The Evolution of Contemporary Western Marxist Thought and Its Core Problematic

In the century-long development of Western Marxism, it has never been a school of thought with precise denotation and extension. What brings the diverse and complex currents of thought under the name of a single trend is not only their shared concern with Marxist theory, but also their understanding and grasp of the changes and developments in contemporary capitalist society. This determines that today, when we retrospectively focus on the overall developmental trajectory of this school, we need not only to understand the relevant texts in which its thought unfolds, but also to take into account the latest conditions of contemporary capitalist social development. However, due to the new dynamics of the financialization of contemporary capital, in the process of criticizing capitalism, contemporary Western Marxism has weakened its Marxist theoretical底色 through diverse paths of reflection such as political, economic, and cultural critique, to the extent that we still need to provide a legitimacy argument for the sense in which much of the relevant research by Western scholars after the 1970s can still be classified within the scope of the Western Marxist trend. Here, this article will attempt to take chronological logic as the main thread to sort out the evolution and transformation of Western Marxism. On the basis of fully understanding the intrinsic connection between thought and the era, it will propose a core problematic that can run through the entire development of Western Marxism, and attempt to use this as a basis for judging the Marxist theoretical底色 of many contemporary Western Marxist trends.

在西方马克思主义百年的发展历程中，它并不是一个包含着准确外延和内涵的思想流派，因此能够将纷繁复杂的思想流派归入到同一思潮之名的，不仅是他们对于马克思主义理论的共同关注，同时还包括对于当下资本主义社会发展变迁的理解和把握。由此决定了今天，当我们以回溯的方式展开对这一学派整体发展脉络的关注之际，我们不仅需要理解其思想展开的相关文本，同时还需兼顾当代资本主义社会发展的最新状况。但由于当代资本金融化发展的新动态，今天西方马克思主义在对资本主义展开批判的过程中，以政治的、经济的、文化批判等多样化的思考路径弱化了其马克思主义理论底色，以至于1970年代以后的诸多西方学者的相关研究在何种意义上仍然可归属于西方马克思主义思潮范围之内，都还需要我们给出一种合法性的论证。在此，本文将尝试以时间逻辑为主线展开对西方马克思主义发展嬗变的梳理，在充分理解思想与时代之间的内在关联的基础上，提出可以贯穿整个西方马克思主义发展全部的核心问题意识，尝试以此为据来判定当代诸多西方马克思主义思潮的马克思主义理论底色。

I. Theoretical Origins: Figures and Related Events

一、理论源发：人物及其相关事件

The academic community generally takes Lukács’s *History and Class Consciousness*, published in 1923, as the temporal node of the birth of Western Marxism, and accordingly regards Lukács, Gramsci, and Korsch as the three initial heavyweight thinkers of Western Marxism. Although they did not share very similar problematics — for example, Lukács focused on the critique of the reified reality of capitalism and the formulation of proletarian class consciousness; Korsch was concerned with the legitimacy of Marxism as a philosophical form; while Gramsci, in his creative deduction of the theory of civil society, raised the question of cultural hegemony — they all, without prior consultation, explored the possibility of revolutionary “practice” in actuality through the mode of “theory.” Their enthusiasm for revolution stemmed from the complex social roles of the three founding fathers of Western Marxism, thereby distinguishing them from later Western Marxists: they were all once leaders within the communist parties of different countries — Lukács served as the People’s Commissar for Culture and Education in the Hungarian Soviet Republic; Korsch was a member of the Central Committee of the German Communist Party and served as Minister of Justice in the short-lived Tübingen workers’ government; and Gramsci was the founder and General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party. Therefore, their theories originated not only from a bookish study of Marx’s classical texts, but also from vivid social revolutionary practice. This determines that these thinkers’ reinterpretations of Marxism were never driven solely by pure theoretical interest; rather, the new changes in capitalist social development were the fundamental driving force behind their intellectual transformations. This, in turn, determines a common intellectual trait shared by Western Marxist theorists: the elaboration of each idea is always inseparably and intrinsically linked to a specific era.

学界一般将卢卡奇出版于1923年的《历史与阶级意识》作为西方马克思主义诞生的时间节点，并由此将卢卡奇、葛兰西与柯尔施视为西方马克思主义最初的三位重量级思想家。他们虽然拥有着并不十分相似的问题意识——例如卢卡奇着力于对资本主义的物化现实的批判与无产阶级阶级意识的提出；柯尔施关注作为哲学形态的马克思主义的合法性；而葛兰西则在对市民社会理论的创造性推演当中提出了文化领导权的问题——但他们却都不约而同地以“理论”的方式探索着对现实革命“实践”的可能性。对革命的热衷源于三位西方马克思主义鼻祖复杂的社会角色，由此将他们与其后的西方马克思主义者区别开来：他们都曾经是不同国家共产党内的领导人——卢卡奇曾任匈牙利苏维埃共和国主管文化与教育的人民委员；柯尔施曾担任德国共产党的中央委员，在为时不长的图宾根工人政府中担任司法部长；而葛兰西，则是意大利共产党的创始人、总书记，因此他们的理论不仅源于对马克思经典文献的书斋式的著述，同时更源于鲜活的社会革命实践。由此决定了这些思想家对于马克思主义的再阐释从来都并非仅仅源于纯然的理论兴趣，资本主义社会发展的新变化才是他们思想变迁的根本动力。由此，决定了西方马克思主义理论家共有的一个思想特质：每一种思想的阐发总与特定的时代之间存在着密不可分的内在关联。

The three founding figures of Western Marxism were active from the early 20th century to the 1940s. What shaped their intellectual development was not only the social reality of the proletarian revolution at a low ebb, but also the changes in people’s actual social life brought about by capitalist production methods represented by Taylorism and Fordism. This specific historical era and the theoretical implications it contains constitute the necessary realistic background for understanding Lukács, as the source of Western Marxist thought, and the Frankfurt School, which coexisted and flourished alongside him.

三位西方马克思主义创始人活跃于20世纪初期到20世纪40年代，左右他们思想发展的不仅是处于低潮中的无产阶级革命的社会现实，同时还包括以泰罗制与福特制为代表的资本主义生产方式对于人的社会现实生活的改变。这一特定的历史时代以及其所隐含的理论旨归构成了我们理解作为西方马克思主义思想源头的卢卡奇以及与其共生共荣的法兰克福学派必要的现实背景。

Regarding the birth process of the Institute for Social Research, which nurtured the Frankfurt School, we cannot describe the relationship between Lukács and the Frankfurt School in a sequential manner — although the Frankfurt School gradually took shape and grew between the 1930s and 1960s, appearing in chronological sequence as a successor to Lukács’s thought, judging solely on this basis that Lukács gave birth to the Frankfurt School is clearly too arbitrary. If we examine in detail the historical development of the Frankfurt School, we will find that the Institute for Social Research (founded in 1924) to which it was attached was actually a cradle that nurtured the ideas of Hilferding, Lukács, Korsch, and others in its gradual process of formation. Even before the establishment of the Institute, Felix Weil, the Jewish patron who proposed its founding, had together with Korsch founded the Marxist Study Week (Marxistische Arbeitswoche), in which Lukács, Karl August Wittfogel, and Friedrich Pollock were all active participants. The main patron of the Malik publishing house, which initially published Lukács’s *History and Class Consciousness*, was also Weil, the later main patron of the Frankfurt Institute. So much so that in the initial process of establishing the Institute, Lukács and Korsch were considered as reserve candidates for the position of Institute director. (See Rolf Wiggershaus, 2010) The presentation of this fact indicates that the basic ideas that once dominated the Institute for Social Research were also influencing Lukács, Korsch, and others in some subtle way, and the later intellectual evolution of these two thinkers can therefore be fully regarded as a theoretical advancement of certain ideas of the Frankfurt School in its embryonic stage.

就孕育了法兰克福学派的社会研究所的诞生历程而言，我们无法以一种前后相继的方式描述卢卡奇与法兰克福学派的关系——尽管法兰克福学派逐渐形成并壮大于20世纪30-60年代，它在时间序列中似乎成为了卢卡奇思想的后继者，但仅以此就判定是卢卡奇孕育了法兰克福，显然有过于武断之嫌。如果我们详尽考察法兰克福学派的历史发展过程，会发现它所附着而产生的那个社会研究所（成立于1924年）在其逐渐发展成形的过程中实际上是孕育了包括希法亭、卢卡奇、柯尔施等人思想的摇篮。早在该研究所成立之前，提议创立研究所的犹太资助人费利克斯·韦尔就曾与柯尔施一起创立了马克思主义研究周（Marxistishche Arbeitswoche），卢卡奇、卡尔·奥古斯特·魏特夫以及弗里德里希·波洛克等都曾是该研究周的积极分子。卢卡奇的《历史与阶级意识》最初得以出版的马立克（Malik）出版社的主要赞助人也是这位后来的法兰克福研究所的主要赞助人韦尔。以至于在其最初建立研究所的过程中，卢卡奇与柯尔施曾作为研究所主任的后备人选。（参见罗尔夫·魏格豪斯，2010）这一事实的呈现，表明了在当时那些曾经主导着社会研究所的基本理念，也在以某种潜移默化的方式影响着卢卡奇与柯尔施等人，而两位思想家后来的思想演化也因此完全有理由被视为是处于萌芽中的法兰克福学派的某些理念的理论推进。

It is undeniable that the issues Lukács and Korsch focused on, and the way they focused on them, are indeed vastly different from those of the Frankfurt School active in the 1940s. The reason for this difference lies less in the transformation of the capitalist social formation than in the transformation of the social role dominating this critical trend. After the establishment of the Institute for Social Research, the participants of the Frankfurt School, especially under the leadership of Horkheimer, were all university professors active only on the lecture platform. They recruited researchers by setting up project topics and assigned different research directions according to relatively strict disciplinary classifications. They gradually distanced themselves from the entire European socialist and communist movement and maintained the necessary distance from any political party. More importantly, because the vast majority of Institute members were Jews, during World War II they collectively became a marginalized group in European society. Exiles and strangers became their common social identity. The grand narrative of political revolution became a theoretical utopia for exiles and strangers like them; the entire legitimacy of their theory lay in achieving the completeness of the logic of alienation (Xia Ying, 2007, Chapter 2): within this logic of alienation, contemporary European society governed by the logic of capital became a state of rational alienation awaiting sublation, representing a deformation of reason, and the weapon used to diagnose and treat this deformation of reason could only be the inherent drive toward the good that reason itself possesses. The revolutionary narrative embedded in political practice was transformed by the university professors of the Frankfurt School into a classic Hegelian proposition concerning reality and rationalization: reason can complete its own process of rationalization in the unfolding of history. The early representatives of the Frankfurt School were, in this sense, inheritors of the legacy of classical German philosophy.

