Philosophy

PHILOSOPHY. The importation of Marxism to the United States through the immigrant socialist press brought philosophy into Leftist and progressive discussions in the 1870s–1890s. Editors, joined by lecturers and autodidact workers, succeeded in introducing a radical philosophical and political outlook, at least to their constituents, into a terrain dominated by rationalism, empiricism, utopianism, and, soon, pragmatism and logical empiricism. In effect, the immigrant Marxists and socialist press prepared radical thought for further development in later decades in the United States.

Before 1920, Marxism proper was not, however, the overpowering influence that it would become for radicals under communism’s Left hegemony with the development of the Soviet Union and Communist Parties in the United States and throughout the Americas. Before the 1880s, radical German American intellectuals provided their constituents with a mixture of ideas drawing upon German romanticism and freethinking, anarchist, and socialist doctrines. On the one hand, they, like other ethnic socialists, were dedicated to disproving theology with “scientific” examination of natural and social conditions. On the other hand, they espoused a militant idealism of the eternal struggle for justice, now realized in the proletarian struggle. At the high point of German influence, the middle 1880s, “natural rights” arguments against all class societies tended to dominate revolutionary socialist discourse. Marxist materialism ruled in the disappointing aftermath, but never without reservations being voiced.

Jewish socialists and anarchists conducted a spirited philosophical debate on many of these points in their Yiddish-language newspapers and journals. A deep strain of anti-Marxist philosophy persisted especially among Jewish anarchists, whose greatest intellectual figure, Rudolf Rocker, devoted his chief talents to a disproof of historical materialism. Jewish socialists in many varieties (but notably socialist-Zionists) transmuted historic Jewish doctrines of suffering and redemption into messianic versions of materialist socialism. As with the German Americans, what little could be discerned about Marxist philosophy, through Capital and other works, did not suffice and had to be supplemented with other ideas at hand.

With the coming of English-language socialism, Marxism was infused with scientific analogies, notably in the widespread use of Engels’s Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. Daniel De Leon preached this doctrine with special fervor, and Walter Thomas Mills’s widely used socialist textbook, The Struggle for Existence (1901), became a Socialist Party study-group standard for the further simplification of Engels’s notions. Nevertheless, Anti-Dühring achieved its first translation at the hands of Austin Lewis, who criticized Engels’s notions of dialectics as reductive and inadequate. The Charles H. Kerr Company and its popular monthly, the International Socialist Review, militantly promoted as revolutionary favorites of the hour philosophers Joseph Dietzgen and Antonio Labriola: the first as articulator of a dialectical materialism that ordinary people could embrace in their daily lives; the second as continuator of the Hegelian tradition within Marxism.

With Debsian Socialism’s disintegration, a spirited eclecticism passed. More important, the leadership of Communists coincided, in the 1920s–1930s, with a significant diminution of the autodidact tradition. Lenin’s and Stalin’s works, particularly the former’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, came to be considered Marxist philosophy par excellence just as the habits of self-learning fell to immersion in film, radio, and popular culture with the general disappearance of a diverse Left press. Philosophical rumination, once the domain of the self-taught intellectual, became party science. Howard Selsam’s What Is Philosophy? (1932), widely read by Communist-leaning intellectuals of the 1930s, epitomized the shift.

Sidney Hook’s Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (1933) and From Hegel to Marx (1935) reintroduced once-familiar themes of mechanical materialism’s limitations, but added an interpretation of historical materialism as experimental naturalism, part of Hook’s effort to reclaim the active revolutionary project from fatalism. He also introduced, in passing, the theme of praxis and alienation within the still-unknown “young Marx.” Hook was the most influential popularizer and interpreter of Marxism during the 1930s and for some years beyond, reaching an academic as well as popular audience and helped bring the study of Marxism into U.S. university culture.

Karl Korsch was also one of the first Marxian critics of Social Democracy and of Leninism and what he perceived as the distortions of genuinely Marxian socialism in the Soviet Union. Despite his many critiques of various Marxists and analysis of the crisis of Marxism, Korsch continued to his death to identify himself as a Marxist. His book Marxism and Philosophy (1923) contains an original interpretation of the stages of development of the Marxian theory, and is one of the first attempts to apply the theory of historical materialism to Marxism itself. His book major Karl Marx (1938), written in exile from his native Germany, contains one of the clearest presentations of the Marxian theories of society, political economy and history.

