – Louis Althusser (1918 to 1990)

Agency over determinism

Lenin and Bukharin, following the previous generation of Engels (d.1895) and Georgi Plekhanov (d.1918), promoted a deterministic historical materialism, believing that objective economic laws were the driving force of all human history. Accordingly, they believed that human consciousness is essentially a reflection of nature and social reality, and that historical change operates through masses and classes. This orthodox view is enshrined in works such as Bukharin’s ‘Historical Materialism’ (1921) and Kautsky’s ‘The Materialist Historical Constitution of the State and the Development of Mankind’ (1927).

By contrast Western Marxists give much more importance to the individual, to individual will, and assign consciousness a role in creating reality, both individual and social reality, not just passively reflecting it.

Back to libertarian Marx

This is linked to another overarching theme, which is that Western Marxists tend to dissociate themselves from the brutality of the Stalinist regime which developed out of Leninism, in order to assert a more liberal or libertarian form of Marxism. This explains why they tend to prioritise Marx’s early writings over the later ones, because they claim these are more humanitarian than the later prophet of crushing historical materialism.

The centrality of Kulturkritik

The clearest difference from Soviet / Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy is in subject matter: Orthodox Marxism is preoccupied with economic history and the politics of class struggle; Western Marxism is interested in culture.

Instead of analysing processes of capital accumulation or the mechanics of crisis and the reproduction of social relations, most major Western Marxists have written extensively on the problems of alienation and reification within capitalist society.

WM grew as a set of philosophical writings seldom engaging in sociological, let alone economic, issues. (p.44)

To put it simply, orthodox Marxist-Leninism is concerned with the substructure, the infrastructure, the economic base of society – whereas Western Marxism is interested in the superstructure, in culture, consumption and psychology.

The Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy

Merquior lists the leading figures of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy:

• Marx and Engels, the founders of Marxism
• Bernstein, the leading revisionist
• Kautsky, the high priest of orthodoxy at the time of the Second International (1889 to 1916)
• Lenin, leader of the first Marxist revolution
• Bukharin, leading theorist of the Bolshevik regime

Is Marxism a sociology, a science or a critique?

Those traditional Marxist-Leninists all saw Marxism as a social science, explaining all aspects of society. They thought Marx was seeking a fully scientific explanation of history which would incorporate and subsume all theories of economic, social and political change. It was a total system.

By contrast, Western Marxists think of Marxism not as a social science but a method of critique. Marxism provides the tools for a more humanistic analysis of the plight of the individual and the nature of culture in capitalist societies. Hence the German term widely associated with Western Marxism, Kulturkritik. Western Marxism deploys the tools and insights generated by classical Marxism to examine the plight of culture and the individual in the ongoing capitalist societies of the West. But, as Merquior acidly points out, as time went by i.e. after the Second World War, they slowly abandoned any idea of actually changing anything, and Western Marxism devolved into a form of superior sniping from the sidelines.

The tone of crisis

Western Marxism is dominated by the notion of crisis. Born in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and amid the economic and political crises of the 1920s and 1930s, it carries the stigmata of its period – it talks about the crisis of the West, the crisis of capitalism, the crisis of the individual.

It developed into a passionate critique of all aspects of West European capitalism which chuntered on in academic circles in the boring 1950s, trying to dodge the implications of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising – but then flared into life during the political outbursts of the late 1960s.

Since then it has been present in humanities courses across the Western world, which teach students how to use its tools to critique capitalist society, capitalist culture, movies and news media, advertising and consumerism, with zero impact on actual society.

Eclecticism

In the hands of Soviet bureaucrats, of course the Leninist tradition ossified and any deviation from the sacred texts became heresy. The first generation of WM, Lukács and Gramsci, remained wedded to the Leninist achievement, Lukács in particular escaping into exile in Russia where he was forced to kowtow to the growing conformism under Stalin. But the next generation, especially the Frankfurt School, absorbed a wide variety of influences, from Weberian sociology to Freudian psychoanalysis, Sartrean existentialism, and then the successive waves of structuralist thinking, so much so that in the end Merquior wonders whether they were Marxists at all.

2. Hegel

Hegel started off by studying theology. In his student days, forms of negative theology were popular. This is the notion that God made the world but then withdrew or concealed himself so that God can only be revealed through man’s activity. Man has to, in a mystical sense, rescue or save God. The negative of God’s absence triggers the positive of man’s theological endeavour.

When Hegel moved over into pure philosophy (epistemology, ontology etc) he brought many of these ideas with him. The role of God was taken by something Hegel called Spirit, or World Spirit. The idea is that this World Spirit changes and evolves as a result of man’s labour or activity.

And here is Hegel’s key contribution: Hegel historicises philosophy. Human beings, human activity, human perception and all the categories philosophy studies do not exist in a timeless state but are radically mediated by historical change, by changing historical societies.

Stated like that it sounds like a truism, that different historical periods produce different types of politics, culture, humans are constrained by the times they live in. So far, so obvious. Hegel’s claim is that the procession of human societies embody the evolution of the World Spirit progressively perfecting itself.

An obvious objection is, How do you explain historical change? By the process Hegel named the dialectic. As you might expect in a sophisticated account like this, Merquior spends some time wrestling with the different definitions of dialectic which Hegel gave in different works, and which various commentators have wrangled over for the 200 years since.

But the basic idea is that a particular society triumphs but at the expense of values or human potentials which act as a negative force, which are its internal contradictions. Thus the Roman Empire triumphed for a very long time but was based on mass slavery which was, in the long term, unsustainable. All societies tend to contain negative or contradictory elements like this, which create a tension and, at some point, lead to their overthrow and the rise of a new type of society. Every society contains the seeds of its own supercession. Hegel called these elements of alienation which he saw as a positive thing, triggering the triumph of new societies. In the hands of his followers this word, alienation, would acquire the purely negative meaning it has for us today.

Hegel was a student during the heady days of the French Revolution and then the rise of Napoleon so he felt he had witnessed the way one long-lasting regime (the absolute monarchy of the Bourbon kings) eventually generated so many contradictory forces within itself, that it was violently overthrown.

But the thing to bear in mind is that Hegel wasn’t in any way a revolutionary himself and when he wrote about these things it wasn’t in political or sociological terms – it was in terms of a supremely high-level abstract philosophy which talked about the way the World Spirit moved through these successive historical eras in pursuit of greater self-awareness, striving to achieve full consciousness.

Human history is the process whereby human reason moves forward towards a state of perfection. Merquior later, frequently refers to Hegel’s central contribution being his theory of process.

