Henryk Grossman, Rick Kuhn: Fifty Years of Struggle over Marxism by Grossman Henryk & Kuhn Rick

Author:Grossman, Henryk & Kuhn, Rick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Socialist Alternative
Published: 2014-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

b) The development of the materialist conception of history

The materialist conception of history, drafted by Marx with Engels’ collaboration in a series of youthful writings (1842–59) in inspired outlines, was never systematically developed by them. It was only Marx’s students who undertook to extend it philosophically and epistemologically, deepening it, above all, through fruitful, specialised research, in various areas of social, economic and cultural history. Karl Kautsky dealt with it philosophically, above all in Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History, Class Antagonisms in the Era of the French Revolution, Thomas More and his Utopia and The Foundations of Christianity.[122] In his last large work, The Materialist Conception of History, Kautsky revised his earlier conception of the driving force of historical development just as he had in relation to his economic and political conceptions (compare Karl Korsch, The Materialist Conception of History: an Argument with Karl Kautsky).[123] Franz Mehring (1846–1919) in his The Lessing Legend chose the literature and the history of [Gotthold Ephraim] Lessing and Friedrich II as his field of application.[124] In brilliant essays in Neue Zeit, he dealt with the most diverse areas of history and literary history. In his consummate, broadly conceived History of German Social Democracy, that admittedly only extended to the beginning of revisionism, he illuminated the economic and social context of the growth of the socialist workers’ movement and combined this with a presentation of its theoretical developments.[125] Georgii Plekhanov, the creator of the materialist sociology of culture and art, entered the struggle against revisionism as one of the most brilliant proponents of dialectical materialism (above all in Fundamental Problems of Marxism, Henrik Ibsen, Essays on the History of Materialism).[126] From the post-war period: the fine and valuable book, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, by Georg Lukács[127], and Karl Korsch’s Central Points of Historical Materialism and Marxism and Philosophy, should be mentioned, above all.[128] Finally, in addition to the works by Max Adler, already mentioned, also Heinrich Cunow Marx’s Theory of History, Society and the State.[129]

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