Théorie de la connaissance et théorie du parti chez Lénine

1978 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 803-828
Author(s):  
Denis Monière ◽  
Robert Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
External Character ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Western Marxism

In the crisis that pervades Western Marxism, the question of the party and its relation to the masses occupies a central position. This article critically examines the Leninist conception of party, specifying those intrinsic limits which are linked to the theoretical and political context of the period in which it was elaborated. The authors raise the problem of the development of class consciousness and criticize the Leninist principle of the external character of class consciousness.This theory in which the party is conceived as the master-thinker and theoretical guide of a proletariat dominated by its material conditions of existence rests on an epistemological justification: the theory of reflection. The authors retrace in Lenin's theory of knowledge the philosophical foundations of this conception which makes the party the mediator\bearer of the historical truth of the proletariat. In fact, for Lenin, the lack of consciousness of the working class is explained by its inability to pass beyond its class determination and to rise to a comprehension of contradiction. It is precisely by reason of this deep-seated narrowness of the working class that the party is indispensable in bringing knowledge of society in its totality to the proletariat.A consequence of this theory of knowledge is to separate arbitrarily what is conceptualized and what exists, that is to say on one hand a knowledge produced and retained by intellectuals, and on the other a working class delivered over to a blind spontaneity, to ignorance. This position, taken to its extreme, can justify all forms of authoritarianism and elitism.

The Philosophical Leninism and Eastern ‘Western Marxism’ of Georg Lukács

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Fracchia
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Socialist Revolution ◽  
Proper Class ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Soviet Marxism ◽  
Revolutionary Party ◽  
Western Marxism ◽  
Made In

Abstract This essay centres on the English translation (2000) of Georg Lukács’s Tailism and the Dialectic (written in either 1925 or 1926). Lukács is generally heralded as a founding theoretician of a ‘Western Marxism’, in opposition to ‘Eastern’ Soviet Marxism, and his most impressive and most influential work, History and Class Consciousness (1923), is generally treated as having rehabilitated Marxist concern with questions of subjectivity. It might therefore come as a surprise when Lukács in Tailism states that the purpose of History and Class Consciousness was to demonstrate ‘that the organisation and tactics of Bolshevism are the only possible consequence of Marxism’. In my view, however, this should already be abundantly clear from History and Class Consciousness. For Lukács’s absorption with proletarian subjectivity was motivated by an obsession with what he saw as its immaturity. And he coined the category of ‘reification’ in order to explain his disappointed expectations, to explain, that is, why the proletariat did not make a ‘socialist’ revolution in the ‘objectively ripe’ situation of an ‘imperialist war’ created by ‘moribund capitalism’. In short, Lukács did raise anew the question of the subjective, but only to then declare that workers, not even ‘the most revolutionary among them’, could never attain proper class consciousness, which he attributed instead to the ‘revolutionary party’ bearing the properly revolutionary theory. For this reason I agree with Slavoj Žižek’s characterisation of Lukács as the ‘ultimate philosopher [my emphasis] of Leninism’ – although I do think that Lenin himself would have found, as he did in connection with one of Lukács’s other works, Marxism ‘present only at a verbal level’. My concern is two-fold: with a critique of the methodological short-cuts that Lukács made in his purely conceptual derivation of the concept of reification, and his purely conceptual attribution of it as the necessary form of working-class consciousness ‘in its immediacy’; and with the dangerous political consequences that Lukács derived from his assessment of the reified character of working-class subjectivity, mainly a theoretical guarantee that the party with the proper revolutionary theory must always be right, or at least more right than anyone else.