This is a necessitarian theory of history in that it claims the present is in some sense a fulfilment of all which has gone before. But it isn’t narrowly determinist because Hegel sees the parade of history as a steady increase in human self-awareness and it is this steady growth in self-consciousness – rather than more literal ideas about the state or contract theory or individual liberty – which Hegel means when he talks about Freedom. All his ideas are about big abstracts with capital letters. Humanity wins Freedom as the World Spirit unfurls itself through History.

3. Marx

Even before he was dead (1831) Hegel’s works were being contested by what was quickly named the Hegelian Left (1835 to 1843). These included Ludwig Feuerbach whose book ‘The Essence of Christianity’ (1841) caused a scandal by taking a purely anthropological approach to religion. He said there is no God and organised religion merely reflects man’s alienation from his own nature.

Moses Hess in ‘The European Triarchy’ (1841) adapted Hegel’s vision to a revolutionary mindset but claimed each revolution represented a step forward in humanity’s ability to love, leading to the final revolution where Christian love and charity would become universal. He it was who took Feuerbach’s idea of religious or psychological alienation and transferred it to society as a whole in a vision of economic alienation.

Karl Marx had attended Hegel’s lectures and shared the restiveness of the younger generation. His first works were soaked in the German Idealist tradition:

• ‘The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’ (doctoral thesis, 1841)
• ‘The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law’ (1842)
• ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ (1843)

Marx absorbed Feuerbach’s anthropological critique and Hess’s necessity of revolution but lacked a motivating force in his theory. This came when his friend Friedrich Engels suggested economics as the key engine for historical change.

Merquior gives a fascinating summary of Marx’s impact on communism and socialism, explaining the difference between the two.

Until Marx, communism was economically illiterate. (p.44)

The idea of everyone sharing goods in common is very old, going back to the ancient world if not before, cropping up as a Christian variant and in various utopias. What it didn’t have was any methodology, any ideas about how to attain this material equality.

Meanwhile, socialism is a much more recent invention, dating from and a response to industrialisation. Critics objected to ‘the anarchy of production’ in early industrial capitalism, and theorised that it should be brought under state control, supervised, planned and directed (Owen in Britain, Saint Simon in France).

Thus, while communisms were political movements, revolutionary and distributivist, socialisms were economic creeds, reformist and productivist. What Marx did was both to economicize communism and politicize socialism. (p.44)

He taught communism to speak the language of economics and socialism to adopt the idea of revolutionary social transformation, from communism.

Hess had written about economic alienation as a sad thing. Marx made it into a dynamic engine of change. Eventually so many workers will be alienated from their work, workplaces and society, that they will be forced to bring about radical social change.

But all this took place in the arena, within the conceptual space, mapped out by Hegel. Marx took Hegel’s idea of a World Spirit moving forward through different societies and turned it into humanity moving forward through different stages of economic development. Writing in Hegelian terms, Marx thinks the advent of a communist society will be the end of history because the World Spirit/Humanity will finally come to know itself completely, overcome all self-alienation, the triumph of Reason. This partly explains why the polymathic and prolific Marx never got round to giving any description or guidelines as to what his communist utopia would look like – leaving dictators like Lenin and Stalin, not to mention umpteen Third World revolutionaries (Castro, Pol Pot) to make it up.

Marx adopted Hegel’s teleology wholesale. Communism isn’t something which has to be imposed on any society, anywhere. It is the necessary, logical outcome of human development. It is an unstoppable force. Ferdinand Lassalle told Marx that he was a ‘Hegel turned communist’ (as opposed to Hegel’s political support for the bourgeois Prussian state of his day).

A fundamental premise of all this, or ‘discovery’, is the theory of historical materialism, best expressed in the Preface to Marx’s ‘Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ (1859). The relevant paragraph reads:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production.

The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

Things change when:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

For Marx, this economic explanation isn’t just passive, it doesn’t just produce interesting intellectual analyses of various societies. It is dynamic, it explains how societies have and must change the future.

In ‘The Communist Manifesto’ (1848) Marx and Engels mapped out their analysis and predictions about capitalist society:

All political struggles are struggles between classes

Classes represent elements in the means of production.

In industrial capitalism only two classes matter, the capitalists or industrial bourgeoisie, and the workers or industrial proletariat.

Capitalism works rapaciously to accumulate capital through profit i.e. the rich become richer.

Capitalism tends towards monopoly so a slowly dwindling number of capitalists will become super-rich.

Meaning that the rest of society will become poorer, immiserated, proletarianised.

Eventually the proletariat, probably prodded by Marxist intellectuals, will realise that it is no longer a class like other classes but has come to represent Humanity, Marx’s version of the World Spirit.

When it realises it has the numbers and represents humanity, the proletariat will embark on its great revolution which will overthrow the capitalist class, abolish private ownership, take control of the means of production and distribution and, since these will be held and managed in common, everyone will be equal.

History will have ended in the communist utopia or, as Hegel would have put it, the World Spirit coming to complete self-consciousness.

Critique of Marx

Marx and Engels spent the rest of their lives feverishly expecting the great collapse but, of course, it never came. Economic crises, yes. Political revolutions, especially in unstable France, yes. Even the establishment of a Commune in Paris in 1871. But the radical transformation of a capitalist country into a communist one, no.

Instead, Marxism turned out to be the ideological vehicle under which backward, undeveloped peasant economies industrialised themselves, in Russia, then China, then across the first world. This is directly opposite to what Marx’s system predicted.

In the industrialised, developed world, contrary to everything he predicted, things improved. The misery and political turbulence of the Hungry Forties receded and the 1850s and 60s were a golden age for capitalism with a tremendous boost to the standard of living of the middle classes and upper working classes.

Merquior moves onto a subtler question: most romantic thinkers have hated modernity i.e. the world they lived in. Hegel was an exception, commending 1830s Prussia as the climax of the evolution of the World Spirit. What of Marx? Well, he was conflicted. He thought capitalism was evil for exploiting the workers, but he was also in awe of how it was transforming the world, genuine awe which comes over very clearly in the pages of The Communist Manifesto.

But at the same time he was ferociously against the deformations of the capitalist system. Merquior describes the rather challenging idea that it was ‘the commodity form’ which Marx most consistently wrote about, the mere idea of making something, anything, a commodity by giving it a value and allowing its exchange for money.

As to political forms, although Marx described himself as a democrat, at the same time he wrote again and again of bourgeois liberal democracy being the superstructure concomitant of capitalist exploitation and therefore having to be overthrown.

