I think it's fair to say that there isn't an agreed definition of "Western Marxism". In the same way that the phrase "New Left" can be used to refer to radically different political developments, often depending largely on the speaker's own point of view and whether they treat the phrase as a compliment or an insult, the phrase "Western Marxism" can be used to refer to very different sets of theories according to one's preferences and purposes.
For my purposes, I'm going to define Western Marxism negatively in terms of approaches which differ significantly from the major forms of Marxism that became institutionalised in the Leninist and social democratic parties of the pre-war period and positively in terms of reworkings of the Marxist tradition which emphasise the activist, humanist and emancipatory elements in his thought. This means locating Western Marxism in terms of agency rather than structure (in terms of the conventional distinction) or in terms of "critique" rather than "science" (in Alvin Gouldner's terminology).
In terms of this course, we can treat structuralism and Western Marxism as the opposing developments of different emphases within classic modernism. One element of this can be seen in terms of the concept of determinism. Both Marx and Weber emphasise the extent to which people's action is determined by their social situation; Marx's famous phrase for this is "Human beings make their own history, but not under conditions of their own choosing". Structuralism develops the emphasis on the primary role of social relations to argue that the idea of agency is an illusion. This can be described as a strong determinism, or perhaps more clearly as a variant of fatalism. A weak determinism would see determination as "setting limits and exerting pressures"; in the Western Marxist tradition this setting of limits and exerting of pressure on human action is above all the result of the action of other human beings or of ourselves in the past. In other words, if we take the idea of the determination of human action by social structure as characteristic of classic modernism, we could say that structuralism collapses human action back into social structure, while Western Marxism tends to collapse social structure back into human action.
In this lecture I'll be talking about three authors: Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci and Alain Touraine, mainly because I think there is a relatively similar logic in their theories. This isn't an obligatory definition: Martin Jay, for example, includes Althusser in his discussion of Western Marxism (Marxism and totality); Roger Gottlieb's anthology includes socialist feminist authors. Both of these are admittedly slightly unusual choices, but virtually any definition of Western Marxism would also include the authors of the "Frankfurt School" or "critical theory" (Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm, Marcuse, etc.); I've avoided them in these lectures, but they have of course made a substantial contribution in terms of theorising modernity and rationality in particular. I will be talking about Jürgen Habermas, one of the "second generation" of the Frankfurt School, in lecture 9. You're welcome to read up on the other Critical Theorists if you want to write about them; apart from their own writings and books devoted to them, both Jay and Gottlieb include them.
It's worth spending a couple of minutes on the context that these authors are writing in. The relevant writings of Lukács and Gramsci date from the inter-war period, so they predate structuralism by a few decades. Lukács was a Hungarian communist; his most important book for our purposes, History and Class Consciousness, was written after his involvement in the Hungarian revolution of 1919. Gramsci was involved in the workers' council movement during the Turin strikes of the same period. His theoretical reputation largely derives from his prison notebooks, written in a deliberately elliptical fashion because of censorship and smuggled out of jail. In other words, both of them share an experience of practical politics at a level which can be described in terms of the social totality, as well as an experience which leads them both to emphasise that social knowledge and social action are not separate forms of life. Touraine's life is a bit more prosaic; he is a French sociologist, but one whose research programme has led him into involvement with a broad range of social movements - from investigating the experience of car workers at Renault in the 1950s through involvement with the student movement in 1968 to research on Allende's Chile and the anti-nuclear movement in France. Thus there is a common thread of involvement with social movements and a refusal to separate theory from practice.
Western Marxism shares with structuralism a common emphasis on holism or the concept of totality. This is formulated by Lukács as "the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts". Thus both of the major developments of critical modernism reject methodological individualism in favour of a view of the social whole as essentially relational, although as we shall see the content of these relations differs dramatically. In each case, it is this relational approach that enables us to think of a social whole. An example from the Western Marxist tradition would be the concept of class: this is seen as representing, not an individual fact (so that A is a shopkeeper and B is a peasant) but a relation (so that C stands in a relation of exploitation and domination of D).
