Page 58 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

MARXISM

Political repression drove Marx himself into exile, at first to Paris
and then to London, where he would live for most of his adult life. A
committed socialist excluded from the academic career to which he
had originally aspired, he sought to fashion a self-consciously
progressive social theory that would be of political value to the working-
class movement. His own academic training nonetheless profoundly
affected the shape of this theory. What emerged was a synthesis between
Hegelian philosophy and British utilitarian political economy, which
combined a culturalist sense of the antithesis between culture and
utilitarian capitalist civilization with a utilitarian sense of the importance
of material interest, and incorporated each into an overall Hegelian
understanding of history as process. Marx is thus led to a dual stress,
first on the logics of capitalist development, and second on the notion
of ideology, by which he seeks to denote the nexus between belief and
interest. Both themes become central not only to Marx’s own Marxism
but also to that of the international socialist movement in the late
19th and early 20th centuries, and later to that of the international
communist movement.
In Germany itself, Marxian socialism attained to a much greater
political and intellectual influence than in Britain: the major socialist
party, the SPD, which grew to become the largest German political
party in the years before the First World War, had formally adopted a
version of Marxism as its official social theory. Socialist intellectuals
such as Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932)
and Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) were employed by the party itself,
and were thus able to achieve public prominence in German intellectual
life from outside the university. This very visible presence of Marxist
ideas in late 19th and early 20th century Germany came to command
the attention of many liberal academics working within the universities.
Classical German sociology was born out of this academic engagement
with the legacy of Marx: as Albert Salomon famously observed, Max
Weber, the German “bourgeois Marx”, became a sociologist “in a
long and intense debate with the ghost of Marx”. This debate, in
1
turn, decisively shaped the entire subsequent history of German
sociology; and also of what is often termed “western Marxism”, a
phrase coined originally by the French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, to describe that tradition of critical Marxism which developed
in Western Europe, and especially in Germany itself, in more or less
deliberate opposition to official, Soviet, “scientific” Marxism. 2

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