Xia Ying: The Evolution of Contemporary Western Marxist Trends and Their Core Problematic
Throughout the century-long development of Western Marxism, it has never been a school of thought with precise extensions and intensions. What allows such diverse and complex intellectual currents to be grouped under the same banner is not only their shared focus on Marxist theory, but also their understanding and grasp of the shifts and developments in contemporary capitalist society. Consequently, today, when we retrospectively examine the overall trajectory of this school, we must not only understand the texts through which its ideas unfolded but also account for the latest developments in contemporary capitalist society. However, due to the new dynamics of the financialization of contemporary capital [1], Western Marxism’s current critique of capitalism has weakened its Marxist theoretical "undercolor" (底色) through a diversification of analytical paths—including political, economic, and cultural critiques. As a result, we must provide a localized justification for the extent to which the research of many Western scholars since the 1970s can still be classified within the scope of Western Marxism. Here, this article will attempt to sort through the evolution of Western Marxism using a chronological logic as the primary thread. Based on a full understanding of the internal connection between thought and its era, I propose a core "problematic" (问题意识) [2] that runs through the entire development of Western Marxism, using this as a basis to judge the Marxist theoretical pedigree of various contemporary Western Marxist trends.
I. Theoretical Origins: Figures and Related Events
Scholarship generally regards the publication of Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness in 1923 as the birth of Western Marxism, and thus considers Lukács, Gramsci, and Korsch as its three original heavyweight thinkers. Although they possessed distinct problematics—for instance, Lukács focused on the critique of capitalist reification and the proposal of proletarian class consciousness; Korsch concerned himself with the legitimacy of Marxism as a philosophical form; and Gramsci raised the question of cultural hegemony through his creative deduction of civil society theory—they all, without prior consultation, explored the possibility of actual revolutionary "practice" through the medium of "theory." Their passion for revolution stemmed from the complex social roles of these three founders, which distinguished them from later Western Marxists: all three served as leaders within the Communist parties of different nations. Lukács was the People's Commissar for Culture and Education in the Hungarian Soviet Republic; Korsch was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and served as Minister of Justice in the short-lived workers’ government in Thuringia; and Gramsci was a founder and General Secretary of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI). Consequently, their theories did not merely originate from ivory-tower writings on classical Marxist documents, but from vivid social revolutionary practice. This determined that these thinkers’ re-interpretations of Marxism were never rooted in purely theoretical interest; rather, the new changes in the development of capitalist society were the fundamental drivers of their intellectual shifts. This establishes a shared intellectual characteristic of Western Marxist theorists: the elaboration of every idea is always inextricably linked to a specific era.
The three founders of Western Marxism were active from the early 20th century to the 1940s. Their intellectual development was governed not only by the social reality of a proletarian revolution at its low ebb, but also by the transformation of human social life by capitalist modes of production, represented by Taylorism and Fordism [3]. This specific historical era and its implicit theoretical objectives constitute the necessary realistic background for understanding Lukács as the source of Western Marxist thought, as well as the Frankfurt School that flourished alongside him.
Regarding the birth of the Institute for Social Research, which gave rise to the Frankfurt School, we cannot describe the relationship between Lukács and the Frankfurt School in a simple sequential manner. Although the Frankfurt School gradually formed and grew from the 1930s to the 1960s—appearing chronologically as a successor to Lukács’s thought—it would be far too arbitrary to judge on this basis alone that Lukács "fathered" Frankfurt. If we examine the historical development of the Frankfurt School in detail, we find that the Institute for Social Research (founded in 1924), to which the school was attached, was actually a cradle that nurtured the ideas of Hilferding, Lukács, Korsch, and others during its formative process. Long before the Institute’s founding, Felix Weil, the Jewish benefactor who proposed its creation, had co-founded the "Marxist Study Week" (Marxistische Arbeitswoche) [4] with Korsch. Lukács, Karl August Wittfogel, and Friedrich Pollock were all active participants. The Malik Publishing House, which first published Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, was also primarily funded by Weil, the future benefactor of the Frankfurt Institute. Indeed, during the initial process of establishing the Institute, Lukács and Korsch were considered as candidates for the directorship (see Rolf Wiggershaus, 2010). This fact demonstrates that the fundamental concepts dominating the Institute at the time were subtly influencing Lukács and Korsch. Therefore, the subsequent intellectual evolution of these two thinkers can be rightly viewed as a theoretical advancement of certain concepts then germinating within the embryonic Frankfurt School.
It is undeniable that the issues Lukács and Korsch focused on, and their methods of engagement, differ vastly from the Frankfurt School active in the 1940s. The reason for this difference is less a shift in the form of capitalist society than a shift in the social roles of those leading this critical trend. The Frankfurt School after the Institute’s founding—especially under Horkheimer’s leadership—consisted entirely of university professors active only in the lecture hall. They recruited researchers through research projects and assigned different directions based on strict disciplinary classifications. They gradually moved away from the broader European socialist and communist movements, maintaining a necessary distance from any political party. More importantly, because the vast majority of Institute members were Jewish, they collectively became a marginalized group in European society during World War II. Exiles and strangers became their shared social identity. For exiles and strangers such as these, grand narratives of political revolution became a theoretical utopia. The legitimacy of their entire theory lay in achieving the integrity of a "logic of alienation" (Xia Ying, 2007, Chapter 2): within this logic, contemporary European society, governed by the logic of capital, became a state of alienated reason waiting to be sublated (扬弃) [5]. It signified a distortion of reason, and the only weapon available to diagnose and treat this distortion remained the internal drive toward the "Highest Good" (Summum Bonum) inherent in reason itself. The revolutionary narrative inherent in political practice was transformed by the Frankfurt School professors into a classic Hegelian proposition regarding the relationship between reality and rationalization: reason can complete its own process of rationalization within the unfolding of history. In this sense, the early representatives of the Frankfurt School were all heirs to the legacy of German Classical Philosophy [6].
