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Marxist humanism is a branch of Marxism that primarily focuses on Marx's earlier writings, especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in which Marx espoused his theory of alienation, as opposed to his later works, which are considered to be concerned more with his structural conception of capitalist society. The Praxis School, which called for radical social change in Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia in the 1960s, was one such Marxist humanist movement.
Contents
Marxist humanism was opposed by the "antihumanism" of Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who described it as a revisionist movement.
Theory
The term "Marxist humanism" at the notion of alienation remains a part of Marx's philosophy. Teodor Shanin and Raya Dunayevskaya go further, asserting that not only is alienation present in the late Marx, but that there is no split between the young Marx and mature Marx.
The early Marx, influenced by Feuerbach's humanistic inversion of Hegelian idealism, articulated a concept of species-being, according to which man's essential nature is that of a free producer, freely reproducing their own conditions of life. However, under capitalism individuals are alienated from their productive activity insofar as they are compelled to sell their labor-power as a commodity to a capitalist; their sensuous life-activity, or labor, thus appears to them as something objective, a commodity to be bought and sold like any other. Thus, to overcome alienation and allow humankind to realize its species-being, the wage-labor system must be transcended, and the separation of the laborer from the means of labor abolished.
Criticisms
The most potent criticism of Marxist Humanism has come from within the Marxist movement. Louis Althusser, the French Structuralist Marxist, criticises Marxist Humanists for not recognising the dichotomy between 'Young Marx' and 'Mature Marx'. Althusser believes Marx's thought to be marked by a radical epistemological break. For Althusser, the humanism of Marx's early writings—influenced by Hegel and Feuerbach—is fundamentally incongruous with the "scientific", structure-concerned theory found in Marx's mature works such as Das Kapital. Of the Marxist Humanist's reliance on the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Althusser writes, "We do not publish our own drafts, that is, our own mistakes, but we do sometimes publish other people's" (cited in Gregory Elliot's "introduction: In the Mirror of Machiavelli" an introduction for Althusser's "Machiavelli and us", p. xi).
Humanists argue that ‘Marxism’ developed lopsidedly because Marx's early works were unknown until after the orthodox ideas were in vogue—the Manuscripts of 1844 were published only in 1932—and to understand his latter works properly it is necessary to understand Marx's philosophical foundations. However, Althusser does not defend orthodox Marxism's economic reductionism and determinism; instead, he develops his own theories of ideological hegemony and conditioning within class societies, through the concept of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) and interpellation which constitutes the subject.
Marxist humanists
Notable thinkers associated with Marxist humanism include: