Page 19 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Ch-01.qxd 5/9/2007 5:56 PM Page 8

••• John Scott •••

work of both writers (Baudrillard, 1972; Bauman, 1976) was firmly rooted in the work
of the critical theorists who formed the core of Marxist humanism. The growing
recognition of the centrality of the media of mass communications has simply
enlarged and extended ideas already apparent in that work.
In this chapter, I will focus on the products of the relatively short history of
Marxist humanism. The early work of Lukács and the ways in which his ideas were
taken up by Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse will be considered. Some of the con-
tours of their wider acceptance will be discussed, but I will not explore this work in
any detail. It is important, nevertheless, to indicate some of the contemporary work
that falls firmly within the tradition of Marxist Humanism. I will, therefore, sketch
the ways in which the broad philosophical framework of Marxist humanism has per-
sisted, especially in Eastern Europe, where it provided a continuing critical current to
the once-dominant Soviet orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy and Western Marxism

At the time of his death, Karl Marx was known principally for his political writings,
such as The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels, 1848), and for the broadly mate-
rialist interpretation of history that underpinned these writings. Marx had been
working on the economic theories that were central to this materialism for many
years, but he had managed to publish only a very small part of his voluminous
research. Of his projected multi-volume Economics, only the first of the volumes on
Capital had appeared. In the years following his death, others struggled to complete
the unpublished works that formed his intellectual legacy, aiming to demonstrate
their continuing relevance for understanding contemporary conditions.
Central to this task was Friedrich Engels. Despite undertaking important work of
his own before he began working with Marx, Engels can properly be considered ‘the
first Marxist’ (Carver, 1981: 31). He saw his life’s work as promoting and populariz-
ing the ideas of Marx by casting them in a systematic and more rigorously ‘dialecti-
cal’ framework. It was in Engels’s hands that ‘Marxism’ came to be systematized as a
positivistic science formulating law-like generalizations. His Marxism comprised an
economistic view of history that gave little autonomy to cultural phenomena.
Engels’s efforts were closely linked to the development of Marxism in Europe.
Franz Mehring and Karl Kautsky in Germany and George Plekhanov in Russia were
the most important theorists of what came to be known as ‘orthodox’ Marxism or,
by its critics, ‘vulgar Marxism’. ‘Revisionists’ such as Eduard Bernstein and the
Fabians, who pioneered the attempt to revise Marxism to take account of the grow-
ing monopolization of capitalist production and of imperialist expansion, did not
significantly challenge the economic focus and deterministic framework of orthodox
Marxism. This economism was also apparent in the more radical attacks levelled
against both orthodoxy and Revisionism by Rosa Luxemburg and the Austro-
Marxists (Renner, 1904; Hilferding, 1910).
• 8 •