Consequently, the fundamental logic governing contemporary social life—which Marx summarized as "capital"—was diagnosed by the successors of the Frankfurt School active from the 1930s to the 1960s as a "pathological reason." During World War II, this group of academic professors of Jewish descent saw their entire theoretical arsenal for social critique gradually transform into pure philosophy: the German Classical tradition (Hegel and Marx) and the philosophical traditions active in the early 20th century (Husserl and Heidegger’s phenomenology, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the emerging Anglo-American analytical philosophy). Whether these traditions served as effective supports for their thought or as its antitheses, they all participated in the theoretical construction of Western Marxism during this period. Thus, a unique theoretical mode of Western Marxism took shape: using pure philosophy to address vivid social realities. This trend was first tested in the section "The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought" in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness. Here, the problem of the "thing-in-itself" (物自体) faced by classical philosophy (represented by Kant) was understood as a philosophical expression of the reified reality bred by the capitalist mode of production. The solution to metaphysical problems in philosophy was thus to be understood and transcended through shifts in the developmental logic of capitalist social reality. Although the conclusions of Lukács’s study sparked much debate, this unique research path—linking a specific "philosophical turn" (哲学转向) closely to the reality of capitalist social life (including modes of production, consumption, and entertainment)—became a theoretical thread that has long dominated Western Marxist research.
For this reason, Lukács was criticized and even exiled by the actual Hungarian Communist Party for manifesting a "Hegelian Marxism." In a sense, Lukács’s exile was a direct consequence of pure philosophy’s intervention in the critique of reality. Yet, this consequence did not end Western Marxism's enthusiasm for this research path. In Reason and Revolution, published in 1941, Marcuse not only attempted to clear the internal link between Hegel and Fascism, but also directly interpreted Hegel’s philosophy as a philosophical expression of the French Revolution: "The Reason which Robespierre set up as the 'highest being' was an image of the Reason which Hegel celebrated in his system. Free, subject, spirit, notion, are the categories in which the structure of his system is built. These concepts are all derivatives of the Idea. Unless we succeed in revealing the content of these concepts and their internal connection, Hegel's system will remain what it is not—obscure metaphysics" (Marcuse, 1993, pp. 4-5). The articulation point connecting the two is defined by Marcuse as "Reason." If the French Revolution actually realized an industrial liberation, then in Marcuse’s view: "The French philosophers of that time thought that the realization of Reason meant industrial liberation. They believed that expanding industrial production could provide all the necessities to satisfy human needs. Therefore, at the same time Hegel was elaborating his system, Saint-Simon in France was advocating that industry was the only force capable of leading humanity toward a free and rational society. The economic process is the foundation of Reason" (Marcuse, 1993, p. 4).
Marcuse’s theoretical objective most typically represents the thinking path of Social Critical Theory [7] active between 1940 and 1970: intervening in the critique of social reality with the posture of a pure philosopher, where the total theoretical appeal of philosophical metaphysics always finds its essence in a specific social revolutionary reality. German Classical Philosophy, as the paradigm of modern metaphysics, became the key to understanding all social revolutionary reality through its construction and completion of the system of Reason. This constitutes one of the shifts in Social Critical Theory during this period.
Another important theoretical shift lay in the fact that, because the dogmatic Marxism of the Second International biased its analysis toward economic and political conditions, its ultimate result was not only to turn Marxism into a rigid determinism in theory, but also to manifest a turn toward social democracy in politics. Consequently, while searching for a genuine and radical theoretical appeal amidst the spreading atmosphere of fascism, Western Marxism naturally turned more toward the domination and repression exercised upon the individual by the cultural elements that permeate everyday life. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, discovered in the 1930s, arrived just in time to present a Marxism imbued with a humanist hue to the social critical theorists of this period. From this point on, the alienation of the sentient individual within the everyday life of society essentially occupied the theoretical discourse of many thinkers of this era. Thus, after completing a diagnosis of the entire macro-social transformation through the core paradigm of (pathological) rationality, Western Marxists of this period mostly concentrated their concrete analyses on the description and critique of individual lifestyles. From this emerged Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, Marcuse's Reason and Revolution, Eros and Civilization, and One-Dimensional Man, as well as Fromm's Escape from Freedom, The Sane Society, and To Have or to Be?. These works extended their tentacles into the mode of existence of people living within the reality of capitalist society; their direct influence on society around the 1960s was far greater than all those theoretical forms that attempted a direct critique and analysis of the economic structure of the logic of capital, including Pollock’s analysis of Marx’s monetary theory and Henryk Grossman’s research on the laws of capitalist accumulation and breakdown. This is despite the fact that the latter's research was clearly more consistent with the theoretical path Marx took in the 19th century in his critique of capitalist society.
During this period, the entire critique of capitalist society by Western Marxist theorists, represented by the Frankfurt School, was transformed into a form of cultural redemption imbued with humanism. This passion for cultural redemption coincided perfectly with the "May Storm" [8] that erupted in 1968. In a certain sense, one could even say there existed a hidden interaction of mutual stimulation between the Frankfurt School and the '68 Revolution. The most direct evidence of this is that the thought of Marcuse, a representative figure of the Frankfurt School, directly became one of the "3Ms" (Marx, Mao [9], and Marcuse) that underpinned the occurrence of this revolution.
The May Storm brought to human society for the first time a revolution not for bread, but only for roses; in a sense, it interpreted a relatively pure version of Marx’s classic revolution. This perhaps represents the revolutionary path imagined by Marx in his day: the critique and subversion of capital cannot be carried out by a crowd of the cold and hungry poor, but by a group of idealists whose fundamental purpose is an appeal to action. In a speech titled "Beyond One-Dimensional Man" completed on October 31, 1968, Marcuse evaluated the significance of the May Storm as follows:
"There is a symbolic event, the May Storm in France, which, though brief in itself and quickly contained by the authorities, nonetheless illuminated a turning point in history... Allow me to briefly summarize the meaning of these events. It has shown that radical movements for change can occur outside the laboring class; as a catalyst, this external force can in turn activate the repressed forces of resistance within the laboring class." "Clearly, the protest hopes for a massive change, even an unthinkable change—that is to say, the protest hopes to produce a society fundamentally different from existing capitalist society and existing socialist society. It must be able to liberate not only human reason but also human sensibility, not only human productive forces but also human receptivity, and to strengthen not only the life instinct [Lebenstrieb] but also the Eros that stands in opposition to the death drive [Thanatos]." (Marcuse, 2019, pp. 130–133).