不可否认的是，卢卡奇与柯尔施所关注的问题以及其关注问题的方式的确与活跃于20世纪40年代的法兰克学福学派有着云泥之别。这一差别得以产生的原因，与其说是资本主义社会形态的转变，不如说主导这一批判思潮的社会角色的转变。社会研究所成立之后的法兰克福学派，特别是在霍克海默领导后的研究所，其参与者全部都是仅仅活跃在大学讲台上的大学教授。他们以设立课题项目的方式来招募研究者，以较为严格的学科分类来分派不同的研究方向。他们逐渐远离了整个欧洲社会主义与共产主义运动，并与任何一种党派保持着必要的距离。更为重要的是由于研究所成员绝大多数都是犹太人，在二战期间，他们也集体沦为了欧洲社会的边缘群体。流亡者与异乡人成为了他们共同的社会身份。宏大的政治革命叙事对于如他们一般的流亡者和异乡人来说，变成了一个理论上的乌托邦，其全部理论的合法性在于成就一种异化逻辑的完整性（夏莹，2007，第二章）：在这一异化逻辑中，由资本逻辑所统御的当代欧洲社会成为了有待被扬弃的理性的异化状态，它表征着一种理性的畸变，而用以诊疗这一理性畸变的武器仍然也只能是理性自身所拥有的趋向至善的内在动力。政治实践中所蕴含的革命叙事被法兰克福学派的大学教授们转变为了一个黑格尔式的现实与合理化之间的经典命题：理性可以在历史展开过程中完成自身的合理化过程。法兰克福学派的早期代表人物在这一意义上都是德国古典哲学遗产的继承者。

Thus, what Marx had summarized as the fundamental logic of “capital” governing contemporary social life was diagnosed by the inheritors of the Frankfurt School, active from the 1930s to the 1960s, as a “pathological rationality.” The entire theoretical arsenal used by a group of academic professors of Jewish descent during World War II to critique society gradually transformed into a series of pure philosophies: the tradition of classical German philosophy (Hegel and Marx), philosophical traditions active in the early twentieth century (Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and the gradually emerging Anglo-American analytic philosophy), and so on. These different intellectual traditions, whether as effective supports for their thought or as its antagonists, all participated in some way in the theoretical construction of Western Marxism during this period. Thus was formed the unique mode of theoretical existence of Western Marxism at that time: using the methods of pure philosophy to touch upon one vivid social reality after another. This tendency made its first attempt in Lukács’s *History and Class Consciousness*, in the section on “The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought.” The problem of the “thing-in-itself” faced by classical philosophy represented by Kant was understood as a philosophical expression of the reified reality bred by the capitalist mode of production. The resolution of philosophical metaphysical problems was thus to be understood and transcended through the changing logic of the development of capitalist social reality. Although the conclusions of Lukács’s study sparked much debate, this unique research path—closely linking a philosophical turn with the real-life modes of capitalist society, including production, consumption, and entertainment—became a theoretical vein that long dominated Western Marxist research.

由此，曾经被马克思概括为“资本”的统御当代社会生活的基础逻辑，被活跃于20世纪30-60年代的法兰克福学派的继承者诊断为一种“病态的理性”，第二次世界大战之中的一群犹太血统的学院派教授用以批判社会的全部理论武器也渐趋转变为了一系列纯粹哲学：德国古典哲学传统（黑格尔与马克思）以及活跃于20世纪初期的哲学传统（胡塞尔与海德格尔的现象学以及弗洛伊德的精神分析、正在逐渐形成的英美分析哲学等）。这些不同的思想传统或者是他们思想有效的支撑者，或者是其思想的对立者，都以某种方式参与到这一时期西方马克思主义的理论建构当中来。至此，形成了西方马克思主义此刻独特的理论存在样态：用纯粹哲学的方式触及一个个鲜活的社会现实问题。这一趋向在卢卡奇的《历史与阶级意识》中有关“资产阶级思想的二律背反”一节小试牛刀。将以康德为代表的古典哲学所面临的“物自体”问题理解为资本主义生产方式所孕育出的物化现实的一种哲学表达。哲学的形而上学问题的解决由此要以对资本主义社会现实发展逻辑的变迁来加以理解和超越。卢卡奇的这一研究的结论虽然引发了诸多争论，但这一独特的研究路径（即将某一哲学的转向与资本主义社会现实生活方式，包括生产、消费、娱乐方式等紧密相连）却成为长久以来支配西方马克思主义研究的一种理论脉络。

It was precisely for this reason that Lukács, for manifesting a Hegelianized Marxism, was criticized and even exiled by the actual Hungarian Communist Party. In a sense, Lukács’s exile was a direct consequence of pure philosophy intervening in the critique of reality, yet this consequence did not terminate Western Marxism’s enthusiasm for this research path: Marcuse, in *Reason and Revolution* published in 1941, not only attempted to clear Hegel of any intrinsic connection with fascism but also directly interpreted Hegel’s philosophy as a philosophical expression of the French Revolution: “The reason which Robespierre exalted as the highest good is merely the replica of the reason celebrated in Hegel’s system. The essence of Hegel’s philosophy is a structure composed of categories such as freedom, subject, spirit, and concept, all of which originate from the Idea. Unless we succeed in revealing the content of these concepts and their internal connections, Hegel’s system would appear to be obscure metaphysics, whereas in reality it is anything but” (Marcuse, 1993, pp. 4–5). [1]1 The page numbers refer to the Chinese translation of Marcuse’s *Reason and Revolution* cited by the author. The joint point linking the two, for Marcuse, was defined as “reason.” If the French Revolution in fact realized an industrial liberation, then in Marcuse’s view: “The French philosophers of this period believed that the realization of reason was industrial liberation. They thought that expanding industrial production would seemingly provide all necessities to satisfy human needs. Therefore, at the same time, Hegel elaborated his system, and Saint-Simon in France preached that industry was the only force capable of leading humanity toward a society of freedom and reason. The economic process was the foundation of reason” (Marcuse, 1993, p. 4).

也正因如此，卢卡奇因彰显了一种黑格尔式的马克思主义而遭到了现实匈牙利共产党的批判甚至放逐。在某种意义上说，卢卡奇被放逐是纯粹哲学介入现实批判的一个直接后果，但这一后果却也没有终止西方马克思主义对于这一研究路径的热衷：马尔库塞在出版于1941年的《理性与革命》中不仅试图撇清黑格尔与法西斯主义之间的内在关联，同时更是直接将黑格尔的哲学阐释为一种对法国大革命的哲学表达：“罗伯斯庇尔奉为最高的善的理性只不过是黑格尔体系中所颂扬的理性的复本。黑格尔哲学的精髓是一个由自由、主体、精神、概念等范畴组成的结构，这一系列概念都源于理念。除非我们成功地揭示这些概念的内容和它们之间内在的联系，否则，黑格尔的体系就似乎是晦涩难懂的形而上学，而实际上绝非如此。”（马尔库塞，1993，第4～5页）而两者之间得以被勾连起来的关节点，在马尔库塞这里被规定“理性”。如果说法国大革命所实现的其实是一个工业的解放，那么在马尔库塞看来：“这一时期的法国哲学家们认为，理性的实现就是工业解放。他们认为扩大工业生产似乎就可以提供满足人类需要的一切必需品，因此，在此同时，黑格尔精心设计了他的体系，圣西门在法国鼓吹工业乃是唯一能够引导人类走向自由和理性社会的力量。经济的过程乃是理性的基础。”（马尔库塞，1993，第4页）

Marcuse’s theoretical orientation most typically manifests the line of thought of the critical theory of society active from the 1940s to the 1970s: intervening in the critique of social reality in the posture of a pure philosopher, where the entire theoretical demand of philosophical metaphysics always has some social revolutionary reality as its essence. Classical German philosophy, as the paradigm of modern metaphysics, with its construction and completion of a system of reason, became the key to understanding all social revolutionary realities. This is one of the changes in the critical theory of society during this period.

马尔库塞的理论旨归最为典型的表现出了活跃于1940-70年代社会批判理论的思考路径：以纯粹哲学家的姿态来介入社会现实的批判，哲学的形而上学的全部理论诉求总会与某一社会现实革命为其本质。德国古典哲学作为近代形而上学的典范，以其对理性体系的建构和完成，成为了理解全部社会现实革命的关键。此为这一时期社会批判理论的变化之一。

Another important theoretical transformation lies in the fact that, because the dogmatic Marxism of the Second International [2]2 The Second International (1889–1916) was an international organization of socialist and labor parties. Its later dogmatic and reformist tendencies were a key target of critique for Western Marxists. overemphasized the analysis of economic and political conditions, its ultimate result not only theoretically turned Marxism into a rigid determinism but also politically manifested a turn toward democratic socialism. Therefore, Western Marxists, situated in the atmosphere of the spread and expansion of fascism, while seeking a genuine and radical theoretical demand, naturally turned more to the domination and repression of the individual by cultural elements permeating daily life. The *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844*, discovered in the 1930s, opportunely brought a humanistically colored Marx before the critical theorists of society of this period. Thus, the alienation of the sensuous individual in everyday social life substantially occupied the theoretical discourse of many thinkers of this era. Consequently, after using the core paradigm of (pathological) reason to diagnose the entire grand social transformation, Western Marxists of this period mostly concentrated their concrete analysis on the description and critique of individual modes of life: hence emerged Horkheimer and Adorno’s *Dialectic of Enlightenment*, Marcuse’s *Reason and Revolution*, *Eros and Civilization*, and *One-Dimensional Man*, as well as Fromm’s *Escape from Freedom*, *The Sane Society*, and *To Have or To Be*. These works, penetrating into the modes of existence of people living in real capitalist society, had a far more direct impact on society around the 1960s than all the theoretical forms that attempted to directly critique and analyze the economic structure of the logic of capital—the latter including Pollock’s analysis of Marx’s theory of money and Grossman’s study of the laws of capitalist accumulation and collapse. [3]3 Friedrich Pollock (1894–1970) and Henryk Grossman (1881–1950) were economists associated with the Frankfurt School and its broader milieu, known for their work on Marxian economic theory. Although their research obviously conforms more closely to the theoretical path Marx himself used in the nineteenth century to critique capitalist society.