As well as this strong relationalism, there is a radical extension of the category of "the social". Like structuralism, or at least like Althusser's structuralism, but unlike the classical modernism of Marx and Weber, Western Marxism tends to treat "the social" (in its own definition) as the primary or even the only reality. This is clear in terms of the concept of human nature: the idea of a biologically fixed, universally present human nature is rejected as firmly by Gramsci as by Althusser (we have seen that Lévi-Strauss does not take this approach). Here again, the substance of Western Marxism's alternative - social agency - is radically different from that of structuralism. More broadly, the idea of nature as separate from and essentially different to society is rejected. For Lukács, it is effectively unknowable; for Gramsci, nature is something that is effectively completely subordinated to society in the process of production. Similarly, both reject the idea of the unconscious as having an independent and pre-social nature. This is not just a rejection of the idea of the non-social; it is also bound up with a rejection of positivist and scientistic approaches to social reality and the insistence that we cannot claim to stand "outside of history", to be an external observer of a fixed and given reality.
For Western Marxist authors, society is a human creation; more exactly, humanity is social humanity. "Human beings make their own history", but not as isolated individuals. Human beings only appear as human beings in interaction with one another, that is, in social relations. These social relations, however, are not fixed and given, so that we could discuss them in terms of structures which define what appear to be individuals; rather, they are the results of collective creation and social conflict.
Thus whatever appears as natural, given, or fixed in society is the result of human action, but we do not recognise it as such. Lukács introduces the term "reification" to describe this process where the result of our actions appear to us as a quasi-natural "thing" (res), because we do not recognise its social origins or the process of creation that goes into its formation. This concept of reification links in to some of Marx's discussion of what is translated into English as "alienation", but it does not give economic production, interaction with external nature, the same central role it has in much of Marx's writing. In Western Marxism, then, what appear as structures are simply the products of human action, or, even more simply, a form of human action which has taken on a life of its own and now appears quasi-natural.
A term which is sometimes used to characterise this view of society is that of "expressive totality". The social whole, the totality, is seen simply as the self-expression of the social subject, a self-expression and self-creation which we only partially recognise as such. Within a Marxist framework, the force of the word "expressive" comes from the implication that Lukács, in particular, does not recognise the importance of material needs and interaction with nature in this process, so that the self-creation of society is "instrumental" rather than "expressive". This point could, however, equally be directed at Gramsci, whose complete subordination of the natural world to the social leads to the implication that needs are not just socially defined but in fact socially created; at Althusser, who of course throws the notion of human needs out of court; or even, in some slightly convoluted arguments, at Marx the arch-materialist. This is not just a problem within Marxism; given that pure biological needs are never manifested directly in humans, but are always articulated in a social context and given a socially meaningful form, the argument that we can disentangle pure biological needs from the social form they always take is a problematic one, albeit a necessary one.
Like Marx, Western Marxism recognises that an abstract description of the subject of this process of the expressive creation of society as being simply "humanity" would be both ahistorical (in the sense of not recognising the changing nature of this process over time) and metaphysical, because identifying the social creator with all of social humanity, even at a single point in time, makes it difficult if not impossible to point to the specific social locations of this creation. While all members of society are seen as involved in this creation - because they are involved with each other, they do not do so equally, or consensually, except perhaps in a future communist society.
Therefore Western Marxists argue that the social actor, the creative subject, is not social humanity as a whole but its parts, in particular social classes. Social classes, then, are placed at the centre of the Western Marxist theory of society; social structure arises out of social conflict. This is as true for the creation of institutions for the purpose of exploitation and domination (industrial organisation, the state) as it is for the creation of institutions by which the dominated and exploited aim to overcome both domination and exploitation and create a new social order. This may explain why Western Marxism has traditionally generated both analyses of the mechanisms of state domination, cultural manipulation and so on and analyses of the emancipatory power of action to resist and transcend them.
I want to make two points here. (1) The first is to remind you of Marx's distinction between "class in itself", in other words class situation as created by economic situations, and "class for itself", in other words a class's self-creation of itself as a class through political organisation and the development of class consciousness. In Western Marxism, it is the latter which receives most attention, because it is here that the creative and relational aspects of class can be seen most clearly: class organisation and class culture are clearly creative, and equally clearly, at least in the case of the workers' movement, they are not self-sufficient but are formed in conflict with the capitalist class. Touraine, indeed, argues that there is no class without class consciousness, in other words that the concept of class is meaningless unless it relates to social action.