Hook was connected at the time with German immigrant socialist Karl Korsch who became a major figure in bringing a Hegelian influenced Marxism to Europe and to the United States. In Marxism and Philosophy (1923), Korsch argued that Marxism was a critical and dialectical theory, providing tools to criticize bourgeois theory and society and the forces to transform it. For Korsch, the unity of theory and practice was the criterion for authentic Marxism, and he interpreted Marxism as the revolutionary theory of the working class movement and developed a concept of “practical socialism.” In his later work, Karl Marx (1938), written in his US exile, Korsch asserted that the principle of historical specificity was a key criterion of Marxian theory, maintaining that Marxism provided a historically specific critique of capitalist society and alternatives to it.

In retrospect, Korsch's chief contributions to Marxian theory include his theory of the workers' councils as the authentic organ of socialist society; his critiques of Social Democratic revisionism and Leninism; his analysis of the crisis of Marxism; his theory of fascism and counterrevolution; his proposals for new working class political strategies and new models of socialism; his recognition of the so-called "Third World" as a likely site of the sort of revolutionary politics advocated by Marxists; and his interpretations of Marxism and meta-theoretical reflections on the mixture of science and dialectics, theory and practice, which in his view constitutes the specificity of the Marxian theory.

Both Korsch and Hook moved rightwards in the 1940s and 1950s. Korsch rejected orthodox Marxism as historically outmoded, and wanted to adapt Marxism to a new historical situation, a task he did not live to carry out. Shifting his ground rightward, gradually at first, Hook tried to combine Marxism with Deweyan pragmatism, and then abandoned anticapitalism entirely during the 1940s. Max Eastman’s pamphlet The Last Stand of Dialectical Materialism (1935) was the outstanding popular (or vulgar) version of the challenge. James Burnham, cofounder of the Left-philosophical journal Symposium in the early 1930s, closed out the era with a blistering attack upon dialectics as a hindrance to Trotskyism (which he would, in turn, renounce a few years later, en route to conservatism). The Popular Front–oriented Science and Society, meanwhile, attempted, without great success, to maintain the faith in Russian-style socialism’s scientific claims. After 1950, Science and Society went its own way politically with a variety of Marxist-influenced philosophical contributions.

Trotskyist circles of the 1930s–1940s provided a particularly heated intellectual forum for the reinterpretation of Marxist philosophy. Attacking all currents of Deweyism, former Dewey student George Novack and James G. Wright sought to uphold Trotsky’s views. C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Grace Lee, and their “Johnson-Forest Tendency” struck off in new directions, fostering the rethinking of Marxism in the light of Hegel. Their translation and mimeographed publications from Marx’s 1844 Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts highlighted the recuperation of the young Marx that would mean so much to the coming New Left generation.

Few could have foreseen that the Frankfurt School’s writings would become so influential. Although the group had produced (or encouraged) both Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, it remained relatively obscure. Philosophy proper had no wide New Left following in the 1960s, even among those who admired Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man enough to attempt his more difficult Reason and Revolution. For cerebral activists, the New Left Review offered an ongoing discussion of Continental trends, heavily influenced by Trotskyism and, during the late 1960s, by structuralism. Through this avenue Louis Althusser gained a degree of currency on American campuses. Before 1970 only specialists and a relative handful of enthusiasts were familiar with the writings of such major figures of critical theory as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, or Walter Benjamin. But these quasi-Marxist thinkers would play a large role in redefining post-Marxist philosophical approaches after the collapse of the New Left.

A revived Hegelianism reached a younger generation of mostly academic readers via Telos, the sole philosophical journal attached to the New Left, and the unique proponent of a “phenomenological Marxism” (principally via the Italian philosopher Enzo Paci and his Eastern European counterparts) en route to a Middle European mélange of radicalism and neoliberalism. The journal Radical America in turn reintroduced the Trinidadian historian, journalist and revolutionary C. L. R. James as champion of a dialectics and socialism liberated from Stalinism and intellectual neocolonialism. Another version of Left Trotskyism is evident in the work of Raya Dunayevskaya, at one time Leon Trotsky's secretary, who founded the organization News and Letters Committees and developed a Marxist Humanist movement that continues to be active after was its leader until Dunayevksaya’s death.