另一个重要的理论转变在于，由于第二国际教条化的马克思主义偏重于经济和政治状况的分析，其最终的结果不仅在理论上让马克思主义成为了一个僵化的决定者，而且还在政治上表现出一种民主社会主义的转向。因此，身处法西斯主义蔓延扩张氛围中的西方马克思主义在探寻一种真实的、激进的理论诉求之际，自然会更多地求助于渗入日常生活的文化要素对于单个人的统治和压抑，而发现于1930年代的《1844年经济学哲学手稿》恰逢其时地将充满着人道主义色彩的马克思带到这一时期的社会批判理论家的面前。由此对于一个感性个人在社会日常生活中的异化，实质上占据了这一时期诸多思想家的理论话语。于是，在用（病态）理性的核心范式完成了对整个宏大社会转型做出一种诊断之后，西方马克思主义者们在这一时期大多将具体分析集中到了对个体生活方式的描述和批判当中：由此产生了霍克海默与阿多诺的《启蒙辩证法》、马尔库塞的《理性与革命》《爱欲与文明》《单向度的人》以及弗洛姆的《逃避自由》《健全社会》《占有还是存在》。这些将触角渗入到资本主义社会现实生活着的人的生存方式之中，它们对于1960年代前后的社会所产生的直接的影响要远远大于所有试图对资本逻辑的经济架构进行直接批判和分析的诸多理论形态，后者包括波洛克对于马克思货币理论的分析以及格里斯曼（Henryk Gross‐man）对于资本主义积累和崩溃规律的研究。尽管他们的研究显然更符合马克思在其19世纪对于资本主义社会进行批判的理论路径。

During this period, the entire critique of capitalist society by Western Marxist theorists represented by the Frankfurt School was transformed into a humanistically colored cultural redemption. This enthusiasm for cultural redemption resonated perfectly with the May 1968 movement [4]4 The May 1968 movement was a series of massive student and worker protests and general strikes in France, which nearly toppled the government and became a symbol of the global New Left. that erupted, and it can even be said, in a sense, that there was a hidden interactive relationship of stimulation and being stimulated between the Frankfurt School and the ’68 revolution. The most direct evidence lies in the fact that the thought of Marcuse, a representative figure of the Frankfurt School, directly became one of the 3Ms (Marx, Mao, and Marcuse) [5]5 “3M” is a shorthand referring to the three thinkers whose ideas were seen as influential on the May 1968 movement: Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, and Herbert Marcuse. that supported the occurrence of this revolution.

这一时期以法兰克福学派为代表的西方马克思主义理论家对于资本主义社会的全部批判被转变为一种充满着人本主义色彩的文化救赎。对这一文化救赎的热衷与爆发于1968年的五月风暴一拍即合，甚至可以在某种意义上说，法兰克福学派与68革命之间存在着一种隐蔽的激发与被激发的交互作用。最为直接的印证就在于法兰克福学派的代表人物马尔库塞的思想直接成为支撑这一革命得以发生的3M（马克思、毛泽东与马尔库塞）之一。

The May 1968 movement, for the first time in human society, brought a revolution demanding not bread, but roses, [6]6 “Not for bread, but for roses” is a slogan associated with the New Left and the May 1968 movement, signifying a demand for quality of life, beauty, and self-realization beyond mere material subsistence. interpreting in a certain sense a relatively pure classical Marxist revolution. This might be the revolutionary path once imagined by Marx: the critique and subversion of capital could not be carried out by a group of starving poor, but by a group of idealists whose fundamental purpose was to appeal to action. In a speech titled “Beyond One-Dimensional Man,” completed on October 31, 1968, Marcuse evaluated the significance of the May 1968 movement as follows:

五月风暴为人类社会首次带来了不为面包，只为玫瑰的革命，在某种意义上诠释了一种较为纯粹的马克思的经典革命。这或许才是被马克思当年所想象的革命路径：对资本的批判与颠覆，不可能是一群饥寒交迫的穷人，而是一群以诉诸行动为根本目的理想主义者。马尔库塞在完成于1968年10月31日以《超越单向度的人》为题的演讲中，这样评价五月风暴的意义：

“There is a symbolic event, namely the May 1968 events in France, which, although brief and soon suppressed by the authorities, illuminated a historical turning point. … Allow me to briefly summarize the meaning of these events. They have shown that radical movements for change can arise outside the working class, and that this external force, as a catalyst, can in turn activate the repressed forces of resistance within the working class.” “Clearly, the protest hoped for a great transformation, even an unimaginable one, that is, a society fundamentally different from the existing capitalist society and also from the existing socialist society, a society capable of liberating not only human reason but also human sensibility, not only human productive forces but also human receptivity, not only strengthening the life instincts but also strengthening the erotic drive opposed to the death drive.” (Marcuse, 2019, pp. 130–133)

“有一个象征性的事件，那就是法国的五月风暴，虽然它本身很短暂并且很快就遭到了权力机构的遏制，但却照亮了历史的转折点。……请允许我简要地总结一下这些事件的含义。它已经表明，激进的变革运动可以发生在劳动阶级之外，作为催化剂，这一外部力量反过来可以激活劳动阶级中被压抑的反抗力量。”“显然，抗议希望发生一场巨大的变革，甚至是匪夷所思的变革，也就是说，抗议希望产生一个社会，它本质上不同于现有的资本主义社会，也不同于现有的社会主义社会，它不仅能够解放人的理性，也能够解放人的感性，不仅能够解放人的生产力，也能够解放人的感受性，不仅能够加强人的生命本能，也能够加强与死欲相对而立的爱欲。”（马尔库塞，2019，第130～133页）

When Marcuse wrote this lecture, more than half a year had passed since the ’68 revolution. The fact that this revolution achieved nothing in terms of real politics in contemporary French society had become a settled conclusion, but its theoretical significance as an intellectual turning point for contemporary philosophy was widely recognized by the academic community: although the May ’68 events did not bring about a genuine transcendence of capitalism, they effectively broke the original principle of immanent critique of capitalist society that characterized early Western Marxism. The new sensibility, dominated by human sensuousness, and the diverse existence of irrational tendencies (manifested in reality in the widespread popularity of youth subcultures before and after the ’68 revolution) opened up a new path for Western Marxist critique of capitalism. This determined that critical theory could no longer explore all possibilities of transcending rationality within the principle of reason itself. In other words, critical theory could no longer be confined to completing the transcendence of capitalist society within the logic of capital defined by the principle of reason. On the contrary, genuine resistance had to find expression in a new form of society completely heterogeneous to capital. Thus, post-’68 Western Marxism exhibited the following two characteristics: on the one hand, rational critique based on the economic process gave way to irrational critique based on postmodern philosophy and culture. On the other hand, after the 1970s, the development trend of financialization of capital brought about new forms of capital dominated by creative capitalism, leading to a convergence of the critique of the logic of capital with the critique of culture and politics. In other words, today, critique of culture and politics, within the context of Western Marxism, is also reduced to the study and critique of the mode of operation of the logic of capital, and the study and critique of the mode of operation of the logic of capital is equally a critique of contemporary culture and politics.

马尔库塞写作这篇演讲的时候，68革命已经过去了半年多，这一革命对于当代法国社会现实政治毫无建树已成定论，但它成为了当代哲学的思想拐点的理论意义却得到了学界的普遍认可：五月风暴虽然并没有带来一个对资本主义的真实超越，但却实质上打破了原初西方马克思主义面向资本主义社会的内在批判原则。以人的感性为主导的新感性，多样化存在的非理性趋向（在现实中表现为在68革命前后青年人的亚文化的普泛流行）敞开了西方马克思主义对资本主义批判的新路径，由此决定了批判理论将不可能在理性原则之内来探寻超越理性的全部可能性，换言之，批判理论不再可能囿于被理性原则所界定的资本逻辑之内来完成对资本主义社会的超越，相反，真正的反抗要在一种完全异质于资本的新的社会样态当中获得表达。由此，68后的西方马克思主义呈现出如下两个特征：一方面，以经济过程为基础的理性批判让位于以后现代哲学与文化为基础的非理性批判。另一方面，70年代以后由于资本金融化的发展趋向带来的以创意资本主义为主导的新资本形态，使得对资本逻辑的批判与对文化的、政治的批判出现合流的趋势。换言之，今天对文化和政治的批判，在西方马克思主义语境中也会被归结为对资本逻辑的运行方式的研究和批判，而对资本逻辑运行方式的研究和批判同样也就是对当下文化和政治的批判。

Concurrently with this, Marx’s theoretical image in Western intellectual circles also changed: during the ’68 revolution, Marx once served as the intellectual support for the revolutionary movement, but after the revolution he faced great suspicion and criticism. The dramatic rise and fall of Marx’s intellectual portrait in the ’68 revolution instead stimulated, from the opposite direction, a wave of reinterpretations of Marx’s thought among contemporary Western Marxists. However, at this point, Western Marxists would no longer merely dwell on the internal logic of Marx’s own textual corpus, nor did they particularly emphasize the legitimacy of Marx’s thought in critiquing and interpreting social reality. Instead, they focused on the reality of capitalist society, interpreting the theoretical character of Western Marxists in the posture of critics of the logic of capital. This common theoretical character would always be integrated into the theories of post-’68 Western Marxism in various forms of expression.

