Page 41 - Cultural Theory

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••• John Scott •••

Karl Kosik in Czechoslovakia set out similar views to Kolakowski and Schaff (Kosik,
1976), but the most vibrant tradition of Marxist humanist philosophy was that of the
‘Praxis’ group in Yugoslavia. 18 From 1964 to their suppression in 1975, and heavily
influenced by the arguments of Erich Fromm (1965), they developed ideas from the
young Marx, especially in relation to alienation and freedom (Markovic´ and Petrovic,
1979). Most important among these was Mikhael Markovic´ (1974; Markovic´ and
Cohen, 1975). Markovic´ wrote specifically on culture, though his main contribution
was to restate the arguments of Galbraith (1967) rather than make any specifically
novel Marxist contribution. Golubovic´ (1972), however, did set out a general view of
culture that explored the relationship between ‘elite’ and ‘mass’ culture and applied
this to the situation of intellectuals in ‘actually existing socialism’.
Marxist humanism, then, is no longer sustained as a strong research tradition, and
it is doubtful whether it can, any longer, form the basis of a viable research pro-
gramme. It proved highly successful at a time when the main currents of Marxism
gave little attention to cultural matters and sociology was, for the most part, failing
to produce comprehensive explanations of the social organization of culture. Having
successfully put cultural analysis on the agenda, its ideas were rapidly adopted by
others and put to use in alternative research programmes. It is now difficult to see
how the sociology of culture could be anything other than a central part of socio-
logical analysis, but it is equally difficult to see how a Marxist humanism could, any
longer, provide the sole intellectual basis for this.

Notes

1 Bloch’s first book (Bloch, 1918) was on music and art, drawing on Simmel’s ideas but seeing
these artistic forms from the standpoint of the utopian (the ‘not yet’). In the 1920s, he
became a Marxist, supporting the Soviet Union and Stalinism.
2 Soul and Forms consists of essays written in Budapest between 1907 and 1910. They were first
published in book form in 1910 and were expanded in 1911.
3 Central to Lukács’ ideas on reification were the arguments of Simmel in his analysis of
money (Simmel 1900).
4 Lukács prepared a response to some of his orthodox critics (Lukács 1925) but he left it
unpublished and seems never to have referred to it again. Not until the 1990s, long after his
death, was the manuscript found in the CPSU archive in Moscow, having narrowly escaped
destruction in 1941. It was published for the first time in 1996 and was translated into
English in 2000.
5 Korsch lost his professorship with the rise of the Nazis, moving to Denmark and then to
England and the United States. He remained in the US until his death in 1961.
6 Following the Russian revolution, the Marx archives were centralized in Moscow, where
David Ryazanov at the Marx-Engels Institute began a systematic publication of the collected
works (the so-called M.E.G.A.). For a time, this became the focus of a reconsideration of
Marx’s ideas. The Institute of Social Research worked closely with Ryazanov during the
1920s, and Lukács worked on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx, 1844) in
Moscow to ready them for their publication, for the first time, in 1932. Karl Löwith’s review
of the manuscripts immediately argued that they vindicated Lukács’s book and his use of
Hegelian ideas. Henri Lefebvre translated these manuscripts into French in 1933.
Developments in Russia, however, brought this to a virtual end: Ryazanov was purged by

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