page_title: Marxist humanism
section_title: Currents
hierarchical_section_title: Marxist humanism / Currents
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Discussiebijeenkomst in de aula van de Oude Lutherse Kerk te Amsterdam met Henri Lefebvre
context_page_description: Marxist humanism is an international body of thought and political action rooted in an interpretation of the works of Karl Marx. It is an investigation into "what human nature consists of and what sort of society would be most conducive to human thriving" from a critical perspective rooted in Marxist philosophy. Marxist humanists argue that Marx himself was concerned with investigating similar questions.
  Marxist humanism was born in 1932 with the publication of Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and reached a degree of prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. Marxist humanists contend that there is continuity between the early philosophical writings of Marx, in which he develops his theory of alienation, and the structural description of capitalist society found in his later works such as Capital. They hold that it is necessary to grasp Marx's philosophical foundations to properly understand his later works.
context_section_description: In the aftermath of the occupation of France and the Second World War, the independent leftist journal Les Temps modernes was founded in 1946. Among its original editorial board were the existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. While both leant support to the politics and tactics of the French Communist Party and the Soviet Union during this period, they concurrently attempted to formulate a phenomenological and existential Marxism that opposed the Stalinist version. The failure of the Western Communist Parties to lead successful revolutions and the development of an authoritarian state structure in the Soviet Union were both, in their view, connected to the "naturalism" and "scientism" of the official orthodox Marxist theory. Orthodox Marxism is not a theory of revolutionary self-emancipation but a self-proclaimed science that imposes a direction upon history from above in the name of irrefutable "iron laws". Against this, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty argued for a subject-centered view of history that emphasized the lived experience of historical actors as the source of cognition.
  In 1939, Henri Lefebvre, then a member of the French Communist Party, published Dialectical Materialism. This book, written in 1934-5, advanced a reconstruction of Marx's oeuvre in the light of the 1844 Manuscripts. Lefebvre argued here that Marx's dialectic was not a "Dialectics of Nature" (as set forth by Friedrich Engels) but was instead based on concepts of alienation and praxis. In the wake of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, Lefebvre -  together with Kostas Axelos, Jean Duvignaud, Pierre Fougeyrollas and Edgar Morin - founded the journal Arguments. This became the centre of a Marxist humanist critique of Stalinism. In his theory of alienation, Lefebvre drew not only from the Manuscripts, but also from Sartre, to proffer a critique that encompassed the styles of consumption, culture, systems of meaning and language under capitalism.
  Starting in the late 1950s, Roger Garaudy, for many years the chief philosophical spokesman of the French Communist Party, offered a humanistic interpretation of Marx stemming from Marx's early writings that called for dialogue between Communists and existentialists, phenomenologists and Christians.
   
  The period following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 saw a number of movements for liberalization in Eastern Europe. Following Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech, where he denounced "Stalinism", Marx's 1844 Manuscripts were used as the basis for a new "socialist humanism" in countries such as Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Petofi Circle, which included some of Lukács's disciples, was a centre of what was termed "revisionism" in Hungary. In 1959, the Polish writer Leszek Kołakowski published an article "Karl Marx and the Classical Definition of Truth" that drew a sharp distinction between the theory of knowledge found in the works of the young Marx and the theory found in Engels and Lenin. This challenge was taken up by Adam Schaff - a member of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party - and expanded into an investigation into the persistence of alienation in socialist societies. 
  The Czechoslovak Karel Kosik also began the critique of communist dogmatism that would develop into his Dialectics of the Concrete, and would eventually land him in jail.
  This period also saw the formation of a humanist Marxism by Yugoslav philosophers Mihailo Markovic and Gajo Petrovic that would come to act as the basis of the Praxis School. From 1964 to 1975, this group published a philosophical journal, Praxis, and organized annual philosophical debates on the island of Korčula. They concentrated on themes such as alienation, reification and bureaucracy.
   
  In Britain, the New Left Review was founded from an amalgamation of two earlier journals, The New Reasoner and the Universities and Left Review, in 1959. Its original editorial team – E. P. Thompson, John Saville and Stuart Hall – were committed to a socialist humanist perspective until their replacemen
caption: Henri Lefebvre
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