When Marcuse wrote this speech, more than half a year had passed since the '68 Revolution. It was already a foregone conclusion that this revolution had achieved nothing in terms of contemporary French realpolitik, yet its theoretical significance as an intellectual turning point for contemporary philosophy was widely recognized by the academic community. Although the May Storm did not bring about a real transcendence of capitalism, it substantially shattered the original principle of immanent critique that Western Marxism directed toward capitalist society. A "new sensibility" dominated by human sensibility and a trend toward diversified irrational existence (manifested in reality as the widespread popularity of youth subcultures around the '68 Revolution) opened a new path for the Western Marxist critique of capitalism. This determined that it would be impossible for critical theory to explore all the possibilities of transcending rationality from within the principles of rationality. In other words, it is no longer possible for critical theory to remain confined within the logic of capital as defined by rational principles to complete the transcendence of capitalist society. On the contrary, true resistance must find expression in a new social form that is entirely heterogeneous to capital. Consequently, post-'68 Western Marxism exhibits the following two characteristics: on the one hand, rational critique based on economic processes yields to irrational critique based on postmodern philosophy and culture. On the other hand, due to the developmental trend of the financialization of capital after the 1970s, a new form of capital dominated by "creative capitalism" emerged, leading to a convergence between the critique of the logic of capital and the critique of culture and politics. In other words, today the critique of culture and politics within the context of Western Marxism is also summarized as research into and critique of the operational modes of the logic of capital, while research into and critique of the operational modes of the logic of capital is likewise a critique of contemporary culture and politics.
Changing alongside this was the theoretical image of Marx in Western intellectual circles: during the '68 Revolution, Marx had been the intellectual pillar of the revolutionary movement, yet after the revolution, he encountered massive suspicion and criticism. The dramatic rise and fall of Marx’s intellectual portrait during the '68 Revolution instead stimulated, from the negative side, a surge of re-interpretation of Marx's thought among contemporary Western Marxists. However, at this moment, Western Marxists no longer simply obsess over the internal logic of Marx’s own texts, nor do they particularly emphasize the legitimacy of Marx’s thought for critiquing and interpreting social reality. On the contrary, they focus on facing the reality of capitalist society, interpreting the theoretical character of Western Marxists in the posture of critics of the logic of capital. This common theoretical character is always integrated into post-'68 Western Marxist theory through various modes of expression.
II. The Core Question: Revolution and Its Subject(ivity)
From its inception, Western Marxism as a form of social critical theory has presented diverse modes of theoretical expression. Among these, aside from the various thinkers gathered around the Frankfurt Institute who constructed a relatively distinct "school" (in which Walter Benjamin, as a "nomad" of the school, became a variable that broke the school's basic research paradigm), almost all other researchers of Western Marxism lack a distinct sense of academic identity. Therefore, when we attempt to discuss the transformation of the Western Marxist critical paradigm as a whole, elucidating a common "problem-consciousness" hidden behind these different thinkers and different theoretical forms has become a theoretical issue in urgent need of a response. It is precisely through the response to this common problem that the legitimacy of including thinkers with diverse theoretical expressions and different intellectual traditions within the scope of discussion can finally be proven.
Surveying the developmental course of Western Marxism, we might categorize Western Marxist thinkers more clearly according to the evolution of different time periods as follows: In the 1930s, the dominant Western Marxists were not only theorists but also participants in real-world political revolution and construction—even party leaders—such as Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci. From the 1940s to the 1960s, a group of Western Marxists represented by the Frankfurt School were mostly scholars in their studies [10]. Their influence spread to places including France, Britain, and the United States, stimulating the birth of diverse interpretative paths for Marxism in the French-speaking and Anglo-American worlds: for example, the confrontation between Sartre’s humanism and Althusser’s structuralism in French Marxism; the flourishing of radical left-wing trends represented by Jean Baudrillard, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek, and Giorgio Agamben; as well as Analytical Marxism, Ecofeminist Marxism, and Feminist Marxism in the Anglo-American world; as well as Raymond Williams’s cultural-historical outlook and historiographical practice, Maurice Dobb’s turn toward economic history, Eric Hobsbawm’s turn toward the history of nationalism, E.P. Thompson’s "cultural turn" in new social history, and John Saville’s rise of the new social history of labor. Most of these thinkers emerged after the 1960s, and their representative figures often span multiple academic fields or even cross into non-academic domains, involving the integration and intersection of arts, literature, drama, and more. Permeating everyday life, they opened up the Western Marxist critique of the logic of capital from a micro-perspective. A theoretical consequence of this is that while Western Marxists after the 1960s continued to use the critical paradigms of earlier Western Marxists—such as dialectics, alienation, labor, and capital—their connotations underwent fundamental changes. The most prominent feature is that the logic of critique, which formerly served grand narratives of social revolution, has now mostly transformed into a critique of everyday life. Consequently, when we look back at the developmental trends of Western Marxists after the 1970s, a theoretically thorny problem inevitably arises: except for a few thinkers such as David Harvey and Antonio Negri, most of the thinkers active during this period who could be categorized within the scope of Western Marxism no longer possess a typical Marxist tone. Thus, the sense in which we judge a thinker to be a Marxist has first become a theoretical problem that must be faced. To identify the inherent inheritance of Western Marxist theory within a multitude of critiques of everyday life—critiques heavily colored by metaphysics, literature, and even art—requires us to have a general understanding and grasp of Western Marxism’s own theoretical characteristics and its core problem-consciousness.
Research on this issue was addressed in the two pamphlets on Western Marxism written by the British Marxist Perry Anderson between 1976 and 1984 (namely, Considerations on Western Marxism (1976) and In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1984)). In In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, Anderson even gave a definitive judgment on the end of the Western Marxist trend:
"My view that the tradition of Western Marxism has essentially run its course has been confirmed... The sheer biological death of the older generation was bound to produce this consequence. In the period between the watershed year of 1968 and the time I wrote that pamphlet, death caught up with Della Volpe, Adorno, Goldmann, Lukács, and Horkheimer. By the late 1970s, Bloch, Marcuse, and Sartre had passed away in succession... The two youngest theorists I mentioned were Althusser and Colletti, both of whom were in their prime at the time. Then, largely as I expected, neither of them wrote anything of substance thereafter, merely repeating old tunes or even degenerating to the point of repudiating the tradition. The lower limit of the course of original Western Marxism can be roughly drawn at the mid-1970s." (Perry Anderson, 1989, p. 19).