This was reinforced by his concept of ‘freedom’. Being a German philosopher and good Hegelian, Marx thought of freedom in terms of self-realisation, ‘the self-actualisation of human essence’, of the overcoming of the alienation of being compelled by capitalist production. Therefore he didn’t trouble too much about the John Stuart Mill-type ideas about the laws necessary to guarantee freedoms under the state, freedom of speech, travel, association, and so on.

For the German Idealist the legitimation of a society came from the windy idea that it represented the actualisation of history rather than representing the will of the people. Despising and downgrading this kind of bourgeois liberalism was to give permission to all the Marxist dictators of the twentieth century to do the same. Marx’s German Idealist mindset had a catastrophic impact on hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century and to the murder of tens of millions in the attempt to mould messy reality to the paradigms of German Idealist philosophy.

As to his economics, the lynchpin was long ago demolished. This was the notion of ‘surplus value’, the difference between the amount of labour put into a product, and what it’s sold for. Roughly speaking, capitalism cheats the worker of the difference. Put another way, the profit of the capitalist really belongs to the worker. From this insight comes the notion that the entire capitalist system is a form of organised theft, that the theft is enforced by all aspects of the system including the entire legal system, the courts and, if you protest against it, the police.

Merquior quotes later economists who roundly conclude that the labour theory of value is not accurate – many other factors contribute to a product’s value – and is also not, in the end, necessary for the theory of exploitation, Fundamentally, this or that price is irrelevant, it’s the notion that the worker is powerless because somebody else owns the means of production and uses it against him, which is the crux of the Marxist complaint.

Lastly, Merquior says the Marxist vision is based on the idea that each social system contains the seeds of the class which will overthrow it. This was certainly true of the bourgeoisie who overthrew feudalism, and the theory says that bourgeois capitalism will in turn harbour the proletariat which will grow and size and power till it overthrows the system. But Merquior says this is wrong because the proletariat is a different thing. It is by definition a weak and exploited mass, whereas the bourgeoisie who triumphed at the end of the medieval period were a highly educated elite who were able to radically restructure laws and customs, technology, trade routes and so on to suit their interests. The proletariat can’t do that at all.

In reality ‘the proletariat’ was a myth Marx created to carry the burden of his Hegelian view of social change. A large number of poor people working in factories definitely existed and yet, as Marx himself knew, there were more domestic servants than factory workers in Victorian society where he lived. His political vision was always a philosopher’s fiction.

Merquior cites Raymond Aron saying the most revealing thing about the entire Marxist worldview is how he (and Lenin, and Gramsci) all said that in practice you needed a small, focused, motivated political party to ‘raise the consciousness’ of the masses enough to trigger the revolution. In pure Hegelian Marx this shouldn’t be necessary, because communism isn’t something imposed from outside, it is an unstoppable force of history. Aron shrewdly points out that Marx and most of his followers lacked the courage of their convictions and so were forced to add the necessary role of the vanguard party which became, in every country where a communist revolution took place, the party of oppression, tyranny, famine, mass murder and then institutional corruption.

In reality, as the industrial proletariat Marx and Engels so valorised actually grew in size as a percentage of the population, as it continued to do throughout the 19th century, western societies became less revolutionary. Sure there were still marches to reduce the working day and week and riots which trashed the rich parts of cities, but the proletariat turned out, in Western Europe, to be a counter-revolutionary force.

So Marxism as a ‘system’ had three legacies:

1. It turned out to be the ideology under which Third World nations undertook (generally very violent and repressive) industrialisation. In this way it took the role played by the Protestant work ethic or whatever else you think was responsible for the industrial revolution in western Europe.
2. Because this happened first in Bolshevik Russia, chance had it that the Russian form, streamlined by Lenin, would be the form of Marxist thought broadcast all around the world along with traditional Russian brutality, so that anyone who disagreed with it within a communist country, or even within a communist movement in a capitalist country, was liable to be arrested or murdered by the Soviet police state or its countless copies.
3. Meanwhile, in Western Europe, Marxism went on to become a powerful form of critique and resistance to the most advanced forms of capitalism. Which is what this book is about.

4. György Lukács

Very clever man, raised in the Jewish household of a wealthy self-made business man and, like so many spoiled and pampered sons, rejected his parents. As a student just before the Great War, Lukács studied German philosophy and applied it to his natural gift for literary criticism. Whatever he wrote is interesting because he was a clever, insightful man. Merquior’s prose is demanding, as usual:

Lukács’s Kierkegaardian ethicism articulated two conceptual axes. (p.63)

There are some very dense pages explaining the development of Lukács’s early aesthetic theory and its preoccupation with artistic ‘form’ as a kind of utopian escape from the contingency of the world, larded with references to his intellectual influences and peers in Edwardian Hungary, and which sounds like this:

One might say that Lukács translated Popper’s celebration of form into a Laskian form-content of a value-sphere, art, utterly divorced from worldly reality: a dualist metaphysics of neo-Kantian origin allows him to go on contrasting ‘soul and form’ with inauthentic ‘life’. (p.66)

After having written essays about art and fiction for some 15 years and becoming a leading light of Budapest’s intellectual world, in 1923 Lukács published the single book which is arguably the founding text of Western Marxism, ‘History and Class Consciousness’. Comprising eight essays, it attempts a philosophical justification of Bolshevism (p.80). It does this in a number of ways, one of them being a revival of the Hegelian element in Marxism.

Lukács describes the distinction between actual class consciousness of the proletariat and the ‘ascribed’ class consciousness it would have if it understood its role in history.

The book is most famous for its emphasis on the psychological or cultural impact of capitalism, specifically the twin concepts of alienation and reification.

Lukács also argues that Marxism is superior to Hegel’s system, or any other philosophical system, for its focus on the totality of human history and of the human situation in the present.

Above all Lukács claims that even if all the claims of Marxism could be disproved, it would still be superior to all other philosophies due to its method, of dialectical materialism, ‘the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders.’

In the end, Merquior cynically concludes that the book’s achievement was to ‘concoct a version of Leninism highly palatable to the humanist mind’ (p.87). If Milton set out to justify the ways of God to men, Lukács set out to justify the ways of Lenin to European intellectuals.

Critique

Merquior’s critique is complex but has several elements. On the narrowly Hegelian front, Lukács claims to be reviving the Hegelian substrate of Marx’s thought but falls down on at least two Hegelian principles, subject theory and process theory, which Merquior explains in detail.