A rising interest in Marxism within the universities from the 1960s onward prompted a Left philosophical revival just as the New Left fragmented and dispersed. While a linguistic-oriented analytic philosophy was still hegemonic, universities began hiring more Marxist philosophers who taught Marxist-oriented courses, and major university presses began publishing numerous books on Marxist theory and classics of Korsch, Lukacs, the Frankfurt School, Althusser, and an array of other contemporary French and Italian Marxist thinkers.

Marxist philosophy itself underwent dramatic changes. In addition to German currents of a mostly Hegelian Marxism, other imports (from France in particular) were transmuted in attempts to synthesize Marxism with such theories as structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction, and Italian Marxism contributed an “autonomous Marxism” tradition, championing independent struggles of workers, students, and youth, outside of the confines of Marxist or other left parties. By the later 1970s, an “analytic Marxism” flourished as an effort to apply techniques of Anglo-American philosophy and game theory to a critical analysis of Marxism. At the same time, feminists proposed a synthesis of Marxism and feminism, while liberation theologians proposed a parallel synthesis of Marxist philosophy with biblical readings and hermeneutics. Fresh attempts to demolish Marxism came from many directions, most notably from the “New French Philosophers” and poststructuralists such as Jean Baudrillard. While there were attempts to synthesize Marxism and Deconstruction, many poststructuralists were hostile to Marxism and Marxists in turn attacked poststructuralism.

Further, the later 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet bloc seemed to consolidate a shift away from the Marxist philosophical project on a global scale. The same period, however, saw a return, in a variety of muted forms, of versions of Marxism. The Radical Philosophy Association, originating in 1968 as the Radical Caucus within the American Philosophical Association, morphed into the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) in 1982 and continues to have biannual conferences and to publish newsletters and journals. After varied mergers between Marxism and Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, the RPA incorporated a variety of forms of identity politics and sponsored meetings in Cuba and Latin America. The Sartre Society of North American and Socialist Feminist Philosophers in Action pursued, respectively, the dialogue between existential philosophy and Marxism and the promotion of feminist thought. Cornel West argued in several widely-read books for a reinstatement of socialist ethics with a certain stress on racial issues. Younger philosophers, such as Lewis R. Gordon and Arnold Farr, worked out of more clearly revolutionary paradigms, seeking to recuperate the efforts of Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse and others to capture the tragedy and possibility of the modern condition.

The Socialist Scholars Conference has been an annual weekend gathering of prominent socialist scholars in New York for debate, dialogue, and solidarity, which was sponsored by the City University of New York’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. The conference was held annually in from 1983 to 2004, but was discontinued in 2005 due to internal divisions, although it was followed by a Left Forum which has held conferences, mostly in New York and the East Coast from 2005 through the present. There was also a Westcoast Left Forum held in Los Angeles in 2019 and a Midwest Radical Scholars Conference has been active from the 1980s through the present.

Founded in 2005, The International Herbert Marcuse Society has held nine bi-annual conferences in the succeeding years and is planning future events with international T.W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin societies. Yet Marxist philosophy has also had an impact among younger students and activists who have been participating in anti-Trump and Black Lives Matter demonstrations, that coalesced into a global movement in 2020 with the murder of George Floyd and other African American men and women. Hence, while Marxist philosophy, like Philosophy in general, is in decline in the Universities, it is alive in the streets and hearts and minds of new generations of activists, young and old who continue to believe with Karl Marx that the point is not just to understand the world, but to change it.

Buhle, Paul. Marxism in the United States. London: Verso, 1991.

Gordon, Lewis R., ed. Fanon: A Critical Reader. London: Blackwell, 1996.

Kellner, Douglas, ed. Karl Korsch: Revolutionary Theory. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1977; British edition, London: Pluto Press, 1981