4. Alienation and reification

2017 ◽  
pp. 39-52
Author(s):  
Stephen Eric Bronner
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Current System ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Human Control ◽  
Marxist Concept ◽  
Western Marxism ◽  
New Framework

‘Alienation and reification’ explores the concepts of alienation and reification in Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and how this affected 20th century Western Marxism. Alienation is not a uniquely Marxist concept, but Marx defined it as an inability to grasp the workings of history and subject them to human control. In the capitalist system, alienation occurs through the lack of working class consciousness, and their transformation from people into objects—their reification. The Frankfurt School saw alienation and reification as philosophical and experiential problems, but believed that trying to remedy them in the current system was pointless, and a new framework was needed to cultivate autonomy.

The Strange Radicalism of Thomas Carnduff and St John Ervine

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connal Parr
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
First World War ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
World War ◽  
Abbey Theatre ◽  
Unpublished Work ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

St John Ervine and Thomas Carnduff were born in working-class Protestant parts of Belfast in the 1880s, though Ervine would escape to an eventually prosperous existence in England. Orangeism, the politics of early twentieth-century Ireland, the militancy of the age—and the involvement of these writers in it—along with Ervine’s journey from ardent Fabian to reactionary Unionist, via his pivotal experiences managing the Abbey Theatre and losing a leg in the First World War, are all discussed. Carnduff’s own tumultuous life is reflected through his complicated Orange affiliation, gut class-consciousness, poetry, unpublished work, contempt for the local (and gentrified) Ulster artistic scene, and veneration of socially conscious United Irishman James Hope. It concludes with an assessment of their respective legacies and continuing import.

Uprootedness and Working-Class Consciousness

1963 ◽  
Vol 68 (6) ◽  
pp. 682-692 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Leggett
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Class Consciousness

Communism: The Philosophical Foundations

Philosophy ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 66 (257) ◽  
pp. 269-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antony Flew
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
German Philosophy ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
Ludwig Feuerbach ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Classical Philosophy ◽  
Predicate Expression

‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher.’ It is with this seminal sentence that Leszek Kolakowski begins his great work on The Main Currents of Marxism: its Rise, Growth and Dissolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978). Both the two terms in the predicate expression are crucial. It is most illuminating to think of Marx as originally a philosopher, even though nothing in his vastly voluminous works makes any significant contribution to philosophy in any academic understanding of that term. It is also essential to recognize that for both Marx and Engels philosophy was always primarily, indeed almost exclusively, what they and their successors called classical German philosophy. This was a tradition seen as achieving its climactic fulfilment in the work of Hegel, and one which they themselves identified as a main stimulus to their own thinking. Thus Engels, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, claimed that ‘The German working-class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy’.

Late Twentieth-Century Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Sects and Cults: Weston La Bare, Norman Cohn, & E. P. Thompson

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Stephen Kent
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Ghost Dance ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Religious Sects ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Before the diminished influence of classical psychoanalysis in the late twentieth century, several now-classic studies of sectarian religions contained Freudian psychoanalytic perspectives on religious sects or cults. These studies included Weston La Barre’s analyses of both serpent handlers and the Native American Ghost Dance; Norman Cohn’s panoramic examination of medieval European sectarian apocalyptic movements; and E. P. Thompson’s groundbreaking examination of Methodism within the formation of English working-class consciousness. Regardless of the problems that are endemic to the application of Freudian psychoanalysis to history, the sheer (although sometimes flawed) erudition of these three authors suggests that classical psychoanalysis had an important interpretive role to play in the study of some sectarian and cultic groups.

Workers, Citizens and the Argentine Nation: Party Politics and the Working Class in Rosario, 1912–3

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 589-616
Author(s):  
MATTHEW B. KARUSH
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Port City ◽  
Electoral Democracy

The electoral democracy created by the Sáenz Peña Law of 1912 opened up dramatic new possibilities for working-class political identity. In the important port city of Rosario, the Radical politician Ricardo Caballero crafted a political discourse that combined an explicit defence of working-class interests with a nostalgic depiction of the country's rural past. By linking class consciousness with images drawn from the popular culture of the ‘gauchesque,’ Caballerismo constructed a distinctively working-class version of Argentine nationalism and citizenship.

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