Page 20 - Cultural Theory

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••• Cultural Analysis in Marxist Humanism •••

These radical attacks did, however, begin to raise questions about the ability of
orthodox Marxism to understand political and cultural factors and about the part
played by conscious human action in the development of these elements of the
‘superstructural’. Some years earlier, the Italian Marxist Antonio Labriola had rejected
the strong deterministic arguments of his compatriots Loria and Ferri. Drawing on
Hegel, he stressed that Marxism posits action – praxis – as the crucial link between
economic conditions and cultural life, and that ‘social psychology’ is a crucial ele-
ment in historical explanation. However, Labriola’s influence on other Marxists was
limited, and he did not go on to construct a systematic social theory of either poli-
tics or culture.
It was only in the 1920s that the economism and determinism of established forms
of Marxism were seriously challenged. The philosophical reconsiderations that have
come to be known as ‘western Marxism’ laid the real foundations of Marxist human-
ism (Anderson, 1976). Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács, in particular, worked through
a larger body of philosophy and provided the basis on which the later work of the
critical theorists in Frankfurt was built. Writing from within the Marxist tradition,
they looked back to the roots of Marxism itself, and particularly to its philosophical
roots in Kant and Hegel. They sought to reconstruct Marxism on a new philosophi-
cal basis that would take account of the sociological work of Weber and Simmel and
the psychological work of Freud. It was this novel mix of ideas that shaped the
emerging framework of Marxist humanism.
Born in Hungary, Georg Lukács attended Simmel’s lectures in Berlin and became a
member of Simmel’s private seminar group. A fellow member of this group, Ernst
1
Bloch, took Lukács to Heidelberg to hear Rickert’s lectures, and in Heidelberg they
both became members of Max Weber’s academic circle. Lukács’s primary interests lay
in aesthetic theory and literature, which he approached from the standpoint of the
Geisteswissenchaften and he began to read Hegel and the ‘Young Hegelians’ of the
1840s. An especially important influence on his work, however, was Kierkegaard,
whose ideas were concurrently being intensively examined by other important
thinkers: while Lukács was drawing out the Hegelian dimension in Kierkegaard’s
work, Heidegger and Jaspers were using it to forge their existential phenomenology.
Lukács’s aim in his earliest books had been to interpret the symbolic structures
2
through which literary works are produced. In Soul and Forms (Lukács, 1910) he used
Simmel’s idea of ‘form’ (Simmel, 1900; see also Simmel, 1908) to analyse literary
expression, while in The Theory of the Novel (Lukács, 1914–15) he adopted more
explicitly Hegelian ideas. To these arguments, however, he added the Marxist view
that cultural products of all kinds had to be seen as originating in specific social
classes (Arato and Breines, 1979). All cultural production, he argued, occurs within a
capitalist division of labour and must be seen as involving a process of ‘objectifica-
tion’ that separates the products from their creative human producers. The cultural
sphere, then, comes to appear as if it were an objective and impersonal sphere of
intellectual forms detached from any subjective human meaning. The task of cultural
analysis is to show that cultural products can be understood only if they are related
back to the meanings and interests of their producers, understood as class members.

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