Western Marxism is a term used to describe a wide variety of Marxist theoreticians based in Western and Central Europe (and more recently North America), in contrast with philosophy in the Soviet Union. While Georg Lukács's History and Class Consciousness and Karl Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy , first published in 1923, are often seen as the works which inaugurated this current, the phrase itself was coined much later by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. ...
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Western Marxism is a term used to describe a wide variety of Marxist theoreticians based in Western and Central Europe (and more recently North America), in contrast with philosophy in the Soviet Union. While Georg Lukács's History and Class Consciousness and Karl Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy , first published in 1923, are often seen as the works which inaugurated this current, the phrase itself was coined much later by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Its proponents have mostly (but not exclusively) been professional academics.
Although there have been many schools of Marxism, such as Austromarxism or the Left Communism of Antonie Pannekoek or Rosa Luxemburg, that are sharply distinguished from Marxism-Leninism, the term "Western Marxism" is usually applied to Marxist theorists who downplay the primacy of economic analysis, concerning themselves instead with abstract and philosophical areas of Marxism. In its earliest years, Western Marxism's most characteristic element was a stress on the...
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