Unorthodox Marxism is unthinkable without Hegel. The irreplaceable starting and returning points for surpassing conformist Marxism are found in Hegel. From Gramsci to Merleau-Ponty, Marxists escaped the constraints of orthodoxy by tapping Hegelian waters. Critical Marxism obtained coherence and significance in countries where Hegelian thought remained alive: Italy and Germany. Conversely, where a Hegelian tradition never rooted, dissipated, or arrived late – in the United States, England, France – orthodox Marxism not only dominated but suffocated alternatives.

Yet this assertion is too crude and requires qualifications. Apart from the difficulty of identifying national traditions of Marxism, the relationship between Hegel and a critical Marxism explodes a simple cause and effect. Diverse schools of Marxism have appealed to Hegel. In the nineteenth century Russian Hegelianism was second to none. In the twentieth century Soviet as well as European Marxism rest on Hegelian bases. Yet a pattern emerges that is more than a pattern: It illuminates the logic and essence of Marxism. The Hegel that has informed (and sometimes decorated) Marxism has been divided into two types. Two Hegelian traditions crystalized, and each infused two major Marxisms of the twentieth century, Soviet and European.

The failure to discern the two Hegelian traditions obscures the history of Marxism. Partly because of the division of intellectual labor, the distinction between the two Hegels has rarely been studied. Russian specialists regularly concluded that Soviet Marxism is Hegelian in form and inspiration. Conversely, specialists of European history argued that Western Marxism remains fundamentally Hegelian.

These judgments are accurate, but imprecise and unilluminating. Soviet and European Marxism relied on antagonistic Hegelian traditions. This is more than an interesting (or uninteresting) fact.

“So much the worse for the facts.” With these words of Fichte, Lukács closed the first draft of “What Is Orthodox Marxism?” To the skeptical, perhaps to the sympathetic, the words are outrageous. Marxism is not contradicted by the facts. The facts are duplicit, or, at best, mute. To quantify, classify, or categorize facts is to capitulate to them. “Truly orthodox dialectical Marxists paid little attention to the so called ‘facts.’”

The obverse is plainer and more convincing: The facts confirm Marxism. The large events, as well as the small, prove the truth of the theory. The Russian and Chinese revolutions, imperialism, and the crises of capitalism all demonstrate the continuous validity of Marxism. Marxism is compelling precisely because it is accurate and, finally, because it is successful: It works. The strength of the working class, as well as the victory of several revolutions, leaves little doubt. Success is the proof.

Success: This is the rub. How does one evaluate success? The Seventeenth Congress of the Soviet Communist party (1934) announced that the party had “triumphed” everywhere. Stalin declared that socialism was now “the sole commanding force.” The official account dubbed this meeting the “The Congress of Victors.” Several decades later, in 1956, Khruschev indicated how the victors fared: “Of the 139 members and candidates of the party's Central Committee who were elected at the Seventeenth Congress, 98 persons, i.e. 70 percent, were arrested and shot… The same fate met… the majority of the delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress. Of 1,966 delegates… 1,108 were arrested on charges of revolutionary crimes, i.e. decidedly more than a majority.”

The term “Western Marxism” (and “European Marxism”) entered Marxist dictionaries in the early 1920s. The Soviet edition listed it as derogatory. By implying that a specific Marxism belonged to Western Europe, the universality of bolshevism and the III (Communist) International (Comintern) was threatened. To the participants, this threat was not instantly evident. Moreover, the political and philosophical layers of Western Marxism unpeeled sequentially; at least this is how it appeared to Korsch when he looked back. First a specific Western Marxist politics took shape, and later its philosophy was elaborated.

“As it moved westwards,” Korsch explained in 1930, “this Marxist Leninist philosophy [of the Russians] encountered the work of Lukács, myself and other ‘Western’ Communists which formed an antagonistic philosophical tendency within the Communist International itself.” He added: “This philosophical discussion was only a weak echo of the political and tactical disputes that the two sides had conducted so fiercely some years before.” Of these political disputes, Korsch mentioned two: Rosa Luxemburg's criticism of the Russian Revolution and the conflict between the Bolsheviks and the “radical left tendency” led by the Dutchmen Anton Pannekoek and Hermann Gorter.

A “weak echo”: World War I, the collapse of the II International, the radicalization of the working class, the Russian Revolution, brief Western European revolutions, the founding of the III International and the new Communist parties resonated for decades. The magnitude and profundity of these upheavals damned philosophical discussions to irrelevancy. By 1923, however, when Korsch and Lukács published their major philosophical works, the revolutionary surges had subsided. Politics lost an immediacy, or, at least, the options contracted. This was not only hindsight.

The monotony of defeat and self-destruction compelled Western Marxists to reevaluate the relationships of history and nature. Initially, they kept distant from the natural sciences for devaluing the new and unique in history; this devaluation condemned Marxism to improving, not undoing, the past. Yet the uniform defeat of the European revolutions and the barbarism of fascism exacted a toll. The hope of a liberating breakthrough dimmed. Moreover, Marxists were not only victims but victimizers. To Walter Benjamin&s words that the “bourgeoisie never ceased to be victorious” could be added: Marxists never ceased to bury each other and the revolution. The subordination of history to bleak repetition tempered the efforts to rescue it from nature.

The Western Marxists, especially the theorists of the Frankfurt School, adopted a negative vision of nature. This vision is not be confused with the classic ethos of entrepreneurial capitalism, which eyed nature only as stuff to be exploited and subdued. Rather nature, even before and outside of human exploitation, was racked by violence and pain. Nature mutely testified to ceaseless horror, perpetual cycles of silent suffering. “Nature” and “natural” lost their benign and innocent quality; the natural in nature was also violent and unnatural. Big fish eat little fish, although, Marcuse noted dryly, “it may not seem natural to the little fish.”