I do not agree with Perry Anderson’s judgment regarding the "lower limit" of the development of Western Marxism. However, I have a sympathetic understanding of why Anderson sets this limit: it stems from his fundamental understanding of the essential characteristics of Western Marxism. In this understanding, Anderson posits Western Marxism from its inception as a response to a specific type of revolutionary practice: "Western Marxism, after the victory and isolation of the Russian Revolution, underwent a long period of formation; it was fundamentally the product of repeated failures of the workers' movement in the advanced capitalist strongholds of continental Europe after the initial Bolshevik breakthrough of 1917 [11]." (Ibid., p. 10) Consequently, when Western Marxism became dominated by "ivory tower" experts like those of the Frankfurt School, gradually confining itself theoretically to the study and deduction of purely philosophical problems and exhibiting an irrepressible tone of pessimism, Western Marxist theory in Anderson's sense indeed reached its end. (Ibid., pp. 11–13)
However, the proposal of this "end of Western Marxism" thesis is clearly built upon Anderson’s overly narrow definition of the field. This is evident in two ways: First, although the birth of Western Marxism had a specific political background, treating Western Marxist theory solely as a theory providing direct political strategies for the practice of resisting capitalist society obviously weakens its theoretical contribution to the history of thought. It also effectively denies the inherent philosophical nature of classical Marxist theory. Second, after the 1970s, the financialized turn of capitalist society caused the social reality constructed by the logic of capital to manifest itself as a form of metaphysics—that is, the production of real things was increasingly determined a priori by the logic of capital. The resulting modes of social production and human consumption produced an inverted [12] expression.
This change in the mode of domination of capital logic brought about a shift in the critical paradigm of Western Marxism toward capitalist society. In German social critical theory, this manifested in the research of Frankfurt School successors such as Habermas and Honneth, centered on keywords like "communication," "recognition," and even "compromise." Their goal was philosophical research based on linguistics and the philosophy of law, heterogeneous to the logic of capital. Within the Radical Left intellectual tradition, however, it transformed into a reconstruction based on constructing a metaphysics of devenir (becoming) and multiplicité (multiplicity). The logical architecture of this metaphysics actually constitutes a theoretical expression of the financialization trends in contemporary capitalist society. Therefore, after the 1970s, it was by no means far-fetched for a group of philosophers with an increasingly heavy background in metaphysical research to still call themselves Marxists (such as Deleuze and Guattari) or be generally recognized as such by the academic community (such as Žižek, Badiou, or even Agamben and Rancière). On the contrary, they were attempting to use different fundamental paths of philosophical metaphysics to describe the new forms of contemporary capitalist development.
Thus, prematurely judging that Western Marxism has ended misses not only the thoughts of a group of thinkers active since the 1970s but, more importantly, misses the newest ways of grasping the developmental forms of contemporary capitalist society.
Therefore, in my view, Western Marxism is far from over. To this day, there remains a group of highly dynamic thinkers who can be classified within this trend of thought. The criteria for including them within the category of Western Marxism involve the following two core problematics: first, does a revolution directed at capitalist society exist, and if so, how is it possible? Second, with the ultimate goal being a revolutionary theory for changing the world, the search for the leader of the revolution—that is, the revolutionary subject or subjectivity. In a sense, all thinkers who attempt to respond to these two questions, whether in an affirmative or negative way, can be regarded as Western Marxists.
Consequently, although contemporary German social critical theory and Anglo-American Marxist theory exhibit a secondary orientation where "construction" outweighs "revolution" and "critique," they can still be classified within the framework of the core questions mentioned above. It is simply that for them, the analysis and critique of capitalist society cannot be presented in a package of subversive strategies; instead, they should be constructed through negotiation between different social groups. In other words, they merely provide a negative answer to the possibility of a revolution directed at capitalism. Conversely, the Radical Left trend represented by Continental thought provides an affirmative answer to revolutionary discourse. By revolving around the discussion of the problem of subjectivity in philosophy, and within the context of political philosophy, they argue for the possibility of stimulating revolution through different schemes of constructing subjectivity. Philosophically, through the exploration of subjectivity, they have revived a re-understanding of philosophical metaphysics—something that had previously declined under the deconstructions of Marx and Nietzsche.
The two core problematics of Western Marxism we propose here are not only applicable to Western Marxists after the 1970s; they can also be used to frame the early Western Marxists who were just emerging in the 1920s. However, for early Western Marxists, the legitimacy and necessity of revolution were themes that required almost no demonstration. Therefore, their entire theoretical task was concentrated on the question of how the revolutionary subject is generated. Lukács’s emphasis on the class consciousness of the proletariat and Gramsci’s discussion of the "Modern Prince" [13] both found their theoretical telos here. If there is a difference between Western Marxists after the 1970s and those before, the core of this difference lies in the change in the method of demonstrating the revolutionary subject. If for Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci, the revolutionary subject was "already-constituted" (既成性), then for Western Marxists after the 1970s, the revolutionary subject is "in-becoming" (生成性).
This means that in Lukács, the proletariat as the revolutionary subject carries a certain transcendence (a priori character): "Every crisis means that the regular development of capitalism has run into a dead end, but only from the standpoint of the proletariat can this dead end be seen as a necessary link in capitalist production." This is because "the proletariat is no longer the mere object of the crisis; the internal contradictions of capitalist production—which by their very concept already mean the struggle between the bourgeois production system and the proletarian production system, the conflict between socialized productive forces and their individual-anarchic form—unfold publicly." (Lukács, 2017, pp. 342–343) [14]
Why is the proletariat no longer the mere object of the crisis? Lukács continues Marx’s principle of the immanent critique of capital logic, noting: "When the proletariat is only conscious of commodity relations, it can only be conscious of itself as the object of the economic process. Because commodities are produced, the worker as a commodity, as a direct product, can at most be a mechanical cog in this machine. But if the reification of capital is dissolved into the continuous process of its production and reproduction, then from this standpoint, the proletariat can become conscious of itself as the true—though bound and temporarily unconscious—subject of this process." (Ibid., p. 277)
With the help of the dialectical unity of subject and object in the Hegelian process, Lukács completed a role-setting for the proletariat as the transformer of capitalist society. Because this setting originated from the inherent commodity structure of capitalist society and the proletariat’s own transformation into labor power—a commodity that can be bought and sold—it presented a quality of being "given" rather than arbitrary. In other words, only this proletariat with these special attributes, and only this proletariat, could become the revolutionary subject. Its essence as a revolutionary subjectivity was determined by its own concept and the objective structure of the capitalist society in which it was situated; it was irreplaceable.