As Merquior pointed out in his introduction, a quality of the entire tradition of Western Marxism is its obsession with culture critique to the almost complete exclusion of economics or practical politics and Merquior highlights how ‘History and Class Consciousness’ Lukács inaugurates this.

He goes further to claim that, deep down, Lukács’s Marxism is utopian and follows a fundamentally Christian teleology: in his book, man’s alienation from the products of his labour and, by extension, from the entire capitalist world which enslaves him, plays the role of the Christian Fall from Grace. The communist revolution, which will be spearheaded by the proletariat conceived as representative of all humanity, is a modern secular form of the Christian notion of the Atonement or Restoration of fallen humanity, restoring humanity to completeness, full self-awareness, full autonomy.

Beneath all the Hegelian terminology and discussion of reification and alienation, lies a fundamentally Christian telos.

Merquior notes that Lukács later dismissed ‘History and Class Consciousness’ because it rejected not just capitalist social relations but the entirety of industrial civilisation, modern technology and the division of labour. It was profoundly anti-industrialisation and it is this profound alienation from the industrialised nature of the modern world, which Western Marxism was based on.

But this type of industrialisation was precisely what was to be wholeheartedly promoted by Stalinist communism with its emphasis on the forced industrialisation of backward Russia. And so Lukács – stuck in Moscow and having to curry favour with the Soviet camp – had to back down and rethink his opposition to industrialisation. He also withdrew from his earlier radicalism in other ways, lining up with the Stalinist attack on modernism and the avant-garde, writing sophisticated justifications of Stalin’s insistence during the 1930s on the new mode of Socialist Realism. It is harsh, and also simplistic in the context of Merquior’s sophisticated philosophical analysis, but I have seen the later Lukács described as a toady and lickspittle hireling of Stalinist ideology.

Anyway, as part of his adapting to changing Soviet ideology, Lukács later dismissed his most important book and the foundational text of the entire Western Marxist movement, as ‘romantic anti-capitalism‘ – and Merquior waspishly comments that you can maybe use this dismissive phrase (with what he calls its overtone of ‘humanist pathos’) to describe the entire Western Marxism project.

5. Ernst Bloch

Bloch’s syncretist system proposed utopia as a blend of cosmogenesis cum social eschaton within an apocalyptic anthropolatry. (p.85)

What I think Merquior means by this is that although Bloch became a Marxist during the Great War and a leading Marxist intellectual between the wars and on into 1940s and 50s, he never actually joined the Communist Party. Instead he steered his own eccentric path, becoming notorious for his visionary writings about utopia.

Bloch’s system is syncretist (meaning ‘combining different forms of belief or practice’) because it combined a cosmic vision of origins with a vision of ends, with an eschaton (‘the final event in the divine plan’), and all in the context of with an apocalyptic worldview which, in the Hegelian manner, places humanity at its heart, ‘an ecstatic exaltation of man’ – to such an extent that it is almost idolatrous of human capabilities, which is why Merquior calls it an ‘anthropolatry’.

Bloch’s most influential book was ‘The Spirit of Utopia’ (1918), an amalgam of biblical, Marxist and Expressionist thought which set out to interpret Europe’s cultural legacy in the light of an eccentric Marxist faith, rethinking the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and to reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives to continue disrupting.

His magnum opus was ‘The Principle of Hope’, published in three volumes in 1954, 1955, and 1959, which explores changing notions of utopia throughout history, studying the depictions of changing utopias in art, literature, religion and other forms of cultural expression. It has hope in the title because, like so many of the writers in this tradition, it looks forward to some Great Event which will usher in a society of Complete Perfection.

Merquior dismisses Bloch as more of a lay theologian than a Marxist philosopher which explains why, in the long run, Bloch has attracted more theologians than Marxists (p.90).

6. Antonio Gramsci

The biographical facts can be found in my review of James Joll’s study of Gramsci. The son of a poor Sardinian family. Scholarship to Turin, then the most industrialised and so socialist city in Italy. 1912 writing articles. 1919 to 1920 closely involved in organising two years of strikes and setting up factory councils. In Moscow for communist training when the Fascists took power. 1924 appointed head of the Italian Communist Party. 1926 arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Sickly and ill, he wrote his famous ‘Prison Notebooks’ until too weak to write in 1935, and died in 1937.

The most important thing about Gramsci is that he wasn’t a trained philosopher, which sets him apart from all the other Western Marxists. And he was not only involved in practical politics, but at the highest level i.e. head of a national Communist Party. Which explains why his notebooks are full of meditations on the practical realities of achieving a communist revolution.

Unlike all the philosophers, whose evidence base was the writings of Marx and Hegel and so, on the basis of their teleological theories of history alone thought that the revolution was just around the corner, Gramsci had practical experience of trying to organise workers just into councils and soviets and knew how difficult it was. After the Fascist victory in 1924 he began to realise the communist millennium might be a long way off.

And so turned his thinking to mulling over how a party achieves cultural and political hegemony over other classes in a society, with much pondering on the experience of the unification of Italy in the 1850s, 60s and 70s. Or, as Merquior puts it:

Gramsci’s own analyses in ‘The Prison Notebooks’ can be deemed a valiant attempt to marxify the ethico-political by correlating it to class-ridden socio-economic infrastructures. (p.98)

The term hegemony existed within Russian theorising but referred to the pre-eminence of the proletariat over other revolutionary classes i.e. the peasants. Gramsci expanded the term 1) to mean the way one class achieves dominance over others and 2) applied it historically, particularly to the specifically Italian history of the unification and 3) extended it into the cultural realm, the realm of superstructure.

In Russia there was little or no civil society (as there still isn’t, as there never will be) so that Lenin could confront the apparatus of the state (army, police, law courts) head on and simply overthrow them. He likened this to a ‘war of movement’. But the countries of Western Europe are thronged with the vehicles of civil society and so the revolution is going to have to be more mediated, as the revolutionary forces seek hegemony by infiltrating the channels of power and discourse. This is a ‘war of position’, preparing the way for the final assault/ Hence the centrality of culture in Gramsci’s theory, and hence the importance of intellectuals who are the people who will infiltrate bourgeois society on behalf of the party / proletariat.

Critique

Gramsci is the one Western Marxist who wasn’t a trained philosopher and didn’t make big attempts to go back to Hegel or to revive the Hegelian roots of Marx. And he is uniformly considered the most accessible and the most intellectually liberating of all the Western Marxists. Could the two facts possibly be connected? In my opinion Gramsci’s uniqueness suggests that Hegel’s entire influence and legacy was baleful and poisonous.