与之同时发生变化的，还有马克思在西方思想界的理论形象：在68革命中，马克思曾经成为革命运动的思想支撑，而在革命后又遭到了巨大的怀疑和批判。马克思的思想肖像在68革命中的大起大落，反而从反面激发了当代西方马克思主义者对于马克思思想再度解读的热潮：只是此刻的西方马克思主义者们不再会仅仅纠缠于马克思自身思想文本的内在逻辑，也并不特别强调马克思思想批判和阐释社会现实的合法性。相反，他们着力于面向资本主义社会现实，以资本逻辑的批判者的姿态诠释着西方马克思主义者的理论品格。而这一共同的理论品格总是会以各种不同的表达方式被融入到后68时代的西方马克思主义的理论当中。

II. Core Problematic: Revolution and Its Subject(ivity)

二、核心问题：革命及其主体（性）

Western Marxism, from its inception as a form of social critical theory, has exhibited diverse theoretical expressions. Among these, apart from the thinkers gathered around the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt who formed a relatively distinct “school” (in which Benjamin, as the nomad of the school, became a variable that broke the school’s basic research paradigm), all other researchers of Western Marxism lacked a clear academic identity. Therefore, when we attempt to discuss the transformation of the critical paradigm of Western Marxism as a whole, elucidating a common problematic hidden behind these different thinkers and different theoretical forms becomes a theoretical issue that urgently needs to be addressed. For it is precisely on the basis of responding to this common problematic that the legitimacy of including different thinkers with diverse theoretical expressions and different intellectual traditions within the scope of discussion can ultimately be justified.

西方马克思主义，从其肇始之际，就其作为一种社会批判理论而言，呈现出多样化的理论表达方式。其中，除去围绕法兰克福研究所聚集起来的各位思想家构筑了一个较为鲜明的“学派”之外（其中本雅明作为该学派的游牧者，成为打破该学派基本研究范式的一个变数），其他所有西方马克思主义的研究者都并不具有鲜明的学术身份的认同。因此当我们试图以一个整体来讨论西方马克思主义批判范式的转变之际，阐发一种隐藏于这些不同的思想家，不同的理论样态背后的共同的问题意识成为了亟待回应的一个理论问题，因为正是建基于对这一共同问题的回应，最终才能为理论表现各异，思想传统各异的不同思想家归入讨论范围提供合法性证明。

Looking at the development of Western Marxism, we can perhaps more clearly categorize Western Marxist thinkers according to the evolution of different time periods: in the 1930s, the dominant Western Marxists were not only theorists but also participants in real political revolution and construction, even party leaders, such as Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci; from the 1940s to the 1960s, a group of Western Marxists represented by the Frankfurt School were mostly scholars in their studies, whose influence spread to France, Britain, and the United States, stimulating the birth of diverse interpretive paths of Marxism in French Marxism and Anglo-American Marxism: for example, the confrontation between Sartre’s humanism and Althusser’s structuralism in French Marxism, the flourishing of radical leftist currents represented by Jean Baudrillard, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek, and Giorgio Agamben, and in the Anglo-American world, analytical Marxism, ecological Marxism, feminist Marxism, and Williams’s cultural-historical perspective and historical practice, Dobb’s turn to economic history, Hobsbawm’s turn to nationalist historiography, Thompson’s ‘cultural turn’ in new social history, Saville’s rise of new labor social history, and so on. Most of these emerged after the 1960s, and their representative figures often spanned multiple academic fields, even crossing into non-academic fields, involving the integration and intersection of multiple areas including art, literature, and drama. They penetrated into daily life, opening up a critique of the logic of capital from a micro perspective. A theoretical consequence of this is that although Western Marxists after the 1960s still used the critical paradigms of earlier Western Marxists, such as dialectics, alienation, labor and capital, etc., their connotations underwent fundamental changes: the most distinctive feature is that the critical logic that previously served the grand narrative of social revolution was now mostly transformed into a critique of everyday life. Consequently, when we look back at the development of Western Marxists after the 1970s, a theoretically quite thorny problem inevitably arises: apart from a few thinkers such as David Harvey and Antonio Negri, most thinkers active in this period who can be classified within the category of Western Marxism no longer possess a typical Marxist tone. Thus, on what basis we judge a thinker to be a Marxist first becomes a theoretical issue that needs to be confronted, because to identify the inherent inheritance of Western Marxist theory within the critique of everyday life, which is heavily tinged with metaphysics, literature, and even art, requires us to have an overall understanding and grasp of the theoretical characteristics of Western Marxism itself and its core problematic.

纵观西方马克思主义发展历程，我们或可按照不同的时间区间的演变，更为明确地将西方马克思主义的思想家做如下归类：20世纪30年代，占据主导的西方马克思主义者不仅是理论家，更是现实政治革命和建设的参与者，甚至是党的领袖，例如卢卡奇，柯尔施与葛兰西；20世纪40年代至60年代，以法兰克福学派为代表的一群西方马克思主义者则大多是书斋中的学者，他们的相关影响散播到包括法国与英美等地，激发了法国马克思主义与英美世界中马克思主义多样化的阐释路径的诞生：比如法国马克思主义中萨特的人道主义（萨特）与阿尔都塞的结构主义的对垒，以让鲍德里亚、阿兰·巴迪欧、雅克·朗西埃、齐泽克与阿甘本等为代表的激进左翼思潮的蓬勃，以及英美世界中分析的马克思主义、生态主义的马克思主义、女性主义马克思主义以及威廉斯的文化史观与史学实践，多布的经济史学研究转向，霍布斯鲍民族主义史学转向，汤普森新社会史‘文化转向’，萨维尔的新劳工社会史论的兴起等等。他们大多诞生于1960年代以后，其代表人物大多跨越多个学术领域，甚至跨越到非学术领域之中，涉足包括艺术、文学、戏剧等多个领域的融合与交叉。渗入日常生活之中，以微观视角敞开有关于西方马克思主义对资本逻辑的批判。由此带来的一个理论后果在于，60年代之后的西方马克思主义者们虽然也在使用此前西方马克思主义者的批判范式，诸如辩证法、异化、劳动与资本等等，但其内涵都发生了根本性变化：最为鲜明的一个特征在于之前服务于宏大的社会革命叙事的批判逻辑现在则大多转变为对日常生活的批判。籍此，当我们回望1970年代以后的西方马克思主义者的发展态势，必将出现一个理论上颇为棘手的问题：除了诸如大卫·哈维与奈格里等为数不多的几位思想家之外，大部分活跃于这一时期的、可被我们归入到西方马克思主义范畴的思想家都不再具有典型的马克思主义基调。于是，我们在何种意义上判定一个思想家为马克思主义者，首先成为了一个需要面对的理论问题，因为要在诸多带有浓重的形而上学的、文学的甚至艺术底色的日常生活批判中辨识出其固有的对西方马克思主义理论的继承，需要我们对于西方马克思主义自身的理论特质及其核心问题意识有一个总体的理解和把握。

Research on this issue has already been touched upon in two pamphlets on Western Marxism written by the British Marxist Perry Anderson in 1976 and 1984 respectively (namely, *Considerations on Western Marxism* (1976) and *In the Tracks of Historical Materialism* (1984)). In *In the Tracks of Historical Materialism*, Anderson even gave a definitive judgment on the Western Marxist current of thought:

对于这一问题的研究在英国马克思主义者佩里.安德森学分别写作于1976年和1984年间的两部关于西方马克思主义的小册子（即《西方马克思主义探源》（1976）与《当代西方马克思主义》(1984））中已有所涉及。而在《当代西方马克思主义》一书中，安德森甚至给予西方马克思主义思潮一个终结性的判定：

“The Western Marxist tradition has basically run its course, a view that has been confirmed by events. … The purely biological death of the older generation was bound to bring about this consequence. In the watershed period from 1968 to the time I wrote that pamphlet, death claimed Della Volpe, Adorno, Goldmann, Lukács and Horkheimer. By the end of the 1970s, Bloch, Marcuse and Sartre had followed. … The two youngest of the theorists I mentioned were Althusser and Colletti, both then in the prime of life. Yet, as I largely expected, neither of them subsequently produced any work of substantive significance; they merely repeated old tunes, or even sank to the point of repudiating this tradition. The lower limit of the original Western Marxist trajectory can roughly be drawn at the mid-1970s.” (Perry Anderson, 1989, p. 19)

“西方马克思主义传统基本上已经走完了他的历程，我的这种看法已被证实。……年老的一代的纯生物学的死亡必然要引起这种后果。在具有分水岭意义的1968年至我写作那本小册子的这段时期里，死神逮住了德拉-沃尔佩、阿多尔诺、歌德曼、卢卡奇和霍克海默。到70年代末，布洛赫、马尔库塞和萨特相继逝去。……我所提到过的理论家中最年轻的两位是阿尔都塞和科莱蒂，这两人在当时还处于年富力强之际。然后多半如我所料，此后他们俩谁也没写出任何有实质意义的著作，只是老调重弹，甚至堕落到否定这个传统的地步。原本的西方马克思主义的历程的下限大体上可以划到70年代中期为止。”（佩里·安德森，1989，第19页）