However, as capitalist society entered the "affluent society," the consumer society, or the so-called "post-industrial society," not only did the capitalist mode of production change, but the forms of labor prescribed by capitalism and the forms of wealth also underwent fundamental changes. Particularly since the birth of the capitalist joint-stock system, the "pure" form of the proletariat—those who possess nothing and survive solely by selling their labor power—tended toward extinction. It was replaced by the decentralized ownership brought about by the equity system. What this decentralized ownership ultimately dissolved was the a priori nature of the proletariat in Lukács’s theory, while simultaneously bringing about the construction of diversified subjectivities.
That is to say, for thinkers after contemporary Western Marxism, revolutionary subjectivity is not a "predestined elect"; it is constantly regenerated within every "situation," and this situation itself is the basic connotation of actual revolution. In other words, here, the revolution and its becoming-subject have an intertextual structure; they stimulate and confirm each other. This led to the formation of concepts such as Badiou’s "Subject of the Event" and Hardt and Negri’s "Multitude." The "becoming" revolutionary subject is not a universal derived from diverse empirical realities—for example, extracting the concept of "table" from many different tables. On the contrary, the revolutionary subject is the power that stimulates the emergence of the revolution and is generated under the specific situation of the revolution. Therefore, before a specific revolutionary situation erupts, the revolutionary subject does not truly exist. Only at the moment of the revolutionary outbreak is subjectivity filled, and what fills it are various possibilities. It is in this sense that the transcendental, and thus given, subject is replaced by a "becoming" subjectivity.
But regardless of how Western Marxism discusses the question of revolution and its subject(ivity), these two questions, as the core problematics of Western Marxism, seem to have remained constant throughout. To serve these two core questions, Western Marxists have indeed borrowed a wide variety of theoretical resources when developing their specific paths of discussion: such as Hegel (Lukács), Kant (Frankfurt School), Freud (Žižek), Spinoza (Negri), Nietzsche and Bergson (Deleuze), and so on. They have greatly advanced the philosophical nature of Marx’s thought from different angles. However, it is precisely because of this purely philosophical research method that what they have completed is always a philosophical demonstration of revolution and its subjectivity, rather than a demonstration of the possibilities for actual revolutionary practical strategies.
When evaluating Marxism after the end of Western Marxism, Perry Anderson once noted: "What the Marxism that succeeded Western Marxism shared with its predecessor was a 'poverty of strategy,' rather than a 'poverty of theory.'" (Perry Anderson, 1989, p. 30) [15] For me, since there is no such thing as the "end of Western Marxism" as Anderson claims, what Anderson provides here is precisely an accurate summary of the characteristics of Western Marxist theory as a whole.
If the various schools of Western Marxism failed to provide a strategy for authentic revolution, what was the theoretical telos they ultimately achieved? In my view, compared to the fundamental theories of classical Marxism, contemporary Western Marxism—from Lukács and the Frankfurt School onwards—actually transformed Marx’s theory of "changing the world" back into a theory of "interpreting the world" [16] through its efforts to rely on dialectics to construct a social critical theory. Within this framework, the critique Marx once leveled against capitalist society was transformed into a cognitive grasp of contemporary capitalism; that is, a shift occurred from Marx’s ontological analysis of capitalist society (referred to in this book as the logic of capital) toward an epistemological construction of capitalist society.
Consequently, from the inception of Critical Theory, the methodological question of how to perceive the logic of capital gradually became a vital field of research in the development of contemporary Western Marxist thought. This shift determined that the paradigm of Western Marxist critique of capitalism moved from discussions of dialectics and the concept of historicity toward an analysis and description of the operational mechanisms of the logic of capital and its corresponding changes in the forms of labor. If the concepts of dialectics and historicity always highlight the transformability of capitalist society through the interaction of subject and object, then the analysis of the operational mechanisms of capital logic and changes in labor forms tends more toward a theoretical path of how capitalism, as an intuitive and objective existence, is to be perceived and grasped.
An obsession with any form of epistemological research (i.e., interpreting the world) does not, in essence, contain the transformation of the object of cognition (i.e., changing the world). In its developmental process, Western Marxism inevitably fell into this transformation of research paradigms. This gave rise to a paradoxical state of existence for contemporary Western Marxist trends: they employ the most radical theoretical postures to outline various increasingly conservative practical tendencies.