7. The Frankfurt School

Founded in 1924 as the Institute for Social Research, most of the small faculty were Marxists, most of them Jewish and so were forced to flee Germany when Hitler came to power. They settled in New York where they flourished for the next 15 years, slagging off capitalist culture in the heartland of capitalist culture.

This is the easiest section to read because Merquior mocks the Frankfurters from the word go and his mockery is refreshingly easy to grasp. He mocks the way the Frankfurters didn’t even pretend to be interested in revolution or the working classes except as concepts in their complex philosophies. They paid the whole notion of ‘revolution’ the most superficial lip service. He mocks the way they instead focused almost entirely on Kulturkritik. He mocks the way most of them came from upper-middle-class Jewish backgrounds where they had received the best schooling in the high bourgeois arts and therefore looked down on popular American culture in particular, with fear and loathing. Merquior mocks what developed into unabashed elitist contempt for the consumer culture they ended up living among.

The Frankfurters’ claim was that chaotic nineteenth century bourgeois capitalism had given way by the 1930s to forms of ‘state capitalism’ which used technological advances to enslave the masses with products of consumer capitalism and the culture industry (p.114). Repressive state power is exercised everywhere all the time. Progress is impossible. Thus Kultukritik gave way to profound Kultupessimismus.

The central plank of the Enlightenment, Reason, they came to see as doomed to enslave humanity by devising ever-new sciences which only create new technologies to oppress us. Doom.

8. Walter Benjamin

The living master of critical cultural microscopies. (p.117)

Benjamin has emerged as the most popular of the Western Marxists for a number of reasons. The most obvious is the quality of his writing. Although dense and sometimes difficult to follow, it is packed with critical insights.

He didn’t just write about the revolution, the process of history and the proletariat but covered a wide range of subjects, most of them literary.

And it helps that most of these subjects weren’t obscure Hegelian philosophers or little-known German poets but well known superstars of European literature. Thus he wrote insightful essays on Kafka and Proust and numerous pieces about Baudelaire, all super-obvious undergraduate favourites.

And he was good friends with Bertolt Brecht, the left-wing student’s favourite playwright, who he exchanged letters with and wrote essays about.

He also wrote about the social impact of photography and early cinema, essays which have gone straight into the reading list of all modern media studies courses.

Again it helps that he didn’t write massive weighty tomes of continuous argumentation working through heavy philosophical themes. The opposite. He was attracted to the notion of fragments: he fantasised about writing a book which would consist of nothing but choice quotations from the work under review; other essays amount to fragmentary theses or aphorisms. All his essays are sub-divided into sections, many of them very short (a page or two). This makes him a lot easier to process.

And in a number of places (‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’) he came up with pithy aphorisms which have been recycled in millions of undergraduate essays, are on t-shirts, fridge magnets etc:

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Handy to impress your tutor or examiner by chucking a few choice Benjamin quotes into your essays.

In addition to all this, Benjamin was also very aware of and attracted by his Jewish heritage. In stark contrast with someone like Lukács, who was also Jewish but always wrote about the entire Western Christian tradition from a position squarely in it, Benjamin was fascinated by, attracted to, and influenced by Jewish mysticism.

He was good friends with the Jewish writer and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. Scholem tried very hard to convert Benjamin to Zionism (which, in the 1920s and 30s simply meant to campaign to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine). They had many exchanges about Jewish mysticism and much of this spills over into Benjamin’s worldview and essays, particularly the mysterious idea of ‘redemption’ through history, which comes to prominence in the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. He uses the Christian term of redemption but in a puzzling but beguilingly mystical way. He was, in Merquior’s words, ‘a unique combination of Marxist rhetoric over Jewish mystical thought’.

Thus some of his essays have a strange, visionary, haunting quality, quite unlike the regimented literary insights of Lukács or the worryings about class hegemony and organic intellectuals of a Gramsci, let alone the long, turgid works of earnest dialecticians like Adorno and Horkheimer. As Merquior puts it, the best of Benjamin’s essays work through a series of epiphanies, quite unlike the ‘continuum of philosophical disquisition and Hegelian historical process’ found in the other Frankfurters.

As to specific ideas, Merquior spends some time explaining what Benjamin took from his studies of the Romantics (fragments, and the notion of redemption) and more importantly from Jewish philosophy. Benjamin came to distinguish between Christian redemption, which is worked out in time, through history, with Jewish mysticism which experiences redemption as a kind of ‘messianic vigil’, a critical paying attention to epiphanic moments. (Merquior p.121).

Merquior says Benjamin was deeply influenced by the enlightened Judaism of Hermann Cohen.

Cohen’s ethical Judaism lent a new light to that ‘redemptive criticism’ Benjamin learned from the Romantics. Messianic pathos in Benjamin always points to glowing instants, never to the unfolding of a cumulative temporality. (Merquior p.121)

Following Freud, Benjamin thought that meaning is buried under layers of repression. The alert critic digs down to find these slivers and fragments. Merquior flags Benjamin’s concept of the allegory: ‘Allegories are amidst ideas what ruins are amidst things.’ (p.123) Allegories thrive on the dark distance between meaning and intention.

His notion of historical redemption is that the present can, in some mystical way, redeem the suffering and exploitation of the past.

In his essay ‘The Storyteller’ Benjamin claims the true storyteller leaves the imprint of his personality on the story as a potter leaves his thumbprints on a pot. He adds to it a personal layer of testimony and authority. By contrast, we live in a society increasingly buried under a tsunami of information, which is instantly verifiable, trivial, transient, and contains no knowledge or wisdom at all.

This leads onto his other key concept, the aura. The precursors of ‘works of art’ had a cult, magic or ritualistic purpose. This aura lingers in the uniqueness of a hand-made or painted work of art, its uniqueness a testament to its authenticity. The mass reproduction of works of art in photos, in magazines and newspapers 1) destroys the work’s uniqueness 2) destroys the distance which used to prompt cult adulation. Now anyone can hold (a copy of) the Mona Lisa in their hand.

The essay this appeared in, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, also contains a series of passages about the alienating effect of film. In front of a play the audience see a real person perform in real time and react to the audience reaction. In film there are no persons but just camera angles assembled by the director, cameraman and editor. In front of a work of art you can pay attention, take a break, take your time. Film subjects you to an unrelenting sensory bombardment from which you cannot escape.