I do not agree with Anderson’s judgment on the lower limit of the development of Western Marxism. Yet the reason he gives this “lower limit” can be understood sympathetically, because he has a basic understanding of the essential characteristics of Western Marxism. In this understanding, from its very origins Anderson posits Western Marxism as a response to a certain revolutionary practice: “After the victory and isolation of the Russian Revolution, Western Marxism underwent a long process of formation; it was essentially the product of the repeated defeats of the workers’ movement in the developed capitalist bastions of continental Europe following the first Bolshevik breakthrough in 1917” (ibid., p. 10). Therefore, when Western Marxism came to be dominated by bookish specialists such as those of the Frankfurt School, theoretically confined to the study and deduction of purely philosophical problems, and exhibited an irrepressible tone of pessimism, the Western Marxist theory in Anderson’s sense indeed reached its end (ibid., pp. 11–13). But this thesis of termination is clearly based on Anderson’s overly narrow definition of Western Marxism. This is manifested in two respects. First, although the birth of Western Marxism has its specific political background, reducing Western Marxist theory solely to a theory that provides direct political strategies for resisting capitalist social practice obviously weakens Western Marxism’s theoretical contribution to intellectual history. At the same time, it actually denies the inherent philosophical character of classical Marxist theory. Second, because after the 1970s the financialization of capitalist society caused the social reality constructed by the logic of capital to manifest itself as a kind of metaphysics — that is, the production of real things was increasingly predetermined by the logic of capital in advance, and the resulting social production and patterns of human consumption both took on an inverted expression. This change in the mode of domination of the logic of capital brought about a transformation in the critical paradigm of Western Marxism toward capitalist society. In German social critical theory, this manifested in the work of the Frankfurt School’s successors, such as Habermas and Honneth, with their research centered on keywords like “communication,” “recognition,” and even “compromise,” aiming to construct a philosophical study based on a linguistics and philosophy of law heterogeneous to the logic of capital. In the intellectual tradition of the radical left, it transformed into a reconstruction of a metaphysics of becoming (devenir) and multiplicity (multiplicité), whose architectonic logic itself actually constitutes a theoretical expression of the tendency toward financialization in contemporary capitalist society. Therefore, after the 1970s, a group of philosophers with an increasingly strong background in philosophical metaphysical research, who still called themselves Marxists (e.g., Deleuze and Guattari) or were widely recognized as such by the academic community (e.g., Žižek, Badiou, and even Agamben, Rancière, etc.), is by no means far-fetched. On the contrary, they are attempting to use different basic paths of philosophical metaphysics to describe the new forms of contemporary capitalist development.

对于安德森关于西方马克思主义发展历程之下限的判断，我并不赞成。但同情的理解安德森给出这一“下限”的原因在于他对于西方马克思主义的本质特征有一个基本的理解。在这一理解当中，西方马克思主义从其缘起处就被安德森设定为一种对于某种革命实践的回应：“自俄国革命胜利和孤立之后，西方马克思主义经历了很长时期的形成过程，它基本上是1911年布尔什维克首次突破之后，欧洲大陆发达资本主义堡垒中工人运动一再失败的产物。”（同上，第10页）因此，当西方马克思主义被诸如法兰克福学派这样书斋中的专家所主导，在理论上逐渐囿于一种纯粹哲学问题的研究和推演，并呈现出了一种不可遏制的悲观主义基调的时候，安德森意义上的西方马克思主义理论的确走到它的尽头。（同上，第11～13页）但这一终结论的提出，显然建基于安德森对于西方马克思主义过于狭窄的界定。这表现在：其一，西方马克思主义的诞生虽然有其特定的政治背景，但仅将西方马克思主义理论视为一种反抗资本主义社会实践提供直接政治策略的理论，显然会弱化西方马克思主义对思想史的理论贡献。同时也实际上否认了经典马克思主义理论固有的哲学性。其二，由于1970年代以后，资本主义社会的金融化转向，让资本逻辑所构筑的社会现实自身表现出为一种形而上学，即对现实的物的生产日益被资本逻辑在先的予以规定，由此带来的社会的生产以及人的消费模式都产生了一种颠倒性的表达。这种资本逻辑的统御方式变化带来了西方马克思主义对资本主义社会批判范式的转变，它在德国的社会批判理论中表现为以哈贝马斯和霍耐特等法兰克福学派后继者以“交往”“承认”甚至“妥协”为关键词的相关研究，其目的是建基于一种异质于资本逻辑的语言学、法哲学基础上的哲学研究；而它在激进左翼的思想传统下则变成了一种以构筑生成性（devenir）、繁复性（multiplicité）形而上学的再造，这一形而上学的架构逻辑本身实际上构成了对当代资本主义社会金融化趋向的理论表达。因此，1970年代后，一群带有着越来越浓重的哲学形而上学研究底色的哲学家，同时仍自称（如德勒兹与加塔利）或被学界普遍确认（例如齐泽克、巴迪欧，甚至包括阿甘本、朗西埃等）为马克思主义者，这绝非牵强附会，相反，他们正在尝试用不同的哲学形而上学的基本路径来描述当代资本主义发展的新形态。

Thus, prematurely declaring the end of Western Marxism misses not only the thought of a group of thinkers active in the 1970s but, more importantly, misses the latest way of grasping the developmental modality of contemporary capitalist society.

于是，过早地判定西方马克思主义已经终结，其所错失的不仅仅是一群活跃1970年代的思想家的思想，同时更为重要的是错失对当代资本主义社会发展样态的最新把握方式。

Therefore, in my view, Western Marxism is far from having ended; to this day, a group of the most vibrant thinkers can still be classified within this current of thought. The criteria that allow them to be classified within the category of Western Marxism include the following two core problematics. First, does a revolution directed at capitalist society exist, and if so, how is it possible? Second, taking the revolutionary theory of changing the world as its aim, it seeks to explore the leader of the revolution, i.e., the subject or subjectivity of revolution. In a certain sense, all thinkers who attempt to respond to these two questions in an affirmative or negative manner can be regarded as Western Marxists. Therefore, although contemporary German social critical theory and Anglo-American Marxist theory exhibit an orientation that is more constructive than revolutionary and critical, they can still be classified within the above framework of core problematics. For them, however, the analysis and critique of capitalist society cannot be presented within a comprehensive strategy of subversion; on the contrary, they should be constructed through negotiation among different social groups. In other words, they merely give a negative answer to the possibility of revolution against capitalism. In contrast, the radical left current of thought represented by continental European thought gives an affirmative answer to revolutionary discourse. Through discussions of the problem of subjectivity in philosophy, in the context of political philosophy, it demonstrates the possibility of igniting revolution through different schemes of constructing subjectivity. Philosophically, through the exploration of the problem of subjectivity, it revives a new understanding of philosophical metaphysics, which had declined under the deconstruction of Marx, Nietzsche, and others.

因此，笔者看来，西方马克思主义还远未终结，时至今日，仍有一批最富有活力的思想家可以被归入这一思潮之内。而能够将他们归入西方马克思主义范畴之内的标准，包含着如下两个核心问题意识：其一，面向资本主义社会的革命是否存在，如果存在，又将何以可能？其二，以改变世界的革命理论为旨归，探寻革命的主导者，即革命的主体抑或主体性。在某种意义上说，所有试图以肯定的方式，抑或否定的方式对这两个问题给予回应的思想家，都可以被视为是西方马克思主义者。因此，尽管如当代德国社会批判理论以及英美的马克思主义理论呈现出一个建构性大于革命性和批判性的取向，但他们仍可以在以上的核心问题框架中获得一种归类，只是对于他们来说，对资本主义社会的分析和批判并不能在一揽子的颠覆性策略之中得以呈现，相反它们应在一种不同社会群体之间的协商中得以被建构，换言之，他们不过是对于面向资本主义的革命之可能性给出了否定性的回答。而以欧陆思想为代表的激进左翼思潮却对革命话语做出肯定性的回答，并以围绕哲学中的主体性问题的讨论，在政治哲学的语境下，以主体性建构的不同方案论证激发革命的可能性；而在哲学上则以对主体性问题的探讨，复兴了对哲学形而上学的重新理解，但后者曾在马克思、尼采等人的解构中式微。

Here, the two core problematics of Western Marxism we propose are not only applicable to Western Marxists after the 1970s; they can equally frame the early Western Marxists who first emerged from the 1920s onward. For the early Western Marxists, however, the legitimacy and necessity of revolution were themes that required almost no demonstration, so all their theoretical tasks were concentrated on the question of how the revolutionary subject is generated. Lukács’s emphasis on proletarian class consciousness and Gramsci’s discussion of the “Modern Prince” both have this as their theoretical aim. If there are differences among Western Marxists after the 1970s, the core point of these differences lies in the change in the method of demonstrating the revolutionary subject. If for Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci the revolutionary subject is already constituted (既成性), then for Western Marxists after the 1970s the revolutionary subject is generative (生成性). This means that for Lukács, the proletariat as revolutionary subject carries a specific a priori character:

在此，我们所提出的西方马克思主义的两个核心的问题意识，并非仅仅适用于1970年代以后的西方马克思主义者，它同样可能用来框架自20世纪20年代以来刚刚萌发的早期西方马克思主义者。只是在早期的西方马克思主义者那里，革命的合法性和必要性是近乎无需论证的主题，因此其全部的理论任务都集中在了有关于革命主体如何生成的问题。卢卡奇对无产阶级阶级意识的强调以及葛兰西对于“现代君主”的讨论，其理论的旨归都在于此。如果说1970年代其后的西方马克思主义者之间存在差异，这一差异的核心要点就在于对革命主体的论证方法的变化。如果说对于卢卡奇、柯尔施和葛兰西来说，革命的主体是既成性的，那么对于1970年代以后的西方马克思主义者而言，革命的主体则是生成性的。这意味着，在卢卡奇那里，无产阶级作为革命的主体带有着一种特定的先验性：

“Every crisis means that the regular development of capitalism has run into a dead end, but it is only from the standpoint of the proletariat that this dead end can be seen as a necessary link in capitalist production.” Because “the proletariat is no longer the mere object of the crisis; the internal antagonism of capitalist production — which, according to its concept, already signifies the struggle between the bourgeois system of production and the proletarian system of production, the conflict between socialized productive forces and their individual-anarchic form — unfolds openly.” (Lukács, 2017, pp. 342–343)

“每一次危机都意味着资本主义有规律的发展陷入死胡同，但是，只有从无产阶级的立场出发才能把这个死胡同看作是资本主义生产的必然环节。”因为“无产阶级不再是危机的单纯客体；资本主义生产的内部对抗——它按其概念就已经意味着资产阶级生产制度和无产阶级生产制度的斗争，意味着社会化的生产力同其个体——无政府主义形式的冲突——公开展开。”（卢卡奇，2017，第342～343页）

Why is the proletariat no longer a mere object of crisis? Lukács, continuing Marx’s principle of immanent critique of the logic of capital, points out: “When the proletariat is only conscious of the commodity relation, it can only be conscious of itself as an object of the economic process. For the commodity is produced; the worker, as a commodity, as a direct product, is at most a mechanical cog in this machine. But if the reification of capital is dissolved into the uninterrupted process of its production and reproduction, then from this standpoint the proletariat can become conscious of itself as the true — though fettered and temporarily unconscious — subject of this process.” (Ibid., p. 277)

为什么无产阶级不再是危机的单纯客体？卢卡奇延续了马克思对资本逻辑批判的内在性原则，指出：“当无产阶级只意识到商品关系时，它只能意识到自己是经济过程的客体。因为商品是被生产的，工人作为商品，作为直接的产品，至多只能是这一机器中的机械的动轮而已。但是，如果资本的物化被溶化为它的生产和再生产的不停的过程，那么在这种立场上，无产阶级就能意识到自己是这一过程的真正的——尽管是被束缚的和暂且是不自觉的——主体。”（同上，第277页）

By means of the Hegelian dialectical unity of subject and object in the process, Lukács completes a role-setting of the proletariat as the transformer of capitalist society. This setting, because it originates in the immanent commodity structure of capitalist society and in the fact that the proletariat itself, as labor power, becomes a commodity that can be bought and sold, presents itself as something given, not arbitrary. In other words, only this proletariat with its special attributes, and only this proletariat, can become the revolutionary subject. The essence of its revolutionary subjectivity is determined by its own concept and by the objective structure of the capitalist society in which it is situated; it is irreplaceable.