(2) Gramsci develops these issues in his well-known discussion of "hegemony". The essential point he makes is that the power of a ruling class does not reside simply in its control of physical force: power does not simply "come out of the barrel of a gun". One of the central locations of conflict, beside the workplace conflict and the conflict over control of the state, is therefore a cultural one: capitalist domination also rests on a particular form of "common sense", a particular form of everyday culture, as well as what to academics are the more obvious issues of the production of cultural commodities. The workers' movement, he argues, needs to work not just towards seizing power in the state and control of the workplace, but also towards the creation of a new cultural hegemony. This means transforming the way in which we think about the world, recreating culture in a new form with a new content. One example of what is meant by this can be seen in the Italian context: Gramsci argues that the peasants, in particular of the South, accept the present order of things not so much out of economic interest or because of repression but because their everyday mode of social organisation places them in a position of dependence on local notables and because their religious culture equally subordinates them to the dominant social groups. The task of the workers' movement, he argues, is to build a new alliance with the peasantry involving the transformation of their everyday modes of cultural and social organisation. For this reason he placed a particular stress on the development of what he called "organic" rather than "traditional" intellectuals - the growth of a new working-class intelligentsia which would be able to speak to the working class not just in terms of economic interest or political strategy but also to draw on working-class culture and language.
Thus Western Marxism takes the consciousness of ordinary people - their class identity, culture, language and so on - as seriously as it does their activity; indeed, it tends to argue that the two cannot be separated. There is no class without class consciousness for Touraine; for Gramsci, the discussion of "culture" is at the same time a discussion of modes of social and political organisation. Consistently, Western Marxism does not believe in theorising as a pure activity: abstract philosophising, free of all social relations, is neither desirable nor possible. In both cases, then, knowledge and action are seen as ultimately the same thing. We do not act without thinking, but our thought is itself related to practical activity. Gramsci expresses this point of view in a number of famous aphorisms; perhaps the most creative part of his thinking on the subject is his redefinition of intellectual activity as including both theoretical and organising activity. This, of course, relates not just to Communist Party activists but also to "traditional" intellectuals - local notables such as the village doctor, the priest, or the schoolteacher - and the organising and theoretical activity of civil servants or managers.
So Western Marxism can be described both cognitively and normatively as a philosophy of "praxis", or the unity of thought and action. It is asserted (a) that this is what happens in everyday life and (b) we should realise this and take it into account, for example while we are theorising. However, there is obviously more to the issue than that, or it would not make sense to claim that the results of our thought and action appear to us as things, external, structures.
Thus Gramsci, for example, argues that while "everyone is an intellectual" (in other words, theorises and organises on an everyday level), "not everybody has the social function of an intellectual" (in other words, not everyone devotes themselves to this thinking and organising. In other words, the division of mental and manual labour, diagnosed by Marx and carried to its extremes in the Taylorist model of production, means that this initial unity is at the very least severely distorted. On a more general level, the reality of class conflict and class culture means that the social actors, the conflicting class movements of the rulers and the ruled, cannot fully grasp the social totality, but are restricted to a partial knowledge of it. Thus the reason we do not grasp the expressive totality of society as such is that the agent is not the whole of social humanity but is, in fact, the conflicting parts of that humanity.
It then comes as no surprise to find that many Western Marxists expand Marx's own indications in this direction with a much stronger emphasis on the universal nature of the working class, in other words the claim that the thinkers and organisers of the working-class movement can speak, at least to an extent, from the position of the future unalienated humanity. I mentioned in earlier lectures the point that this means that valid knowledge of the social whole is only available in modern (i.e. capitalist) society, in other words that sociology is, from this perspective at least, only possible from modernity; and that this implies a double emphasis on reflexivity here - the reflexivity available to a class movement, and the reflexivity implied by the theorist's need to become involved in that movement. (For Touraine, incidentally, this involvement has a rather different form, which is developed extensively in the second part of The Voice and the Eye).
