Chapter Summary

Since the time of Karl Marx's writing, a variety of theories have emerged that bear the Marxian legacy, although in many different ways.

Economic Determinism

Although it is often said that Marx was an economic determinist, or, rather, that he focused narrowly on how the economic dimension of society determined the shape of the rest of society, this view overlooks Marx's dialectical inclinations. A number of the so-called revisionist Marxists, including Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), Karl Kautsky (1850-1938), and Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932), espoused an economically deterministic brand of Marxism, influenced primarily by the boom and busts that characterized this period of capitalism.

Hegelian Marxism

One reaction to the growth of economic determinism was a renewed focus on Marx's philosophical writings, particularly their Hegelian roots. Although a number of Marx's early writings, which were primarily philosophical in their orientation, were unpublished and therefore unavailable to scholars at the time, Georg Lukács (1885-1971) managed to anticipate much of what was to be revealed of Marx's philosophical perspective. In particular, Lukács focused on two major concepts — reification and class consciousness. With reification he extended Marx's notion of the fetishism of commodities to include the process by which any portion of social life could be made a "thing," rather than just commodities. Lukács also developed the notion of class consciousness, or the belief systems shared by those who occupy the same class position within society. Conversely, those who occupy the same class position may be unaware of their common lot, and may possess a false consciousness. Although classes are a part of every historical epoch, to Lukács it was only under capitalism that a class could achieve true class consciousness and be a truly revolutionary force. Lukács discussed the ways in which the nature of the capitalist system is obscured. He thought that once these were revealed, society would become a battleground in the conflict between those who wished to conceal the class character of society and those who wished to expose it.

Another important Hegelian Marxist is Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Gramsci rejected deterministic Marxist formulations, focusing instead on how revolution was contingent on action on the part of the masses, assuming they became conscious of the nature of capitalism and their role in it. This they could do only by using the analysis provided to them by intellectuals. Perhaps the most important contribution Gramsci made to Neo-Marxian theory has been the concept of hegemony, which he referred to as the cultural leadership exercised by the ruling class. Thus, revolutionary forces must not only change the material bases of society, but they must also wrest from its oppressors the cultural leadership of society.

Critical Theory

Critical theory grew up around a group of German neo-Marxists who were unhappy with the economic determinism of turn-of-the-century Marxism. Rather than focusing on the material dimensions of society, the critical school focused primarily on culture. As its name suggests, critical theory is predominantly known for offering critiques of various dimensions of society. Central to this were its critiques of positivism (it leads to passivity), sociology (for its scientism), modern society (rationalization and the absence of reasonableness, as in the rationality), and culture (the pacifying and repressive effects of mass culture disseminated by the culture industry). The critical school has been credited with refocusing attention on subjective phenomena, despite Marx's materialist tendencies. For example, the critical school also had an interest in ideology and its role in domination. They were also dialecticians who attempted to relate the parts of society to its whole, or its totality. Critical theory has been criticized for its lack of historical focus, its weak treatment of economic factors, and its lack of faith in the working class as a revolutionary force.

A slightly different variant found within the critical school tradition is the work of Jurgen Habermas (1929- ). Habermas believes that Marx oversimplified the social component of species-being. Habermas takes as his starting point the necessity of communicative action in the realization of species-being, which emerges from the distinction between purposive-rational action (work) and communicative action (interaction). While Marx's central problematic was the alienation of workers, Habermas's is the alienation of communication, or the "distortion" of communication. Habermas is concerned with the technological dominance of life through the rationalization of purposive-action. However, unlike other theorists, Habermas argues that rationalization can have a positive effect if it rationalizes communication, which would lead to a communication free from domination, creating a form of emancipatory communication. Habermas's idea of a rational society is a society constructed of free communication, where ideas are weighed on their merits and unaltered by ideology.