卢卡奇借助于黑格尔辩证法中主客体在过程中的辩证统一，完成了一种关于无产阶级作为资本主义社会的改造者的角色设定。这一设定由于源发于资本主义社会内在的商品结构以及无产阶级自身成为劳动力，成为一种可被买卖的商品，从而呈现出一种既定性，非任意性。换言之，只有这一具有特殊属性的无产阶级，也只有这一无产阶级才能成为革命主体。其作为革命主体性的本质是由于其概念自身，其所身处的资本主义社会的客观结构所决定的，是不可被替换的。

However, since capitalist society entered the affluent society, consumer society, or the so-called “post-industrial society,” not only have the modes of production of capitalism changed, but the forms of labor prescribed by capitalism have also undergone a fundamental transformation, and the forms of wealth have changed accordingly. In particular, since the birth of the capitalist joint-stock system, the proletariat in its pure form — those who possess nothing and survive solely by selling their labor power — has tended to disappear. Replacing it is the dispersed ownership brought by the shareholding system. This dispersed ownership ultimately dissolves the transcendental character of the proletariat in Lukács’s theory, while simultaneously bringing about the construction of a diversified subjectivity. That is, for thinkers after contemporary Western Marxism, revolutionary subjectivity is not a predestined elect; it is continuously regenerated in each situation, and this situation itself is the basic content of actual revolution. In other words, here revolution and its generative subject have an intertextual structure: they mutually provoke and mutually confirm each other. Hence concepts such as Badiou’s “evental subject” and Negri and Hardt’s “multitude” emerge. The generative revolutionary subject is not a universal derived from the diverse experiences of reality — for example, extracting the concept of a table from various kinds of tables. On the contrary, the revolutionary subject is the driving force that incites revolution and is generated within the specific situation of revolution. Therefore, before the specific revolutionary situation erupts, the revolutionary subject does not really exist; only at the moment of revolution’s outbreak is subjectivity filled, and what fills it are various possibilities. It is in this sense that the transcendental, and therefore given, subject is replaced by generative subjectivity.

但随着资本主义社会进入丰盛社会，消费主义社会抑或所谓的“后工业社会”以来，不仅资本主义的生产方式发生了变化，资本主义所规定下的劳动形式也发生了根本的变化，财富形式也随之发生了变化。特别是资本主义股份制诞生以来，纯粹形态的无产阶级，即一无所有，仅靠出卖劳动力维持生存的人趋于消亡。取而代之是股权制带来的分散的所有权。而这种分散的所有权最终消解的是卢卡奇理论中无产阶级的先验性，同时带来的是对多样化主体性的建构。即对于当代西方马克思主义以后的思想家而言，革命主体性不是一个先定选民，它是在每个情境（situation）中不断再度生成，而这一情境本身正是现实革命的基本内涵。换言之，在此，革命及其生成性主体具有一个互文性的结构，它们相互激发，相互印证。由此形成了诸如巴迪欧的“事件主体”以及奈格里与哈特的“诸众”等概念。生成性的革命主体并不是一个源于现实的多样化的经验的共相，例如从多种多样的桌子中抽取出桌子的概念，相反，革命的主体是激发革命得以产生的动力，并在革命的特定情境下生成的，因此，革命主体在特定革命情形没有爆发之前，并不真实地存在，只有在革命爆发的瞬间，主体性才填充，而填充它的是各种可能性。正是在这一意义上，先验的、因此是既定的主体被生成的主体性所替代。

But no matter how Western Marxism discusses revolution and the revolutionary subject/subjectivity, these two questions, as the core problematic of Western Marxism, seem never to change. To serve these two core questions, Western Marxists have indeed drawn on a variety of theoretical resources in the concrete unfolding of their arguments — for example, Hegel (Lukács), Kant (the Frankfurt School), Freud (Žižek), Spinoza (Negri), Nietzsche and Bergson (Deleuze), and so on. From different angles, they have greatly advanced the philosophical dimension of Marx’s thought. But precisely because of this purely philosophical mode of inquiry, what they have accomplished is always a philosophical demonstration of revolution and its subjectivity, rather than a demonstration of the possibility of actual revolutionary political strategy. When Perry Anderson evaluated Marxism after the end of Western Marxism, he pointed out: “What Marxism after Western Marxism shares with its predecessors is ‘the poverty of strategy,’ not ‘the poverty of theory.’” (Perry Anderson, 1989, p. 30) For me, since there is no such thing as Anderson’s “end of Western Marxism,” what Anderson gives here is precisely an accurate summary of the theoretical character of Western Marxism as a whole.

但不管西方马克思主义如何讨论革命和革命之主体（性）问题，这样两个问题作为西方马克思主义的核心问题意识，却似乎始终未变。为了服务于这两个核心问题，西方马克思主义者在具体展开其讨论路径的时候，的确借用了多种多样的理论资源，例如以黑格尔（卢卡奇）、康德（法兰克福学派）、弗洛伊德（齐泽克）、斯宾诺莎（奈格里）、尼采与柏格森（德勒兹）等等，他们从不同的角度极大地推进了马克思思想的哲学性，但也正因这一纯粹哲学的研究方式，使得他们所完成的始终是一种革命及其主体性的哲学论证，而非现实革命实践策略的可能性论证。佩里.安德森在评价西方马克思主义终结之后的马克思主义的时候，曾指出：“继西方马克思主义之后的马克思主义同其先辈共有的东西是‘战略的贫困’，而不是‘理论的贫困’。”（佩里·安德森，1989，第30页）对我而言，由于并不存在安德森所谓的西方马克思主义的终结，因此，安德森在此所给出的正是对于整个西方马克思主义理论特色的一个准确的概括。

If the various schools of Western Marxism have not provided a strategy for actual revolution, what then is the theoretical aim they have accomplished? In my view, compared with the basic theory of classical Marx, contemporary Western Marxism, since Lukács and the Frankfurt School, when they have relied on dialectics to construct a critical theory of society, has in fact transformed Marx’s theory of “changing the world” back into a theory of “interpreting the world.” In this transformation, Marx’s critique of capitalist society has become a cognition and grasp of contemporary capitalism — that is, it has shifted from Marx’s ontological analysis of capitalist society (i.e., the logic of capital, as referred to in this book) to an epistemological construction of capitalist society (the logic of capital). Hence, beginning with critical theory, the methodological question of how to cognize the logic of capital has gradually become an important field of research in the development of contemporary Western Marxist thought. This has determined that the paradigm of contemporary Western Marxist critique of capitalism has increasingly turned from discussions of dialectics and the concept of historicity to the analysis and description of the operational mechanisms of the logic of capital and the corresponding changes in the forms of labor. If dialectics and the concept of historicity always reveal the changeability of capitalist society in the interaction of subject and object, then the analysis of the operational mechanisms of the logic of capital and the corresponding changes in the forms of labor always highlights a theoretical path of how capitalism, as an intuitive, objective existence, can be cognized and grasped. And any form of epistemological research (i.e., interpreting the world) does not inherently imply the transformation of its cognitive object (i.e., changing the world). Yet Western Marxism, in its development, has inevitably fallen into such a transformation of research paradigm. Hence arises a paradoxical mode of existence in contemporary Western Marxist thought: they outline increasingly conservative practical tendencies with the most radical theoretical posture.

如果西方马克思主义诸多学派没有给出一个真实革命的策略，那么它所完成的理论旨归究竟是什么呢？在我看来，相较之于经典马克思的基本理论，当代西方马克思主义，自卢卡奇与法兰克福学派以来，当他们着力于依赖辩证法来构筑社会批判理论的时候，他们其实已将马克思的“改变世界”的理论再度转变为一种“解释世界”的理论：在其中，把马克思曾经对资本主义社会的批判变成了对当代资本主义的认知和把握，即从马克思对资本主义社会（即本书中所意指的资本逻辑）的存在论分析转向了对资本主义社会（资本逻辑）的认识论建构。于是自批判理论开始，如何认识资本逻辑的方法论问题逐渐成为了当代西方马克思主义思想发展的一个重要研究领域，由此，决定了当代西方马克思主义对资本主义的批判范式从辩证法、历史性概念的讨论日益转向了对资本逻辑的运行机制及其相应的劳动形式变化的分析和描述。如果说辩证法和历史性概念总会在主客体相互作用中彰显资本主义社会的可改变性，那么对资本逻辑的运行机制及其相应劳动形式变化的分析则总是更多地突显出作为一种对直观的、对象性存在的资本主义如何被认知和把握的理论路径。而执着于任何形式的认识论研究（也即解释世界）在本质上都并不蕴含着对其认知对象的改造（即改变世界）。而西方马克思主义在其发展过程中却不可避免地陷入到这样一个研究范式的转变过程中。由此，产生了当代西方马克思主义思潮的一个悖谬式的存在样态：他们在用最为激进的理论姿态勾勒出各种日趋保守的实践趋向。

III. The Emergence and Withdrawal of the Critique of Political Economy Paradigm in Western Marxist Critical Theory

三、西方马克思主义批判理论中的政治经济学批判范式的出场与退场

This paradoxical mode of existence peculiar to Western Marxist thought is inextricably linked to the evolution of contemporary capitalist society. The latter is therefore by no means merely a realistic background for understanding the former, but a specific element constituting its thought. In this sense, although the evolution of Western Marxist thought after the 1940s seems to bear a stronger academic style, it remains inseparable from the actual life of capitalist society. This is manifested in the Frankfurt School’s planned analysis and critique of all aspects of capitalist society. This school is the most self-conscious trend of thought to date. They are not only self-conscious in having all their members’ research on every problem of capitalist society bear the mark of Marx, but also self-conscious in constructing a relatively complete theoretical school. Thus is formed a “critical theory” that “customarily demands capital letters” (Ibid., p. 3).

