ABSTRACT
The dematerialisation of Marxism begins in earnest with Georg Lukács. Lenin in 1920 denounced infantile leftism. History and Class Consciousness, in 1923, gave it a classic philosophical justification. When Stalinism — calling itself Marxism—Leninism — paralysed orthodox dialectical materialist thought, Western Marxism 1 - a movement of little political importance but of great significance for marginal intellectuals 2 — reverted to the idealist route to revolution. It turned Marxism into an activist theory of praxis, produced an exuberant growth in theories of the superstructure, and often restored a great deal of the underlying Hegelian problematic, as if ideas rather than economic conflicts are what lead to revolutionary change. This was a product of political failure: concepts like 'class consciousness', 'false consciousness' and 'ideology' have a political function: to explain when revolutions happen, and to explain away the fact that, in most advanced countries, they did not happen.
But these concepts, in the hands of Lukács, Goldmann and others, are also the main Marxist armament for dealing with the complexities of human culture, forming a link between economic and historical analysis and formal cultural or literary analysis. Non-Marxists think them insufficient for this purpose, and tendentious in their effect. In Western Marxism they have been emphasised to such an extent that economic materialism — determination by the economy in the last instance — has been neglected or rejected.
In recent endeavours to make cultural theory sound more 'materialist attempts have been made to treat ideology itself as something 'material'. 143These go back at least to Volosinov and the Bakhtin circle; they here involve identifying ideology with language, and changing the Saussurean model of language to a 'dialogic' one. The whole enterprise misses the point of what Marx meant by 'materialist'. But Bakhtin and his circle have been taken up by modern literary theorists as post-structuralists before their time.