Merquior surprised me by claiming this essay ends up claiming these new technologies for the revolution, saying that the shock effect of film opened up new worlds of aesthetic appreciation. I’ve just battled my way through ‘The Work of Art…’ and didn’t get that at all. In every direction Benjamin the old bourgeois seems to lament the abolition of the art forms of his youth and the tidal wave of mass entertainment which has drowned them.

He wrote an essay praising surrealism for its revolutionary nihilism, for putting everyday objects in such incongruous settings that they gained a new life, just as the dialectical materialist needed to strip bourgeois mystification away to reveal the exploitation inherent in the system.

His life’s work was the Passagenwerk, an encyclopedic collection of information about the new commercial arcades built in Paris in the 1850s and the setting of many of Baudelaire’s poems. It is interesting to learn that the Theses on History were intended to be the preface to the final Passagenwerk (which was never completed or published).

Also that Merquior disapproves of the famous Theses. He thinks the talk about redemption, about Messianism and so on mark a regrettable surrender to irrationalism, to literature. And this, of course, is why they are among the most popular of his works with non-Marxist humanists…

9. Theodor Adorno

The virtuoso of abstruse dialectics as a language of thwarted redemption. (p.116)

Kulturkritik invariably speaks with the voice of assertion rather than argument. (p.135)

Merquior really dislikes Adorno and attacks him in a number of ways, beginning with dismissing him as a chubby little man. Adorno was the driving force in converting the post-war Frankfurt School into what Lukács sneeringly (and very funnily) called The Grand Hotel Abyss (p.137).

In 1935 to 1938, Benjamin in exile in France was entirely financially dependent on the School, now based in New York. He and Adorno corresponded and Adorno counselled against the technological collectivism of Brechtian aesthetics i.e. the positive use of photos and film and sound for revolutionary effect in Brecht’s epic theatre. Adorno reasoned that all technology belonged to The Enemy, so that supporting these new technologies was supporting Fascism. This is typical of the sweeping exorbitancy of his thought.

In the ‘Dialectic of Reason’ (1947) Adorno and Horkheimer identified the great product and centrepiece of the Enlightenment, Human Reason, as the source of all modern oppression. Science and technology, as the products of that Reason, were central, not in liberating mankind (à la H.G. Wells) but enslaving it.

Merquior approaches Adorno through his insistence on individualism (which he learned from his philosophy teacher, Hans Cornelius). This meant Adorno saw all forms of (in social terms) the masses, (in political terms) collectivism, and in (economic terms) science and technology, as enemies of ‘the subject’. Saving the subject is his cultural-philosophical aim.

It was for this reason that Adorno was against symbolism and surrealism – for the objectivity of their poetics. Instead Adorno identified with the angst-ridden individualism of German Expressionism and the angsty-sounding individualism of Schoenberg (and Berg and Webern)’s atonal music.

It was because mass society had been suffused with the mass technologies, particularly the movies but mass consumerism more widely, that Adorno came to believe that society had, in effect, been taken ransom by consumer culture and none of us can escape. That’s why the sub-title to ‘Minima Moralia’ (written in the later 1940s) is ‘Reflections from Damaged Life’.

Adorno spent from 1933 to 1945 in exile in New York (along with Horkheimer and other Frankfurters) and the experience of being dumped amid a thriving happy bubblegum consumer culture traumatised him for the rest of his life. Although he expressed this trauma in terminology taken from the German philosophical tradition, it is transparently clear that he was appalled at the energy and vibrancy of American popular culture and saw it as a mortal threat to the staid and solitary high German culture he was brought up in, especially regarding German classical music which Adorno was an expert in (hence ‘Philosophy of Western Music’, 1949).

By this stage in his book, Merquior is showing signs of impatience and exasperation at the entire tradition of Western Marxism he’s been describing, with its ‘vapid psychological generalities’ and Adorno, in a sense, represents its logical conclusion, and so becomes the butt of a lot of Merquior’s increasingly exasperated criticism.

Adorno’s ‘Negative Dialectics’ (1966) argues that the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and progress has led to the (baleful) domination of nature and the suppression of human individuality. Whereas the dialectical method of a) Hegel and b) the Marxists was positive and dynamic, an engine driving towards a better future, Adorno sees no better future and so proposes an entirely negative dialectic. This doesn’t move forwards, doesn’t point to a final synthesis or reconciliation, but instead makes a static analysis of the discordant elements in society and leaves it at that.

By doing so Merquior claims that Adorno has stopped operating in the Hegelian tradition and is really operating in the shadow of Nietzsche, ‘the master of misology’ i.e. profound distrust of logic and reason.

The result was that Adorno deprived himself of a viable concept of historical change or social structure and so his critique radiates stasis and blockage and, quite frequently, despair.

Adorno’s texts are characterised by an alternation between microscopic analyses of cultural artefacts (as in Minima Moralia and the music book) which then leap to condemnations of society which are so sweeping as to be caricatures. His analyses of the masters of German music are brilliant but he ruins them with ‘fanciful and far-fetched’ generalisations about society which are so sweeping as to be eerie (p.134) when he’s not making ‘foolish comparisons’, aligning the paganism of Stravinsky’s music (which he loathed) with the Nazis, that kind of thing (p.135).

Merquior cites Kracauer who says that, lacking any theory of process or social change, Adorno’s discourse is, fundamentally, empty, so empty of process and history that Merquior says it’s almost like an abstract painting.

Taking the gloves off, Merquior says Adorno’s discourse was often reduced to ‘stubborn even stupid accusations’ levelled against a society he hated, ‘the arrogant use of assertion’ which concealed ‘a poverty of thought’.

Adorno’s big book, ‘Aesthetic Theory’ (1970), summarised all his usual themes, breaking with German classicism and insisting that the only modern art worth the name was hermetic and negative. The hero of his book is Samuel Beckett.

A verdict of sterility seems unavoidable. In Adorno’s hands, dialectics turns despite itself into a formal game yielding few analytical gains…One of the most rebarbative of contemporary thinkers, Adorno left a philosophical jargon which, in the blank resilience of its acrobatics, reminds one of deconstructionism. (p.136)

The Frankfurt School claimed to be devoting its energies to investigating social theory yet, Merquior points out, social theory requires a theory of historical change – how do societies change and why? Whatever you think of them, Hegel and Marx provided such a theory but the Frankfurt School abandoned it because it came to think social change is, in fact, impossible.