西方马克思主义思潮所特有的这个悖谬式的存在样态与当代资本主义社会的演变有着密不可分的内在关联，因此，后者绝非仅仅作为理解前者的一个现实背景，而是其思想构成的一个特定要素。从这一意义上说，西方马克思主义在20世纪40年代以后的思想演变，虽然似乎带有着更为浓重的学院派风格，但却仍与资本主义社会现实生活本身密不可分。这表现为法兰克福学派有计划地对于整个资本主义社会的方方面面所展开的分析和批判。这一学派是迄今为止最富有自觉意识的思潮。他们不仅自觉于让其成员对于资本主义社会的所有问题的研究都带上马克思的色彩，同时更自觉于构筑一个相对完整的理论学派。由此形成了一个“习惯上要求大写字母”（同上，第3页）的“批判理论”（Critical Theory）。

As an independent research institution founded in the early 1920s, the guiding ideas of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research cannot be separated from the real-world background provided by the outbreak of the First World War in 1918 and the October Revolution. This specific background brought discussions of “socialization” and “socialism” to the German intellectual scene of the time. The lectures on socialism given by Robert Wilbrandt, the teacher of Felix Weil, the patron of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, were packed to capacity every time in Tübingen. The latter regarded the pressing question that needed to be addressed as how to effectively establish a socialist alternative to capitalism: “Only socialization, carried out in a planned, correct, and step-by-step manner to complete the transition to a socialist state, can ensure that we do not fall into a situation where one system (capitalist enterprise) has ended while another (socialist enterprise) has not yet been established” (Rolf Wiggershaus, 2010, p. 16). This means that German intellectuals at the time held an extremely optimistic judgment about the establishment of a socialist society, as if the demise of capitalism had become an indisputable fact. Weil also said this in his doctoral dissertation:

作为诞生于1920年代初期的独立研究机构，法兰克福社会研究所的主导理念无法脱离由1918年第一次世界大战以及“十月革命”的爆发所给予的现实背景。这一特定的背景为当时的德国思想界带来的“社会化”以及“社会主义”的相关讨论。法兰克福社会研究所的资助人菲利克斯·韦尔的老师罗伯特·维尔布兰特（Robert Wilbrandt）在图宾根关于社会主义的讲座每一次都人满为患。后者将当时迫切需要面对的问题视为如何有效地建立一个对资本主义进行替代的社会主义方案：“只有社会化，有计划地、正确地按部就班地来完成向社会主义状态过渡，才能保证不让我们陷入一种（资本主义企业）制度已经结束，而另一种（社会主义企业）制度还没有建立的境地。”（罗尔夫·魏格豪斯，2010，第16页）这意味着当时的德国知识分子对于社会主义社会的建立拥有着极为乐观的判定，仿佛资本主义的灭亡已经成为了一个不争的事实。韦尔在他的博士论文中也曾这样说：

“Today, businessmen dare not boldly engage in their commercial activities, because strikes, high wages, heavy taxes, mutual suspicion, and fear of socialization make them terrified; at the same time, Germany’s economic life is gradually drying up.

“今天商人们不敢大胆地从事他们的商业活动，因为罢工、高工资、重税、相互猜忌、对社会化的恐惧，这些使得他们心惊胆战；与此同时，德国的经济生活逐渐枯竭了。

Is it a return to the free market, or a move toward socialism? That is the question.

是返回自由市场，还是走向社会主义？这是个问题。

So is answering this question not the greatest task of the present?” (Ibid., p. 18)

那么回答这个问题难道不是当下最大的任务吗？”（同上，第18页）

In light of this problematic, Karl Korsch, as Wilbrandt’s assistant on the Socialization Committee, wrote the article “What Is Socialization?” to discuss, in a programmatic and explanatory manner, the possible schemes for building socialism. This gave rise to a research approach that deeply intervened in real social practice. When Weil was establishing the Institute for Social Research, this powerful problematic partly shaped the institute’s research direction. When he chose Carl Grünberg as the first director of the Institute for Social Research, although the latter was in fact neither a thoroughgoing Marxist nor entirely a socialist, his speech at the institute’s founding ceremony still rather thoroughly carried out the research approach dominated by Weil and others. This speech was published in different newspapers, each with its own emphasis, and none in full. But judging from the texts that have survived to this day, the speech clarified at least two aspects: First, the era in which they lived was an era of transition from capitalism to socialism. The whole society was accelerating its march toward socialism. Second, the Institute for Social Research would take Marxist thought as its guide to conduct research in economics and sociology. This was manifested not only in Grünberg’s explicit admission that “I too am an adherent of Marxism” (Ibid., p. 35), but also in his very clear definition of what he understood Marxism to mean—and this definition, for a considerable period thereafter, shaped the Institute’s basic understanding of Marxist theory before Horkheimer:

有鉴于这一问题意识，作为维尔布兰特在社会化委员会的助手，柯尔施撰写了《什么是社会化？》一文，以一种纲领性阐释方式讨论建设社会主义的可能性方案。由此孕育了一种对于社会现实实践进行深度介入的研究路径。当韦尔筹建社会研究所的时候，这一强大的问题意识部分地左右了研究所的研究路径。当他选择了卡尔·格律恩堡担任首位社会研究所所长的时候，尽管后者实际上并不是一个彻底的马克思主义者，也并非全然是一个社会主义者，但他在研究所成立庆典上的演讲，还是较为彻底地贯彻了韦尔等人所主导的这一研究路径。该演讲在不同报纸上被刊登出来，每一份报纸都有所侧重，都并非全文发表。但就其流传至今的文本来看，在该演讲中，至少明确了两个方面：其一，当时其所生活的时代为一个从资本主义向社会主义过渡的时代。整个社会正在加速朝向社会主义迈进。其二，社会研究所将以马克思主义思想为指导来进行经济学和社会学的研究。这表现为不仅格律恩堡明确承认“我也是一名马克思主义的拥护者”，（同上，第35页）同时还极为明确地界定了他所理解的马克思主义究竟意指为何——而这一界定，从而在相当一段时间内也左右了在霍克海默之前社会研究所对马克思主义理论的基本理解：

For Grünberg, Marxism, as a materialist conception of history, focused its attention on changes in social events and social existence, and sought to reduce the essence of this change to a reflection of economic life at the level of phenomena. In this sense, the analysis and critique of the internal economic structure of capitalist society would become the theoretical focus of the institute, and in fact shaped the theoretical keynote of contemporary Western Marxism at its birth. In a nutshell, this was a research keynote that sought to integrate theory into practice and philosophy into science. As a result, the vast majority of researchers at the time directed their studies toward Marx’s *Capital*, engaging in discussions of *Capital* and its manuscripts from different angles. In view of this, the three initial theoretical leading figures of Western Marxism—Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci—necessarily approached Marxist theory as a process of using theory to guide practice and transforming theory in practice. In a sense, they became the practitioners of the critical theory of the early Institute for Social Research. Because Grünberg’s actual subsequent work did not follow the research path he had proclaimed; what he remained enthusiastic about was still the method of economic history research derived from his doctoral dissertation period. His two assistants, Friedrich Pollock and Henryk Grossmann, were better able than Grünberg to adhere to the institute’s line of thought at that time. Both had their own unique understandings of the specific mode of economic operation in capitalist society. They not only creatively developed studies of Marx’s monetary theory and the theory of state capitalism (as Pollock did) and studies of the laws of accumulation and breakdown of capitalism (as Grossmann did), but also in fact provided theoretical paradigms such as the value form and the commodity form for the subsequent development of Western Marxist analysis of capitalist society. The theoretical dominance of these paradigms of capitalist social critique has even persisted to the present day. At the same time, neither of them worked as pure theoretical researchers; both held their own unique positions in political practice. Just like Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci, their theories themselves contained a practical orientation.

