10 Facts About Marxist philosophy

Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew from various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s.

Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, theoretical psychology and philosophy of science, as well as its obvious influence on political philosophy and the philosophy of history.

The key characteristics of Marxism in Marxist philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought.

Nonetheless, the force of Marx's opposition to Hegelian idealism and to any "Marxist philosophy" divorced from political practice remains powerful even to a contemporary reader.

Marx's Marxist philosophy is thus inextricably linked to his critique of political economy and to his historical interventions in the workers' movement, such as the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program or The Communist Manifesto, written with Engels a year before the Revolutions of 1848.

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Thereupon, instead of founding itself on the singular, concrete individual subject, as did classic Marxist philosophy, including contractualism but political economy, Marx began with the totality of social relations: labour, language and all which constitute our human existence.

Marxist philosophy claimed that individualism was the result of commodity fetishism or alienation.

In direct contrast to German Marxist philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven.

Marxist philosophy chose the last as the predominant focus of his studies for the rest of his life, largely on account of his previous experience as the editor of the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung on whose pages he fought for freedom of expression against Prussian censorship and made a rather idealist, legal defense for the Moselle peasants' customary right of collecting wood in the forest .

Some varieties of Marxist philosophy are strongly influenced by Hegel, emphasizing totality and even teleology: for example, the work of Georg Lukacs, whose influence extends to contemporary thinkers like Fredric Jameson.