Suchergebnisse

The influence of the Italian neo-Hegelian & socialist traditions on the Marxist theoretical perspective of A. Gramsci is traced, along with the specific sociohistorical context of his time. Hegelianism had a much greater political & social influence in Italy than in other countries such as GB, France, Germany, & the US, becoming associated with Italian unification & setting the tone of a century of intellectual life. A. Gramsci's notions of civil society, cultural hegemony, & intellectual formation only make sense within this context. Of particular importance is the continuity between B. Spaventa & Gramsci, whose thinking show many parallels, despite a seventy-five-year separation. Although critical Hegelianism quickly declined after Spaventa's death, it eventually became an integral part of Italian philosophy through the work of B. Croce & G. Gentile. Gramsci's reconstruction of Italian history & attitudes against Catholic hegemony is shown to be quite continuous with Spaventa's analysis & thought. M. Migalski.

The work of Czechoslovakian educated K. Kosik serves as an example of the mixture of Western & Marxist thought peculiar to Eastern European intellectualism. His work is now suppressed by the Russians, & its historical context includes the wars & ideological disputes of the early twentieth century. The stirring feature of Kosik's The Dialectic of the Concrete (publisher not given) was its phenomenological & existential twists. He is criticized by orthodox Marxists for reintroducing subject-object dualism, deemphasizing the importance of class, displacing alienation from purely economic roots, & for theoretical contradictions. Nevertheless, Kosik deals with several world problems untouched by traditional & Hegelian Marxists, & while his form of Marxism was politically inadequate to take hold, it serves to reveal the bureaucratic centralism of modern communism. The lesson from his work is that neither current Western nor Eastern systems will survive without some interchange of ideologies. L. Kamel.

The rekindled interest in the political thought of Georg Lukacs stems from the concern of the New Left that a new revolutionary strategy is needed during the period of imperialism. The whole trajectory of Lukacs' theoretical development can be seen as an attempt to salvage materialism through the theory of reflection by linking it to a fundamentally incompatible presentation of the dialectic in its Hegelian form. Lukacs retained all of Marx's categories without modification, & attempted to superimpose them upon a partially altered reality, producing a mechanical rather than dialectical analysis. Lukacs' work contributes to the reformulation of Marxism as a "critical theory"--an approach to reality constantly reconstituting itself in terms of the social praxis of which it is an integral moment--against those who portray Marxism as a "science." However, Lukacs' dialectic needs to be reactivated by supplying it with a materialist foundation which will allow an interaction between subject & group, a phenomenology of concept formation, & possibly a functional analysis of social structures. A. Karmen.

The official outlook of Soviet Marxism is that "orthodox" Marxism needs no qualifications or eclectic revisions, but this dogmatism only emphasizes the theoretical degeneration of a rigid, nondialectical abstract formalism. For several decades, efforts at a synthesis of Marxism & phenomenology have been attempted, but the 2 incompatible perspectives cannot be mechanically joined. A nondogmatic Marxism & a relevant phenomenology can be attained simultaneously if Marxism is treated as the outcome of phenomenology & phenomenology is taken as an inextricable moment of Marxism. Marxism is the historically valid mediation that concretely articulates & directs social reality, while phenomenology is the tracing back of all mediations to the human operations that constituted them. The crisis in irrelevant Marxism necessitates a phenomenological reconstitution, in which new content is expressed in novel forms (phenomenological Marxism) dialectically related to previous forms (classical Marxism). Similarly, phenomenological analysis unavoidably penetrates Marxism as the class-analysis that explains consciousness in terms of class position & labor. Phenomenological Marxism is an approach that constantly reduces all theoretical constructs--including Marxism--to their living context in order to guarantee the adequacy of the concept to the object it apprehends & the goal it seeks. Its point of departure from orthodox Marxism occurs with its rejection of the theory of reflection. A new, critical Marxism adequate for contemporary issues must reformulate the notion of class to embrace the new sectors of the Wc; the concept of the economy to incorporate the formerly separate spheres of leisure, education, etc; & the idea of revolution to involve all the activities of everyday life. Phenomenological Marxism can serve the New Left as the basis for a theoretical critique of the Old Left. A. Karmen.

The sudden growth of the student movements around the world in the 1960's & their intrinsic similarities indicate that the established SE systems share a fundamentally parallel matrix that is the source & target of protest. The object of student rebellion has been described as unidimensionality, technistic alienation or simply the pervasiveness of bur'ization in societies that engage in peripheral self-correction & superficial rationalization of a basically irrational whole. Students are in a favorable position to question the foundations of the soc order because they are not fully integrated & committed structurally, they are the best trained to comprehend the system's actual workings, & they are confronting its irrationalities in their everyday life. In the US, the industr proletariat has been largely integrated into the system, so that its conflicts are expressed as drives for self-improvement & SM within the existing framework. The protests of the student movement against indoctrination & training, & the demands for a critical educ within the U reflect the needs of the rising class of technical workers for a freer life with greater options within the horizon of reason. However, the student movements of Western Europe have not originated from the massive growth of higher educ demanded by a structural need for technically competent manpower, but rather from the backwardness of the old educ'al programs. Whereas a new party linking students & the oppressed minorities in the sub-proletariat is lacking in the US, in Western Europe the student movement has to seek a catalytic role as a mediating agency between the bur'ized leftist party & the alienated Wc. The 2 diff projects confronting the student movements in the 2 correspondingly distinct contexts are in pursuit of the universal goal of ultimately permitting people to shape sci, technology & soc instit's as objects of their own creation, necessarily connected with their praxis so that people as subjects are not only conditioned by their world, but can also consciously alter their environment. A. Karmen.

These essays, written immediately after WWI, underwent a 2-pronged attack from both the Bolshevik left-wing & the Soc Democratic right-wing in the mid-1920's which relegated them to obscurity until their recent rediscovery. "What Is Orthodox Marxism" asserted that orthodoxy refers exclusively to adherence to the dialectical method, not any sacred texts or particular pol'al positions. In refutation of F. Engel's positivism, G. Lukacs proposed that there are no facts independent from theory which gives meaning to them. In "The Changing Function of Historical Materialism," Lukacs argued that contrary to bourgeois society where the class struggle was conducted from the bottom up, the advent of proletarian state power would reverse this; the class struggle would be carried out from the "top down." But in the 1930's Lukacs wrote an infamous self-criticism to publicly disengage himself from the themes in these essays. In 1967, Lukacs reassesed the positive strengths of his works: (1) the restoration of the dialectic to central pivot of marxism in oppositon to the revisionist vulgar materialism of the Soc Democrats; (2) the preservation of the notion of the totality which was eroded by the "scientificity" of Soc Democratic opportunism; (3) the defense of the dialectic as a rational life line running through K. Marx's thought; (4) the initiation of an investigation into the roots of alienation a decade prior to the publication of K. Marx's 1844 manuscripts; & (5) the attempts at at integration of Marx's early works with his later writings which avoided a split between the alleged young humanist & older dogmatist. In 1967, Lukacs recognized the following shortcomings in these essays: (a) an excessive amount of polemical sectarianism in behalf of a utopian theoretical purity that then characterized "occidental marxism" in its struggle against parliamentary tactics; (b) a theoretical error which separated society from nature & presented the dialectic as exclusively the methodology of the latter; (c) an underemphasis of the concept of labor which led to "voluntarism"; & (d) a disregard for the notion of praxis as being rooted in the concept of labor. A. Karmen.