III. The Emergence and Withdrawal of the Critique of Political Economy Paradigm in Western Marxist Critical Theory
This paradoxical state of existence unique to Western Marxist thought is inseparably and inherently linked to the evolution of contemporary capitalist society; therefore, the latter serves not merely as a realistic background for understanding the former, but as a specific element of its intellectual composition. In this sense, while the intellectual evolution of Western Marxism after the 1940s seemingly took on a heavier academic style, it remained inseparable from the reality of life in capitalist society itself. This was manifested in the Frankfurt School’s systematic analysis and critique of every facet of capitalist society. This school is, to date, the trend of thought most endowed with self-consciousness. Not only were they conscious of imbuing their members' research on all problems of capitalist society with a Marxist color, but they were even more conscious of constructing a relatively complete theoretical school. Through this, they formed "Critical Theory," which "by convention requires the capital letter." (Ibid, p. 3)
As an independent research institution born in the early 1920s, the dominant philosophy of the Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt am Main) cannot be separated from the historical background provided by World War I and the outbreak of the "October Revolution" in 1918. This specific background brought discussions regarding "socialization" and "socialism" to the German intellectual world of the time. The lectures on socialism given in Tübingen by Robert Wilbrandt, teacher of Felix Weil (the Institute’s benefactor), were packed every time. Wilbrandt viewed the urgent problem of the day as how to effectively establish a socialist alternative to capitalism: "Only socialization, the planned, correct, and systematic completion of the transition to a socialist state, can guarantee that we do not fall into a situation where one system (the capitalist enterprise) has ended while the other (the socialist enterprise) has not yet been established." (Wiggershaus, 2010, p. 16) This means that German intellectuals at the time held an extremely optimistic judgment regarding the establishment of a socialist society, as if the demise of capitalism had already become an indisputable fact. Weil also stated in his doctoral dissertation:
"Today, businessmen do not dare to engage boldly in their commercial activities because strikes, high wages, heavy taxes, mutual suspicion, and the fear of socialization make them tremble with fear; meanwhile, Germany's economic life is gradually drying up. Is it a return to the free market, or a move toward socialism? That is the question. Is answering this question not the greatest task of the present moment?" (Ibid, p. 18)
In light of this problem-consciousness, Karl Korsch, acting as Wilbrandt’s assistant on the Socialization Committee, wrote the article "What is Socialization?" as a programmatic interpretation to discuss possible schemes for building socialism. This nurtured a research path that deeply intervened in social practice. When Weil was preparing the Institute for Social Research, this powerful problem-consciousness partially dictated the Institute’s research trajectory. When he chose Carl Grünberg as the first director of the Institute, although the latter was not actually a thorough Marxist nor entirely a socialist, his speech at the Institute’s inauguration ceremony nevertheless implemented this research path dominated by Weil and others quite thoroughly. The speech was published in various newspapers, each with a different emphasis and none in full. However, judging from the texts that have survived, at least two aspects were clarified in that speech: first, the era in which they lived was an era of transition from capitalism to socialism, and the whole of society was accelerating toward socialism. Second, the Institute for Social Research would conduct economic and sociological research under the guidance of Marxist thought. This was manifested not only by Grünberg’s explicit admission that "I, too, am an adherent of Marxism," (Ibid, p. 35) but also by his extremely clear definition of what he understood Marxism to mean—a definition that, for a considerable period before Horkheimer, governed the Institute's basic understanding of Marxist theory.
For Grünberg, Marxism, as a materialist conception of history, focused its center of gravity on social events and changes in social existence, attempting to attribute the essence of these changes to a reflection of economic life at the level of phenomena. In this sense, the analysis and critique of the internal economic structure of capitalist society became the theoretical objective of the Institute, and in fact governed the theoretical tone of contemporary Western Marxism at its birth. In short, this was a research tone that integrated theory into practice and philosophy into science. Consequently, the vast majority of researchers at the time directed their studies toward Marx's Capital, launching discussions on Capital and its manuscripts from various perspectives. In view of this, the initial focus on Marxist theory by the three original leading figures of Western Marxism—Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci—was necessarily a process of using theory to guide practice and transforming theory through practice. In a sense, they became the practitioners of the early Institute’s Critical Theory.
Because Grünberg’s subsequent actual work did not unfold according to the research path he had proclaimed—he remained keen on the research methods of economic history derived from his doctoral studies—his two assistants, Friedrich Pollock and Henryk Grossmann, were better able than Grünberg to adhere to the Institute’s line of thought at the time. Both had unique understandings of the specific economic operations of capitalist society. They not only creatively expanded research into Marx’s theory of money and state capitalism (as Pollock did) and research regarding the laws of accumulation and the breakdown of capitalism (as Grossmann did), but they actually provided Western Marxism with theoretical paradigms such as the value-form and the commodity-form for its subsequent analysis of capitalist society. The theoretical dominance of these paradigms for the critique of capitalist society continues even today. At the same time, neither of them conducted their work as pure theoretical researchers; both held unique positions within political practice. Just like Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci, their theories themselves contained a practical orientation.
It was precisely because of this unique position of merging practice and theory held by Pollock and Grossmann that neither could become Grünberg’s legitimate successor. Instead, Max Horkheimer, who was not part of the Institute’s inner circle at the time, succeeded Grünberg as the director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research after 1930. However, the new research path opened by Horkheimer brought about certain invisible changes in the Frankfurt School’s research. The German scholar Rolf Wiggershaus, who conducted a systematic study of the Institute, summarized it as: "theory left practice, philosophy left science, and the critique of reason left the salvation of reason." (Ibid, p. 11) The Institute’s research on capitalist society gradually moved away from a focus on the overall economic system of society, turning instead toward a philosophical critique centered on issues of culture and ideology within contemporary capitalist society. Conceptual categories such as reification, alienation, and dialectics gradually occupied the content of what Horkheimer called "Critical Theory." This philosophical turn intensified as the vast majority of the Institute's members emigrated before the war to an "America" that was then free of conflict. The scope of Critical Theory gradually narrowed to the field of capitalist culture and psychoanalysis. While the result of this theoretical development was certainly related to the research theories of Horkheimer and his colleagues, it is an undeniable fact that it was simultaneously inseparably linked to the new situation of post-war capitalist development.
Perry Anderson attributed the birth of this school of Western Marxism to the "product of the defeat of working-class movements in the advanced capitalist fortresses of continental Europe" (Anderson, 1989, p. 10). While this judgment is somewhat arbitrary, Anderson accurately identified the significant shift in the practical context during the birth of this period of Western Marxism: "The long post-war economic boom gradually and ruthlessly subjected labor to capital within stable parliamentary democracies and the newly emergent 'consumer societies' of the OECD system" (ibid., p. 10). This led to two direct consequences: first, the crisis theory of capital appeared as groundless as "the man from Qi worrying about the sky" [17] in a rapidly developing capitalist society; second, the subordination of "labor" to capital fundamentally altered the antagonistic relationship between "capital" and "labor" constructed by Marx in Volume I of Capital. It effectively liquidated the power of "living labor" to deconstruct the logic of capital, making it seem as though capital had lost the possibility of internal implosion. Consequently, the critique of capitalism could no longer be confined to capital itself but needed to expand into every facet of everyday life; everything from the individual’s mode of existence to the internal spiritual world became a practical field for the alienation of capital.