Neo-Marxian Economic Sociology

Noting that the period in which Marx formulated his critique of capitalism was a specific period in the development of capitalism, a number of theorists have attempted to develop work that more accurately portrays the workings of the capitalist system as it exists today. This can be seen as a shift away from focusing on the era of competitive capitalism and towards looking at what has been called monopoly capitalism. Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy are the major contributors to this line of work, particularly in their book Monopoly Capitalism. Monopoly capitalism involves a transformation in the ways in which companies operate. Under monopoly capitalism, firms compete on the basis of advertising and marketing rather than price. Further, markets are dominated by a small number of very large firms. Lastly, there are many owners, in the form of stockholders, and managers play a much larger role in the operation of the capitalist firms. Similar work has been done by Harry Braverman. Braverman took a microscopic view and looked at changes in the labor process. He emphasized that the control of workers required task specialization, the separation of knowledge and execution, and scientific management techniques. The overall effect of these strategies is to increase productivity while decreasing the cost of labor. Machinery also plays a role in this process. Braverman was one of the first neo-Marxists to deal with white-collar clerical workers, as he tried to show that they faced a set of strategies of control very similar to that faced by manual laborers.

One important line of research surrounds the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. Fordism is characterized by the assembly line and mass-production techniques, whereas post-Fordism involves small, flexible production runs and high technology. The importance of the Fordism/post-Fordism debate is related to the argument of whether our current society is modern or postmodern. While some have argued that post-Fordism is an improvement over Fordism, this overlooks the fact that both exist simultaneously across the world and that empirical studies have shown increased stress levels for those working in post-Fordist environments.

Historically Oriented Marxism

Perhaps the single most important contributor to historical Marxism has been Immanuel Wallerstein (1930- ). Unlike other Marx-influenced thinkers, Wallerstein focused on world-systems as his unit of analysis. The current capitalist world economy is but one of three possible world-systems, along with the world empire and a socialist world government, the latter of which has never existed. Wallerstein breaks down the world system into core, periphery, and semi-periphery. The core dominates the world economy and exploits the others. The periphery provides raw materials, and the semi-periphery is a mix of the two. The world-system eventually incorporated every nation, and was structured by three processes: geographical expansion, the worldwide division of labor, and the development of the core states. The world-systems perspective has been criticized for under-developing a central Marxist problematic, since it focuses on relations within the world system rather than relations between classes.

Neo-Marxian Spatial Analysis

A number of Marxists, influenced by the work of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), have turned to an analysis of the production of space. Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) focuses on the ways in which space is used to reproduce the capitalist system and the class structure that underpins it. For Lefebvre, notions of space propagated by elites are used to achieve and maintain dominance, distorting the use of space that would flow from people's natural experience of it. Edward Soja attempts to integrated space, geography, and time. He developed the notion of trialectics to understand cities as historical-social-spatial phenomena, with an emphasis on the spatial dimension. David Harvey highlights the attention Marx paid to the spatial dimension, and the strength and weaknesses of his positions. For Harvey, the necessity of capitalist expansion puts space near the center of Marx's theory. Marx is faulted for paying little attention to the problematics inherent in the territorial organization of states and for ignoring the way space differentiates strata of the working class.

Post-Marxist Theory

Post-Marxists may be characterized by their nihilistic approach to the history of Marxist thought, to the extent that they dispose of much of Marx's philosophical underpinnings, as well as repudiating the existence of any truly Marxist "method." John Roemer's analytical Marxism attempts to employ modern positivistic methods of analysis to create a better "scientific" Marxism. This includes incorporating rational-choice and game-theoretic orientations. Erik Olin Wright has tried to bring robust, complex, empirical methods to the investigation of Marxist themes. This has led him to break from Marx in at least one way, illustrated in his notion of contradictory locations within class relations. This suggests that individuals may hold multiple, sometimes contradictory, class positions.

Marxian theory as a field has not escaped the wide-ranging influence of postmodern thought. It has led to a focus on the relationship between discourse and ideology, time-space compression, and the continuity between Fordism/post-Fordism and modernity/postmodernity.

More generally, Ronald Aronson has gone so far as to suggest that Marxism as a coherent theory is dead. The fall of the Soviet Union, and communism more generally, is seen as the ultimate historical test of Marxian thought, and it has failed. The birth of so many variants of Marxism has destroyed its powerful coherence in totality. Aronson views these new modifications as pure theory, and not as an expression of the unification of theory and practice that was central to Marx's work. Because of this, he does not believe that these new formulations should be called Marxist.