A rough egalitarianism belongs to the twentieth century; it has chopped down political hopes and beliefs of every stripe. From Liberalism to Marxism, none has survived intact. Talk of the Gulag is hardly answered by talk of Auschwitz; nor can analysis of one replace analysis of the other. The wreckage extends in every direction. The vastness of the junkyard encourages, almost compels, retreat and resignation.

Yet, as Herbert Marcuse once remarked, there was no God that failed, only men and women. The debacle allows no escape. With care and caution we must sift through the theoretical rubble. Marx and Weber and Freud remain our contemporaries not because little of import has been said since they wrote but because the society they dissected, and sometimes denounced, still wheezes along. The temptation to flee into the future and begin conceptually afresh is marked by fright, and it yields staler results than less ambitious efforts to think through the past.

This book was written in the spirit of rescue and retrieval. To be sure, recently there has been no dearth of histories of Marxism. This one, however, parts from the usual textual study or narrative monograph; it is both more and less modest. It is more modest in that I do not seek to elucidate the entire oeuvre of Marx; it is less in that I am not content with a flat historical reconstruction. I do not view this study as a Sunday tour through the museum of Marxism, stopping here and there to gaze upon extinct specimens. There are no simple lessons here nor instructions on how to save the world.

“From 1918 to the present day, every chapter of European history could be headed: The defeat of the Revolution.” So Pannekoek paraphrased Marx in 1927. By June 1924, when Lukács and Korsch were denounced as “left” Communists by the keepers of the Soviet orthodoxy, the major post–World War I upheavals were past but hardly forgotten. By their participation in these events, Lukács and Korsch each provided clues to the political significance of their philosophical writings. This explains the hostility that greeted History and Class Consciousness and Marxism and Philosophy, both published in 1923. Each book distilled past political experiences. Although neither book openly broached heretical political positions, neither could be insulated from a dense political atmosphere and past.

A philosophical denunciation of Lukács by the Russian philosopher Abram Deborin and his followers complemented the political denunciation. This philosophical confrontation etched the divergence between two Hegelian traditions. Lukács leaned heavily on Hegel. Deborin also drew on Hegel, and his “school” was identified, and eventually dismissed, as Hegelian. The Deborinites used the “scientific” Hegel to slay the “historical” Hegel of Lukács. Hegel collided with Hegel.

In an Afternote to the first edition of his book, Korsch expressed his theoretical solidarity with Lukács. Yet their theoretical closeness was partly an illusion. Their positions intersected, but each moved perpendicular to the other. Lukács shifted from a Hegelianized Marxism and “left” communism toward philosophical orthodoxy and political compromise. Korsch passed from a conventional philosophical and Marxist past to philosophical and political heresy. For an instant their paths crossed.

Neither Lukács's nor Korsch's philosophical works are discussed here in any detail; this has been done well elsewhere.

The literature on Marxism threatens to drown both the theory and its students. To the cynical it confirms the obsolescence of Marxism: It has fled the streets and factories for the halls and offices of the university. The struggle to publish replaces the class struggle. Academics jet to conferences to hawk competing brands of Marxism. A consumer's guide is required to stay abreast of the offerings and the recalls: structural Marxism, semiotic Marxism, feminist Marxism, hermeneutical Marxism, phenomenological Marxism, critical Marxism, and so on.

This is not surprising. Marxism is not immunized against its object. After a century of contact the critique of the commodity succumbs to the commodity. Marx quipped that the criminal augments the market by producing the professor of criminology, who produces the commodity, the textbook on criminal law. Today the revolutionary joins the criminal. The briefly popular slogan “The revolution will not be televised” was optimistic. The revolution will be televised. Nonetheless, to recognize that Marxism has been made a commodity is no reason to write it off. It proves that Marxism does not escape the social conditions that it has always denounced as determinant.

Nor does “commodification” exhaust the vulnerability of Marxism to its own historical situation. Everywhere Marxism has assumed characteristics of its specific environments. A single, homogeneous Marxism belongs to the past. Marxism takes on the color, and sometimes the content, of its conditions. Marxism devolves into Marxisms. This diversity is not benign. The world map of Marxism includes academics and political parties, entire states and cemeteries. There are Marxist revolutionaries and poets; there are also Marxist careerists, premiers, and executioners. A common vocabulary, reality, and loyalty cease to exist.

In the mid-1920s the story breaks off and up into separate pieces and chapters. Stalinism as a world phenomenon, the onset of fascism, World War II, and the Cold War more than sufficed to repress or frighten into silence unorthodox Marxists. Yet a Western Marxism did not evaporate; its paths can be followed through these decades until the late 1950s, when it reemerged, again political and public.

The scattering and decentralization of Western Marxism lends an arbitrariness to the examination of particular individuals or groups. In Italy, France, Germany, and elsewhere, groups and grouplets, traditions, and currents persisted that finally coalesced into a viable – if unsuccessful – alternative to Soviet and orthodox Marxism.

The fate of Western Marxism in Italy requires some additional comments. In surveying the development of Western Marxism, simple patterns are seductive. If these fail, the opposite approach is equally tempting: to find only “special cases” and to arrive at no general conclusions. In many respects, Italy was a special case, at least in regard to the roots and impact of Western Marxism. Nowhere else did the Western Marxists – the Frankfurt School, or Pannekoek and Gorter, or Merleau-Ponty and Sartre – participate in the mainstream of Marxism. Yet Italian Marxism incorporated Antonio Gramsci. The resiliency and independence of Italian communism in the current period is partly due to this fact (or accident?).

The process by which Gramsci became anointed and official has provoked endless controversy. To some it entailed the domestication of Gramsci, a falsification of his thought; the opponent of official Marxism is palmed off as the exponent.