At the same time, Friedrich Pollock of the Frankfurt School discovered an inherent resilience in capitalism within its state-inflected development models. This led to a fundamental shift in the study of political economy within critical theory: when state-inflected organizational and management mechanisms replaced market mechanisms as effective tools for regulating the development of capital’s logic, the critique of capital’s logic had to shift from the critique of political economy to a critique of politics or even of culture. This was because economic operation had become the implementation of political power; essentially, the two were one and the same. Having perceived the developmental trend of state capitalism, Pollock held a pessimistic view regarding the possibility of subverting the dominion of capital over society. Although Pollock's writings were few, his judgment exerted a singular influence on the entire school. From then on, not only did actual political practice fall into a state of collective silence within the Frankfurt School’s theory, but the study of political economy—centered on the critique of the logic of capital—gradually faded from their theoretical horizon. In its place remained academic philosophical concepts and themes such as enlightenment, alienation, the culture industry, new sensibility, and one-dimensionality, which constituted the entire gravity of the Frankfurt School’s research. These studies always possessed an academic sensitivity in their description of phenomena, but they remained silent on the economic base that supported the evolution of this superstructure—such as the development of new forms of capital. As a result, the critical theory pioneered by the Frankfurt School became merely an important branch of contemporary social "theory." Ultimately, through this theoretical mutation, the school gradually exhibited an uncritical theoretical tendency; a critical theory that had once possessed a strong "negativity" was being replaced by socio-political theories constructed around "recognition" and "compromise." This shift in the critical paradigm not only departed from the original character of critical theory but also fundamentally deviated from the Marxist character inherent to that theory.
The gradual withdrawal of the critique of political economy paradigm from social critical theory inevitably brought about a neglect of the internal economic architecture of capitalist society, ultimately affecting the critical dimension of the theory. To some extent, this led to the decline of the Western Marxist research dominated by the Frankfurt School in contemporary thought. Particularly after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, fundamental changes in international monetary policy directly brought about a new shift in the study of capital. The key to this shift lay not in a fundamental change in the judgment of the nature of capitalist society, but in a fundamental change in the way capitalist society was grasped. This change manifested as follows: if previous Western Marxists tended to transform the problem of capital—which dominates social life—into a critique of everyday life that permeates all aspects of human social existence, then after the 1970s, Western Marxists began to reduce the critique of everyday life back to a critique of capital. From the subjective human psychology identified by psychoanalysis to the modern social governance schemes touched upon by biopolitics, from the micro to the macro, much research during this period attempted to reduce all these appearances to the underlying logic of capital. Consequently, a group of "atypical" Western Marxists emerged. They were not merely researchers of Marxism; rather, they functioned primarily as diagnosticians of modern society. The critique of capital constructed by Marx was simply an effective path they used to critique this society.
IV. Two Stages in the Development of Western Marxism: Using the Critique of the Logic of Capital as a Thread
Thus, our investigation into the developmental trajectory of Western Marxism, in terms of the paradigm shift in the study of capital, must use the internal evolution of the logic of capital within capitalist society as a thread, dividing contemporary capitalist society into two stages with the 1970s Bretton Woods system as the boundary. Although the exploration of the opportunity for revolution and the subject of revolution remained the two core theoretical problems throughout the entire history of Western Marxism, the significant changes in the development model of contemporary capitalism brought about two distinctly different modes of analysis and critique.
The first stage is classical Western Marxism. The capitalism they faced was dominated by physical capital, and the economic categories constructed around capital were therefore based primarily on "commodity" and "value." Under the presupposition of a system of "needs," they focused on the confrontation between labor and capital as their core problem, exploring major theoretical questions such as "history" and "revolution." Here, the logic of capital acted as a latent "invisible hand" controlling the everyday life of modern society, while cultural production, which carried the full weight of the logic of capital, became the overt path of critique, thereby constructing a critical orientation toward an artistic utopia.
In contrast, contemporary Western Marxism after the 1970s represents the second stage of development. The trend toward the financialization of capital has made the logic of capital an overt logic, governing every aspect of modern social life. This mode of dominion differs from the pre-1970s era in that it is no longer specific commodities (commodity-objects) and their value that confirm the spread of the logic of capital; rather, the spread of the logic of capital requires every existing thing to become a carrier of this logic—the birth of "capital-as-thing." A system of desire has replaced the system of needs, becoming the subjective psychological mechanism that constructs social interaction. However, because the system of desire itself is simultaneously a manifestation of the worker's subjectivity and a substantive attribute of the logic of capital, labor and capital form an affirmative collusion. Therefore, for Western Marxists in this stage, the critique of various aspects of social life is simultaneously a critique of capital; likewise, the critique of capital is simultaneously a critique of various aspects of social life. In other words, the distinction between the economic base and the superstructure, which could still be made in the previous stage, has become blurred in this stage.
This necessitated a shift in the way Western Marxism critiqued capitalism during this period. First, in terms of appearance, most contemporary Western Marxists are atypical Marxists; they no longer take Marxist texts as their primary object of study, but instead view Marxist texts as effective theoretical weapons for critiquing contemporary capitalist society. Second, regarding their critical paradigm, capital, money, and financialization have directly become the targets of critique. They no longer need concepts like "commodity" or "value" to "represent" capital; they directly present the "expression" of capital. Among these shifts, the collusion between the logic of capital and the workers who carry labor has caused classical Western Marxism’s discussion of "revolution" and its "subject" to lose its traditional research path. Workers embedded within the system of capital's logic possess a spontaneous and active subjectivity, yet the exercise of this subjectivity does not bring about the subversion of the logic of capital. The subversion of capitalism has thus not only lost its definite subject (subjectivity) but can no longer rely on grand political revolutions or micro-level cultural and artistic revolutions. In the current society where the logic of capital proliferates, "revolution" is transformed into "innovation," and politics, culture, and art all become incarnations of the financialization trend of capital.