The more one plunges into Kulturkritik the less able one is to retrieve a decent theory of the historical process. (p.138)

Commentary

Merquior paints a picture of a man who is completely dissatisfied with the philosophical legacy he has inherited and devoted an enormous book to proving that the dynamic, forward-moving element of Hegel and Marx is defunct. We are all stuck forever as damaged slaves of state capitalism and consumerism.

Oddly, Merquior doesn’t mention the importance of the Holocaust for Adorno. The use of modern technology to identify, round up, transport and murder Jews in a kind of production line process was such a traumatic event for Adorno that he thought it marked a total breach with all previous philosophies. Neither Hegel, Marx nor anyone else could account for it. In his view, this was where the Enlightenment cult of Reason and Science and Technology leads you to: the gas chambers.

Well, there are about three replies to all this. One is, if you think the Hegelian / German philosophy tradition is bunk, then leave it. Walk away. Become an Anglo-Saxon pragmatist. When you’re in a hole, stop digging.

Two, it seems to me a really obvious error to attribute what the Germans did to the whole European Enlightenment, to blame the entire European intellectual tradition for what the Germans did. David Hume had very little to do with the Holocaust. Adorno’s stance is, paradoxically, a form of Holocaust denial. He doesn’t deny the Holocaust happened, the opposite, he’s obsessed with it. But he denies that Germany was uniquely responsible for it. Instead it is an abstract historical category called The Enlightenment. It is a form of avoiding the very specific guilt of German leaders and the German people.

To put it another way, Adorno tries to pass the buck to The Enlightenment, rather than facing the uncomfortable fact that maybe the entire German intellectual tradition, back to Hegel and beyond, was to blame, with its huge abstractions and windy talk about Folk and Spirit and History and Destiny – maybe these huge and windy categories paved the way for Nazi rhetoric about Das Volk, Das Reich and so on. Maybe it’s your fault, Teddy. Maybe you should fess up.

In defence of Adorno

Throughout his book Merquior treats philosophy as philosophy and avoids extraneous aspects of his thinker’s work in order to focus just on their philosophical contribution. He doesn’t take account of the extent to which philosophy is a kind of creating writing which is as rhetorical and literary in intention as poetry or fiction. He doesn’t take account of the cultural or artistic aspect of philosophical writing.

I think this is why he omits the impact of the Holocaust from his account of Adorno, because it’s irrelevant to the question of whether Adorno did or did not contribute to the philosophy of history. So he misses the way Adorno and Horkheimer’s writings caught the spirit of the times.

European culture was traumatised by the horrors of the Second World War, of which the Holocaust was one of the main ones, although the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan run it a close second. In the aftermath of these events there was a widespread feeling of despair across European intellectuals and artists. Alberto Giacometti, Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon all spring to mind.

Therefore, for all the manifold failings which Merquior points out, in his defence you would say that Adorno was the philosophical wing of this movement of devastation and despair about the future of humanity. This is why the extreme negativity of ‘Minima Moralia’ and ‘Negative Dialectics’ struck a chord. Not because they contributed to the Hegelian analysis of social change, but because they expressed in philosophical language the horror that many people felt at what humanity had turned out to be. How could you dream of moving towards a happy-clappy future with the ruins of Belsen or Hiroshima still smouldering?

Similarly, as American popular culture flooded the West with its happy movies, rock’n’roll, blue jeans and fridges, many people knew this glut of superficial produce had nothing to offer the deeper appetites for meaning and imagination. Many thoughtful people reacted against consumer culture (as they do to this day).

Therefore Adorno and Horkheimer’s book ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ (1944) struck a real chord which lasted through the 1960s and 70s, the sense that Western society had been taken over by big capitalism which flooded the market with shiny tat and kept the masses doped with a glut of TV and spectacular movies.

So in their horror at what was revealed about humanity in the Second World War, and then their contempt for the products of mass consumerism, Adorno and Horkheimer may have lacked the ‘process theory’ Merquior is focusing on, but they did speak to the spirit of the age and addressed issues which are, in fact, still with us.

My critique of Western Marxism

Attractiveness and inapplicability

From the radical 1960s onwards this accounts for the appeal of this tradition to radical students and lecturers, because they feel novel, alien, different, because they shed drastic new light on everything we take for granted. As a lecturer and student they force you to think in a completely new way about philosophy, existence, history, psychology, society, politics and the arts. That’s the positive thing about them.

The negative aspect is that none of these ideas transfer into real life, ordinary life, outside of a university humanities department. The gulf between the 500-year-old tradition of no-nonsense Anglo-Saxon pragmatism (Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Bertrand Russell, logical positivism) and the wild fantasies of the continental, especially German, philosophical tradition, is too vast for any number of enthusiastic literature or media studies students to bridge.

The tradition of Western Marxism is an entire world of fascinating figures who developed amazing and mind-altering ideas based on world-shattering visions of human history, and span off from them a universe of insights about art, literature and film, which have almost no practical application in the real world.

The wrongness of the Continental philosophical tradition

All of this, this entire universe of thought, stems from the German idealist tradition, which claims that humans have Reason and that human life is about optimising this Reason – vide Hegel’s fundamental idea that all human history consists of the slow acquisition of self-awareness by the great World Spirit which is cognate with human Reason. This is a beautiful, bewitching fantasy which clearly has no relevance to the real world.

So many of these books are hard to read because they come from within a tradition, and cite authors and ideas which are completely alien to everything we in the Anglo-Saxon world know and believe. To sound a bit xenophobic, in my view it was this worldview composed of huge, sweeping generalisations about History and the Masses or the People, it was this kind of rhetoric which enabled the totalitarian tyrannies of the Bolsheviks and, in direct response to them, of the Nazis. No such beliefs could take off in Britain because we don’t have that kind of intellectual tradition, it just doesn’t exist. Racists and fascists there have been, and still are, but they have never gained much purchase in Britain because they can’t tap into a wider, deeper intellectual discourse of sweeping class-based change – because it just doesn’t exist in Britain. And where it has existed (Russia, Germany, France) it has been very clever, intellectually thrilling, and brought social collapse and tyranny.

Humans are irrational

Philosophical idealism is defined as ‘the set of metaphysical perspectives asserting that reality is equivalent to mind, spirit, or consciousness; that reality is entirely a mental construct; or that ideas are the highest type of reality or have the greatest claim to being considered ‘real’.

And this rests, deep down, on the centrality of human reason, the mind, in creating reality. But this is obviously and demonstrably wrong. Freud devoted to a career to undermining the notion that humans are reasonable, that there is anything like ‘human reason’, and the twentieth century demonstrated where the search for a completely Rational Society ends up, namely totalitarian tyranny.

