How Did The 'Western Marxists' Expand The Understandings Of Ideology Available To Anthropologists?

How Did The 'Western Marxists' Expand The Understandings Of Ideology Available To Anthropologists?

Introduction

Western Marxism is a term used to describe a wide variety of Marxist theoreticians based in central Europe and western (and more recently, North America), in contrast with philosophy in the Soviet Union. While the book History and Class Consciousness by Georg Lukacs and Marxism and Philosophy by Karl Korsch, first published in 1923, are sometimes considered the contribution of work in Marxism, the phrase itself was coined much later by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Most of its proponents have been academic professionals5.

The term “ideology” is defined as the class that has the meaning of material production and it also has control over the means of mental production4. Western Marxists have often produced complex changes in the theories of ideology and superstructures, which are only very lightly, sketched in the writings of Marx and Engels themselves. Westerners Marxists have varied in terms of political commitment: Lukacs, Gramsci and Althusser (known for their alleged "anti-humanism") and they were members of parties aligned with the Soviets. The Maoism and Trotskyism also influenced Western Marxism3. In this essay, we will be discussing about the concept of Marxism; its significance in terms of politics and class, and cultural studies in the context of Marxism.

Discussion

During the 1920s, a number of new approaches to Marxism, based on Hegel and the early work of Marx, were produced. György Lukács and Karl Korsch were the most influential, though their works were denounced by the Soviet-led orthodoxy. Antonio Gramsci produced a related set of ideas, but he was imprisoned and had little influence at the time. A further strand of thought was the critical theory that developed at Frankfurt in the years before the Nazi rise to power. All of these approaches to Marxism had their greatest impact when rediscovered in the renewal of interest in Marxist theory during the 1960s and 1970s. Georg Lukacs was a Hungarian philosopher, literary scholar and critic. Lukacs was a major innovator of Marxist philosophy and theorist in the first half of the 20th Century11.

In the works of Marx and Engels, who had the most influence on the development of the theory of ideology, the term has different connotations. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels insisted on two points. The first was that the ideologies presented a picture of the world in terms of a ruling class. The second is that this picture is necessarily a distortion because the interests of the ruling class are, by definition, partial, and because they represent the interests of humanity in general. In the comments and subsequent developments, ideology is presented in terms of a social class that represents their vested interests as "natural" and universal (as the "national interest", for example)7.

Many later writers have used the term to mean something like, but more generally, to refer, for example, the ideology of gender, racial ideologies, ideologies and ...