Marxism and Phenomenology

Original uncorrected proofs. Please cite the published version in Marxism and Phenomenology: The Dialectical Horizons of Critique, ed. Bryan Smyth and Richard Westerman (Lexington Books, 2021)

Workshop presentation given at the 2019 meeting of the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture / Théorie et culture existentialistes et phénoménologiques Plus a longer chapter-length version of the paper.

Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World (Lexington Books), 2021

Beginning from the program for phenomenology in Edmund Husserl’s classic text The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology the author investigates the crisis of reason in a contemporary context. The late work of Marx is given an original interpretation that connects it to human motility, natural fecundity (excess), and ecology. The overall conception of phenomenology advanced is Socratic in that it is concerned with the presuppositions and application of knowledge-forms to their lifeworld grounding. The author argues that the crisis produced by the formalization of reason creates an inability to foster differentiated community as expected by both Husserl and Marx (Part II); that the formalization of human motility by the regime of value reveals the ontological productivity of natural fecundity (excess) and shows the priority of ecology as the contemporary exemplary science (Part III). Husserl’s idea of Europe as the home for philosophy is surpassed. The contemporary task for Socratic phenomenology is in the epochal confrontation between planetary technology and place-based Indigeneity. Community and labour are shown to depend upon natural fecundity (excess) and their realization to be located in the dialogue between civilizational-cultural lifeworlds especially with respect to their ecological formation and access to transcendentality (Part IV). The book lays out a systematic phenomenological Marxian philosophy by developing a path for phenomenology as a defence of reason (Husserl) understood as reason-in-practice (Marx) that focusses on the crisis of the 21st century (ecology, inter-worldly philosophical dialogue).

Marx, Marxism and the Spiritual. Routledge. , 2020

Rethinking Marxism, 2022

Cedric Robinson's An Anthropology of Marxism was first published in 2001, but a second edition appeared in 2019 with a new preface from celebrity feminist scholar Avery F. Gordon and a new foreword by filmmaker and academic H. L. T. Quan. This new edition, which understandably pays tribute to the recently deceased author, disputes the idea that Karl Marx's oeuvre marks the advent of socialism. Rather, Robinson concluded that Marxism rather has its roots in socialism and that socialism has galvanized the oppressed-slaves, peasants, women, workers, the unemployedthroughout the ages against manifold oppressors. The book traces Marxism to the socialist drive of Christianity but argues that the socialist component is not culture specific. While reducing Marx's thinking to a discourse on economics indicates that Robinson underestimated Marx's subversive clarity, ultimately, for Robinson, only socialism, not Marxism, can provide a humanist tool for universal freedom.

Thesis 11, 2010

During those early days of the 1980s, the outlook for democratic reformist politics looked bleak. Inside the US, Reagan was becoming a popular president, and the world outside seemed increasingly, if not fatally, endangered by a Cold War between an anti-social capitalism in the West and a totalitarian Marxism in the East. The Marxism that was becoming a major theoretical force on my home turf, among the university disciplines, was setting itself up as an aggressive antagonist to the classical tradition of sociology that I was myself struggling to revise and sustain. This environment set the conditions of my ‘Marxism project’, as I was calling it. I wished to show that the Marxist tradition had no monopoly on fundamental criticism or egalitarian social reform. In the broad sweep of religious history I document below, I read Weber’s sociology as laying out the cultural origins of an egalitarian and critical project. Religious rationalization allows community membership to be extended to lower classes; criticism to be applied to corrupt and undeserving authority; and unhappy fate to be challenged by world-mastering reason.

Analecta Hermeneutica, 2020

The aim of this paper is to explore the link that Landgrebe establishes between phenomenology and Marxism in “The Problem of Teleology and Corporeality in Phenomenology and Marxism” (1977) and unfold its more far-reaching implications for both traditions. Landgrebe’s short yet dense paper explores the very basic insight he considers both thinkers to hold in common, namely, that praxis is an essential feature of human consciousness and needs to be grounded in philosophical inquiry. The first step in our research is accordingly to reconstruct Husserlian phenomenology in order to demonstrate the close relationship between corporeality and teleology, between nature and history, and between the human being and the social world. Landgrebe reminds us that “it is not possible even to approach the problem of teleology in an adequate manner if the approach is not based on an analysis of corporeality, i.e. of man as a corporeal being.”What Marxism leaves undone, then, is a transcendental grounding of human embodied praxis, a project that the post-Marxian tradition typically fails to consider

This paper departs from the hegemonic notion of truth-the cognitive notion of truth-and arrives at four other notions of truth in Marx, Gandhi, Heidegger, and Foucault. It puts the four to a possible dialogue. It argues that one can get a glimpse of the cusp of Marxism and spirituality in the dialogue among the four. The work at the cusp, in turn, renders Marxism asketic and the spiritual phronetic. Thinking at the cusp also inaugurates the possibility of an anti-Oedipal future for Marxism and a this-worldly present for spirituality.

An Introduction to Marxist Philosophy, 2021

This work aims to present a critical assessment of the trajectory followed by Marxism since its birth more than a century and a half ago. The fundamental contributions of Marx and Engels were enriched by numerous thinkers, leaders and practical experiences throughout this period. However, at the same time as it was being enriched, Marxism was diversifying into numerous tendencies and currents, and facing growing problems arising both from the practical refutation of some of its postulates and from the failure of the historical experiences carried out in its name. The book reviews the most important currents of Marxism, and analyses the problems that have arisen when historical experiments based on it have been carried out. The transformations that took place in capitalism and, above all, the degeneration and failure of the experiences carried out in its name ended up leading to what is known as the crisis of Marxism, which expresses the loss of influence of Marxism both in its critical theoretical aspect and as a guide to social transformation, and which raises questions about the future of what is the theoretical paradigm with the most elaborate emancipatory objectives in history.