For a much more modest demolition of the entire notion of human reason, a modern summary of the many forms of ineradicable human irrationality, see:

• Irrationality: The Enemy Within by Stuart Sutherland (1992)

The unreason of idealism is made clear every time any of these guys put pen to paper. They all agree on the primacy of Human Reason and yet all of them disagree with all the others about what human reason actually is, how it works, how it works in history, what the categories of thought are, whether there is a historical spirit or how societies change – every subject you can imagine in this area is fiercely contested and denied.

Professionals working in this field take it as a sign of its scientific spirit of investigation and experiment and debate. To any non-involved outsider it looks like a chaos of over-educated popinjays all claiming that their model of the human mind, of Reason, of class and history and so on, is the only one. It would be laughable if its consequences hadn’t turned out to be so catastrophically tragic.

All teleologies are false

The Hegel-Marx worldview is underpinned by some form of teleology i.e. the belief that history, and human society, is heading towards some predestined end. This obviously derives from a fundamentally religious worldview and is completely false. All teleologies i.e. notions that human history is heading for some specific, and generally glorious, end point are obviously childish wish-fulfilments. Human affairs will obviously carry on blundering from one unexpected disaster to another. Certain patterns may be discernible, certain behaviours may repeat themselves, but there is, quite obviously, no underlying meaning and certainly no purpose or definable end point. It is difficult to credit that such a parade of incredibly educated, ferociously clever men could base their life’s works on such a deluded idea!

Human time versus geological time

Another aspect of the general ridiculousness of this entire tradition is the way it deals with ludicrously brief periods of time. Many of these authors write as if human history began with the ancient Greeks about 500 BC and was about to end in…1848 or 1871 or 1917 or 1933 or 1973 or…hang on, I’ll get back to you.

But human history obviously began long, long, long before then – the first hominins appeared some 6 million years ago, the first modern humans evolved between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, and developed a capacity for language about 50,000 years ago.

And, quite obviously, human history isn’t about to ‘end’, in a proletarian revolution or any other pitifully small and local event, any time soon. The earth is predicted to survive for another billion years, until the sun expands to swallow it up. Humans have survived ice ages, epidemics, meteorite detonations and volcanic explosions which darkened the skies for years. Chances are we will survive in some form or another for a very, very long time to come.

Therefore the notion that history is about to ‘end’ in one particular writer’s lifetime (whether Marx or Lukács or Francis Fukuyama’s) is obviously the product of childish narcissism, the childish conviction that my life is so important that it is going to be marked by the end of everything. It’s a flattering notion but completely false. Nobody’s life is particularly important, nobody’s times are particularly important. or, conversely, everyone’s lives are important and everyone’s times are important. But as the tired office cliché puts it, if everything’s a priority, then nothing’s a priority. Same here. Even if we start a nuclear war, some humans will survive and blunder on. Human beings are going to stumble and blunder on indefinitely. Sorry.

From this geological or evolutionary perspective, the notion of ‘history’ proposed by Hegel or Marx or Engels or Lenin or Bukharin or Gramsci or Lukács or all the rest of them is pitifully inadequate. The ‘history’ they operate with – 2,500 out of 50,000 years, around 1% of the existence of our species – is so small and self-obsessed as to be laughable.

Darwin and time

I am a Darwinian materialist. What enabled Darwin’s theory of evolution was the discovery (when he was a student) of Deep Time i.e. early 19th century geologists discovered that the earth was not only older than silly old religious views held (6,000 years or so) but vastly, inconceivably older, certainly hundreds of millions of years old. Darwin saw how dog and pigeon fanciers could breed new sizes and shapes of animals during the course of just one human lifetime. What might not have happened over a hundred million times as long? And that is the seed and context for his theory of evolution through natural selection.

This, for me, is not only the correct perspective on the origin and evolution of life on earth, on the origin of human beings and the deep explanation of human nature – it is also a liberating perspective because it says that I am part of a vast continuum of life forms stretching back in time billions and billions of years, and extending now, in the space around me, to every one of the trillions of organisms now alive on the planet.

This, to me, is a vastly more inspiring way of looking at the world than the squabbles among German philosophers which led, only a generation or two later, to psychopaths in darkened rooms deciding who needed to be shot or sent to the gulag in order to bring about the Perfect Society predicted by Hegel or Marx.

• Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum (2003)

Eurocentric

It goes without saying that all these elephantine theories were utterly trapped within the tiny cell of European history. I’ve commented how again and again these great thinkers deal with All Human History as if it began in ancient Greece, chuntered through ancient Rome, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, end of feudalism, early modern, industrial revolution, the nineteenth century explosion of capitalism repelled by dandies walking lobsters in Paris, the Great War, the rise of Nazism, the Americans winning the Second World War and flooding the world with junk culture – as if that is All World History.

But not only is this selection only about 1% of the history of our species, but even if you zero in on just human history since the last ice age – about 12,000 years ago – this is still a pitifully inadequate model of human history because it so obviously misses out the histories of all the other cultures of the world outside of Europe. The Eurocentrism of the entire tradition of Hegelian Idealism or Western Marxism is off-the-scale local and parochial.

So its complete failure to take into account 1) the true length of human history and 2) the variety and number of other societies all round the world, over millennia, goes a long way to explaining why all forms of applied Marxism have been such miserable tyrannical failures.

But to keep on the Euro perspective a moment longer, stepping back, you can easily mount the case that Soviet communism was in fact just another form of Western imperialism. Certainly liberation movements all around the Third World adopted it and claimed it would liberate their countries and their peoples from capitalist imperialism, and many clever non-western theorists have adapted it for use in their local political struggles. But at root Marxism is a western idea, based in western philosophy, and reeking of western imperial arrogance, reeking of the notion that concepts worked out in lecture halls and libraries of Heidelberg or Bonn can be applied to explain and then run the lives of people living in a myriad of non-western societies from Latin America to Indonesia.

You could argue that the Cold War consisted of the battle between two rival clans or groups of western theorists and the tragedy of decolonisation was that so many, many developing nations were forced to choose between one or other of these warring alternatives and never got to find their own ways of developing and industrialising which suited their local peoples and traditions.

The history of Western Marxism is hugely entertaining, mind-stretching and informative – and a world-historical scandal.

Credit

‘Western Marxism’ by J.G. Merquior was published as a Paladin paperback in 1986. All quotations are for the purposes of criticism and review.

Related link

• A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

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