The "ghost-like" quality of capital’s logic has also allowed it to reach a point where "the map is unrolled and the dagger is revealed" [18]: capital, which originally appeared as "objects" or "social relations," has finally attained an autonomous logical form—it is becoming a thought-architecture that can control and dominate all other elements. This initial gap between human social reality and the thought-architecture constructed by capital was perceived by Western Marxist critical theorists as a pathology of reason, thus constructing a confrontation between history and reason. With the increasing spread of capital’s logic—particularly as "(living) labor" enters the calculation of the "logic of capital"—the logic of capital has itself become a historical structure that derives all of human social life. In other words, the dualistic confrontation between history and reason, as well as the problem of their unification revealed since German Classical Philosophy, has been dissolved by the "logic of capital." The logic of capital has already become a kind of "Absolute Spirit," and social reality has become the various "expressions" of this Absolute Spirit. Whether we diagnose the logic of capital as a pathological form of reason or regard it as a socio-historical structure that derives everything else, the existence of the "logic of capital" has already become an unavoidable fact. The theoretical development of Western Marxism is less an accompaniment to the actual evolution of capitalist society and more an accompaniment to the unfolding of the logic of capital from spontaneity to self-consciousness. Thus, although Western Marxism in these two different stages presents several different critical paradigms, they share a common problem-consciousness. I define this problem-consciousness as: the critique of the logic of capital as it is integrated into social reality. This "critique" contains two meanings: first, describing and analyzing the ways and paths through which capital architectures social life—that is, reducing social reality and personality structures to the logic of capital; second, demarcating the internal and external boundaries of capital’s logic, clarifying the theoretical premises of its existence, and on this basis, exploring all possibilities for transcending capital.
In view of this, strictly speaking, the object of Western Marxist critique is not capitalist society itself, but rather the logic of capital that governs every aspect of social reality. Axel Honneth, a successor to contemporary social critical theory, pointed out when reviewing the unified problematic of the Frankfurt School’s social critical theory: "Regardless of the fragmentation of methods and objects, the various authors of the Frankfurt School agreed on the idea that the living conditions of modern, capitalist society produced social practices (Praktik), attitudes, or personality structures that are deposited in a pathological deformation (Verformung) of our rational capacities; it is this theme that constitutes the unity within the vocal plurality of Critical Theory. Such heterogeneous works may also be bound by this unity, as they tend to point toward the goal of investigating the social causes of the pathologies of human rationality (Rationalität)." (Axel Honneth, 2022, Preface p. i) Here, we must pay particular attention to the fact that Honneth’s identification contains insights in two dimensions: first, the social critical theory dominated by the Frankfurt School always attempts to attribute the social way of life controlled by the logic of capital to a pathologized reason. Second, as a result, the ways in which critical theory attempts the sublation [19] of the logic of capital ultimately point toward a path of seeking human rationality. The critique and restoration of reason became the primary scheme for social critical theory’s critique of capital during this period. Furthermore, at this stage, the logic of capital had clearly not yet become self-conscious as an autonomous power governing social life. It was still conflated with reason and categorized as a basic order of pathologized reason. Consequently, the diagnostic and therapeutic schemes of social critical theory were limited to the examination and restoration of "reason."
Once "reason" is taken as the anchoring point of critique, the presuppositions of traditional philosophical metaphysics inherent in reason inevitably cause all critical theories to gradually distance themselves from a political economy that analyzes the structure of capital itself, turning instead toward the paths of ethics and political philosophy with a strong normative character. From Habermas's theory of communicative action to Honneth’s theory of recognition, all have interpreted this shift in theoretical trajectory, constructing a critical theory of capitalism that is "critique without capital." It is precisely based on this that Honneth identifies the core defect of Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory as: "They were too strongly dominated by the notion that all subjects, regardless of their group affiliation, were incorporated into the capitalist social system without resistance." (Ibid., Preface p. vi) At the same time, he is puzzled by Lukács's theory of "reification" [20], wondering "why every phenomenon in which a person or their own soul-life becomes a thing or is treated like a thing must be traced back to capitalist commodity exchange; for the emergence of this objectified way of acting that deprives human dignity, there exist many other causes besides simple economic compulsion (i.e., looking at the surrounding world and oneself with the attitude of a market participant)..." (Ibid., Preface p. xix)
From this, it is evident that Honneth’s confusion—and the theoretical defects he perceives in the Frankfurt School—fundamentally stems from his disagreement with the early Western Marxists who viewed the logic of capital (the commodity form) inherent in capitalist society as the root of contemporary social pathology. Instead, he regards all facts such as "reification" and commodification as a "forgetfulness of recognition" [21] unique to human beings. (Ibid., Preface p. xix) Here, Honneth seemingly enriches the premises of early Frankfurt School social critical theory by using "recognition" as a substrate and the presupposition of ineradicable social conflict and contradiction to construct a more general root for the formation of an ethical society. In reality, however, by weakening the critical path of the logic of capital, he misses the fundamental essence of contemporary capitalist society. This has led to the situation today where the Western Marxist trend of thought has not only lost its commonality as a holistic school but, more importantly, has fundamentally lost the essential weapon for conducting an effective critique of capitalist society.
As they have increasingly dissipated into representatives of scattered left-wing trends, their critique of capitalism has increasingly manifested in two paths: First, the successors of the Frankfurt School represented by Honneth have become social theorists who take the construction of normative ethics and political philosophy as their mission, completely losing the subversive critique of capitalist society inherent in social critical theory. Second, thinkers represented by radical left trends carry a heavy religious color; through the tireless textual research and deduction of certain philosophical concepts, they have completed a series of constructions of revolutionary discourse in the style of intense thought experiments—such as Agamben’s "The Coming Community" (la comunità che viene) or the "Commonwealth" envisioned by Negri and Hardt. What they ultimately achieve is merely a radical revolutionary posture rather than a truly feasible subversive path.
In this sense, these two paths reach the same end by different routes: both are effective compromises with the existing capitalist society. This compromising posture of Western Marxism toward capitalist society further confirms, from the negative side, that in the development of new forms of contemporary capital, the logic of capital plays an increasingly distinct role as an all-governing, spontaneous mechanism. In view of this, in its evolution, the Western Marxist trend of thought has ultimately turned from critical theory to a "critique-less theory." At its core, the problem lies in its inability to maintain a conscious critical awareness when facing new forms of the logic of capital.
By conducting research along the evolution of Marxism, however, we can gain insight into the basic trends of capitalist development since the 20th century through its relentless efforts based on the critique of the logic of capital, as well as the many possible paths for critiquing capitalism. This provides ideological references for our own reflection and critique of contemporary new forms of capitalism. To this end, research into contemporary Western Marxist theory—whether in the past or in the future—holds significant value for the construction of China's independent discourse system of Marxism.
(Author's Affiliation: Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities, Tsinghua University) Online Editor: Zhang Jian Source: Zhejiang Social Sciences, Issue 1, 2024