I want to mention briefly the idiosyncratic direction in which Touraine develops this line of reasoning. Touraine does not, in fact, share Lukács's and Gramsci's conviction that industrial capitalism is the last stage of social conflict. Instead, he draws a distinction between "industrial" and "post-industrial" society which is not identical with the usual technological determinism, although it does tend to subordinate capitalism to modernity rather than treating modernity as essentially capitalist, as more orthodox Marxists do (and I believe Touraine does not claim to be a "Marxist" in the traditional sense).
What he argues is that societies can be defined in terms of their "historicity", that is, their capacity to act on themselves. In other words, the extent of self-creation and self-knowledge is not fixed but variable. Structuring or institutionalised agency, in the limited sense of the repetitive reproduction of a single method of self-creation, can thus have a greater weight than original and creative agency. Industrial society already distinguishes itself from earlier societies in terms of its greater historicity - its greater capacity for self-knowledge and self-creation as opposed to self-reproduction - ; post-industrial or "programmed" society, towards which we are moving, is radically self-knowing and self-creating. This consists of economic accumulation and the capacity it bestows to create work; the forms of knowledge which produce the social; and the cultural model which represents the way in which a society thinks of itself. Again by contrast with Gramsci and Lukács, Touraine distinguishes between this cultural model - the overall self-knowledge of society - and ideology, which he restricts to the articulation of group interests as defined in this cultural model. Thus if group interests are defined as economic by a cultural model which sees society as primarily an economic reality, ideologies will articulate particular economic interests, but the definition of reality as economic is itself a cultural one. This global cultural model, though, is not imposed on the actors from outside; instead, it consists in and only in the issues and forms of the conflict between the opposing social movements. Thus if the cultural model of industrial society sees society as an economic reality, this is because of the economism of the ruling class and of the working class, and not vice versa.
Thus Touraine is to an extent following both earlier Western Marxists and the founders of critical modernism in arguing that modernity ("post-industrial" or "programmed" society) is characterised by its greater reflexivity. (It should be noted in passing that Touraine argues that the key conflict in programmed society is not between owners and workers but between the dominated and the dominating, between the victims and the operators of the power structure.)
The last point I want to make is to draw your attention to what all of this means for the grounding of truth claims. All three authors are radical in their refusal of "transcendence", in other words of philosophies which claim to be able to locate truth somewhere other than in human society as it develops historically. This means rejecting cognitive and normative claims based not just on a transcendental God but also those claims based on a supposedly universal human nature or on claims about external nature. It is argued alternatively that these do not exist (particularly the first two) or that we cannot know them except in historical and social reality (particularly the latter). I have suggested that the argument about nature is not completely watertight, and we will return to this issue, both in terms of what might be argued to be universal biological needs and in terms of the possibility of thinking of human nature as having a universal social component, particularly a communicative one.
If we accept the Western Marxist argument, however - and the arguments in its favour are at least as good as the arguments in favour of, for example, structuralism or post-structuralism - we have to take a position of what Gramsci calls "absolute historicism". In other words, claims about truth or "the good" can only be evaluated in terms of knowable historical and social reality. More than this, what is true and what is good are historical and social rather than philosophical questions. This does not imply a total relativism or a pure "anything goes" approach, for two reasons. Firstly, within any given society it can be argued (as Touraine does) that these claims need to be referred to the highest level of meanings available in that society, in other words to its overall cultural model, rather than to the ideologies of any particular group within that society. Secondly, however, what might be more in keeping with Lukács and Gramsci's thinking (although as far as I know they do not pursue this line of thought) would be to argue that, just as genuine self-knowledge is only available from the second-last social formation, from the point of view of that proletariat which will become the universal subject of the new society, so it is a mistake to think of pre-capitalist societies, or even capitalist society, as a fixed and static form. All historical societies, in other words, are in change and transition; all contain social conflicts which point to new forms of society. This would open up the possibility of an evaluation of claims about truth and value in terms, not of overall cultural models, but in terms of those ideologies which are prefiguring and leading towards later social forms. Clearly, though, any such evaluation could only be provisional, and in particular could only be related to the provisional ideologies of our own time. It might plausibly be argued that this is what in fact happens.
Next lecture - Previous lecture