对于格律恩堡来说，马克思主义作为一种唯物主义史观，其所关注的重心在于社会事件和社会存在的变化，并且试图将这一变化的本质归结为经济生活在现象层面的一种反映。从这一意义上说，对于资本主义社会内在经济架构的分析和批判，将成为该研究所的理论所指，并实际上左右了当代西方马克思主义在其诞生之初的理论基调。概而言之，这是一个用让理论融入实践，让哲学融入科学的研究基调。由此，当时绝大多数的研究者都将研究指向马克思的《资本论》，他们分别从不同的角度展开对《资本论》及其手稿的相关讨论。有鉴于此，西方马克思主义最初的三位理论主将，卢卡奇、柯尔施与葛兰西最初对于马克思主义理论的关注，必然是一个用理论去引导实践，并在实践中去改造理论的过程。在某种意义上，他们成为早期社会研究所批判理论的践行者。因为格律恩堡后来的实际工作并没有按照他所宣称的这一研究路径而展开，他所热衷的仍然不过是源自于其博士论文期间所展开的经济史的研究方法。他的两位助手，弗里德里希·波洛克与亨利耶克·格罗斯曼（Henryk Grossmann）较之于格律恩堡而言，更能坚守此时社会研究所的思考路径。两人对于资本主义社会特有的经济运行方式都有其独特的理解，不仅创造性地拓展出了对马克思的货币理论与国家资本主义理论的研究（如波洛克）以及有关于资本主义的积累规律与崩溃的相关研究（如格罗斯曼），而且实际上为西方马克思主义后续展开对资本主义社会的分析提供了诸如价值形式、商品形式等理论范式。这些资本主义社会批判范式在理论上的支配力甚至延续至今。同时，两者都并非作为纯粹的理论研究者而展开他们的工作，他们都在政治实践中拥有自己独特的立场。正如卢卡奇、柯尔施与葛兰西一样，他们的理论自身包含则一种实践性指向。

Precisely because of this distinctive stance of integrating practice and theory held by Pollock and Grossmann, neither of them became Grünberg’s legitimate successor. Instead, Max Horkheimer, who was not a core member of the Frankfurt Institute at the time, succeeded Grünberg and became the director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research after 1930. However, the new research path initiated by Horkheimer brought about some subtle changes in the research of the Frankfurt School. The German scholar Rolf Wiggershaus, who conducted a systematic study of the institute, summarized this as “theory left practice, philosophy left science, and rational critique left the salvation of reason” (Ibid., p. 11). The institute’s research on capitalist society gradually moved away from attention to the overall economic system of society, turning instead toward philosophical critiques of cultural and ideological issues in contemporary capitalist society. Conceptual categories such as reification, alienation, and dialectics gradually came to occupy the content of what Horkheimer called “critical theory.” This philosophical turn intensified as the vast majority of the institute’s members emigrated to a then-war-free “America” before the war. The referent of critical theory gradually narrowed to the cultural field of capitalism and psychoanalysis. While the outcome of such theoretical development was certainly related to the research theories of Horkheimer and his fellow scholars, it is an undeniable fact that it was also inextricably linked to the new post-war developments of capitalism.

正是因为波洛克与格罗斯曼特有的这一实践和理论相融合的立场，使得他们都未能成为格律恩堡的合法接班人，反而让当时并不属于法兰克福研究所核心人员马克斯·霍克海默接续格律恩堡，自1930年后，成为了法兰克福社会研究所的所长。然而由霍克海默所开启的新的研究路径，却让法兰克福学派的研究出现了一些隐形的变化。对该研究所做了系统研究的德国学者罗尔夫·魏格豪斯将其概括为“理论离开了实践，哲学离开了科学，理性批判离开了对理性的拯救”。（同上，第11页）研究所对于资本主义社会的研究逐渐远离对社会整体的经济体系的关注，转而趋向于对当下资本主义社会中的文化、意识形态等问题所展开的哲学批判。诸如物化、异化、辩证法等概念范畴逐渐占据着霍克海默所谓的“批判理论”的内涵。这一哲学转向随着研究所的绝大部分成员在战前移民到了一个彼时无战事的“美国”而愈演愈烈。批判理论所指逐渐缩小到了资本主义文化场域与精神分析。这样一种理论发展的结果固然与霍克海默等同仁学者的研究理论有关，但不可否认的事实是，它同时与战后资本主义发展的新态势有着密不可分的关系。

Perry Anderson attributed the birth of this Western Marxist school to “the product of repeated failures of the workers’ movement in the fortresses of advanced capitalism on the European continent” (Perry Anderson, 1989, p. 10). This judgment may be somewhat arbitrary, but Anderson rather accurately identified a significant change in the actual context in which Western Marxism of this period was born: “the long post-war economic boom gradually and inexorably subordinated labour to capital in the stable parliamentary democracies and the newly emerging consumer society of the ‘OECD system’” (ibid., p. 10). This brought two direct consequences. First, the theory of capital’s crisis appeared in the rapidly developing capitalist society as alarmist. Second, when “labour” is subordinated to capital, it fundamentally changes the antagonistic relationship between “capital” and “labour” that Marx constructed in the first volume of *Capital*, and in effect dissolves all the power of “living labour” to deconstruct the logic of capital; capital seems to lose the possibility of internal implosion. Criticism of capitalism could therefore no longer be confined solely to capital itself, but needed to be extended to every aspect of daily life, from the mode of existence of the individual to the individual’s spiritual world, all of which became practical fields of capital’s alienation. At the same time, Pollock of the Frankfurt School discovered, in a state-tinged model of capitalist development, not only the inherent elasticity of capitalism’s survival, but also fundamentally led to a turn in the political economy research within critical theory: when a state-tinged organizational management mechanism replaces the market mechanism as the effective mechanism regulating the development of capital’s logic, then the critique of capital’s logic can only shift from a critique of political economy to a political critique, or even a cultural critique, because economic operation is the implementation of political power; the two are essentially the same thing. Perceiving the developmental tendency of state capitalism made Pollock pessimistic about the possibility of subsuming and overcoming capital’s dominance in society. Although Pollock did not write much, this judgment of his showed a particular influence on the entire school. From then on, not only did actual political practice fall into collective aphasia in the theory of the Frankfurt School, but the study of political economy dominated by the critique of capital’s logic also gradually faded from their theoretical horizon. What remained were heavily academic philosophical concepts and themes such as enlightenment, alienation, the culture industry, new sensibility, and the one-dimensional man, which constituted the entire focus of Frankfurt School research. These studies of phenomena always possessed an academic acuity, but they avoided discussing the economic base that underpins the evolution of this superstructure, such as the development of new forms of capital. The result was that the critical theory inaugurated by the Frankfurt School became merely an important branch of “theory” in contemporary society. Ultimately, in the process of the school’s theoretical evolution, it gradually manifested a non-critical theoretical tendency; a critical theory with a strong “negative” character was being replaced by a social and political theory constructed by things like “recognition” and “compromise.” This transformation of the critical paradigm not only deviated from the foundational character of critical theory, but also fundamentally deviated from the Marxist character inherent in that theory.

佩里·安德森将这一西方马克思主义流派的诞生归结为“欧洲大陆发达资本主义堡垒中工人运动一再失败的产物”，（佩里·安德森，1989，第10页）这一判定有略显武断之处，但安德森却较为准确地指出了这一时期的西方马克思主义诞生的现实语境中的显著变化：“战后长期的经济繁荣逐渐无情地在稳定的议会民主制及‘经济合作与发展组织体系里新出现的消费者社会中，使劳动隶属于资本”。（同上，第10页）由此带来了两个直接的后果：其一，资本的危机理论在快速发展的资本主义社会中显得如同杞人忧天。其二，当“劳动”隶属于资本，从根本上改变了马克思在《资本论》第一卷中所构筑的“资本”与“劳动”之间的对抗性关系，并实际上消解了“活劳动”对资本逻辑的解构的全部力量，资本似乎失去了内爆的可能性。对资本主义的批判由此不再能仅仅局限于资本自身，而是需要拓展到日常生活的方方面面，从单个人的生存方式到个人的精神世界都成为了资本异化的实践场域。与此同时，法兰克福学派的波洛克更是在带有国家色彩的资本主义发展模式中发现了资本主义固有的生存弹性，而且根本上导致了批判理论中政治经济学研究的转向：当带有国家色彩的组织管理机制代替市场机制成为调节资本逻辑发展的有效机制，那么对资本逻辑的批判就只能从政治经济学批判转向政治批判，甚至文化批判，因为经济运行就是政治权力的实施，两者在本质上是一回事。洞察到国家资本主义的发展趋向，使得波洛克对于扬弃资本在社会中的统御的可能性持有悲观的态度。波洛克虽著述不多，但他的这一判定却显现出对整个学派特别的影响力。从此，不仅现实的政治实践在法兰克福学派的理论中处于集体失语状态，而且对以资本逻辑批判为主导的政治经济学的研究也逐渐淡出了他们的理论视域之外。留下了诸如启蒙、异化、文化工业、新感性、单向度等带有浓重学院派的哲学概念和主题，它们构筑了法兰克福学派研究的全部重心所在。这些研究对于现象的描述总是带有着一种学术的敏锐度，但就其支撑这一上层建筑之演化的经济基础，如新的资本形态的发展却避而不谈，其结果是由法兰克福学派所开创的批判理论，仅仅变成了当代社会“理论”的重要分支。最终使该学派在理论的嬗变过程中，逐渐呈现了非批判的理论趋向，带有强烈的“否定性”的批判理论正在被诸如“承认”与“妥协”所构筑的社会政治理论所替代。这一批判范式转变不仅背离了批判理论的底色，同时更从根本上背离了该理论所固有的马克思主义底色。

The gradual retreat of the paradigm of the critique of political economy within social critical theory was inevitably accompanied by social critical theory’s neglect of the inner economic structure of capitalist society, and ultimately affected the critical dimension of its theory. To some extent, this led to the decline of Western Marxist research dominated by the Frankfurt School in contemporary thought. Particularly after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, with fundamental changes in international monetary policy, a new transformation in the study of capital issues directly emerged. The key to this transformation lies not in a fundamental change in the judgment of the essence of capitalist society, but in a fundamental change in the way of grasping capitalist society. This change manifests as follows: if earlier Western Marxists always tended to transform the capital issue that dominates social life into a critique of daily life that permeates every aspect of human social life, then from the 1970s onward, Western Marxists began to reduce the critique of daily life back to a critique of capital: from the subjective psychology identified by psychoanalysis to the modern social governance schemes touched upon by biopolitics, from the micro to the macro, many studies of this period always tried to reduce all these appearances to the logic of capital running through them. Thus, a group of not-so-“typical” Western Marxists appeared. They were not merely researchers of Marxism; they were more often simply diagnosticians of modern society. The critique of capital constructed by Marx was merely an effective path for them to criticize this society.

政治经济学批判范式在社会批判理论中渐趋退场必然伴随着社会批判理论对资本主义社会内在经济架构的忽视，并最终影响了其理论的批判性向度。它在某种程度导致法兰克福学派所主导的西方马克思主义研究在当代思想中的式微。特别以1970年代布雷顿森林体系崩塌之后，随着国际货币政策的根本性变化，直接带来了资本问题研究的新转变。这一转变的关键不在于对资本主义社会的本质的判定有了根本性的变化，而是对资本主义社会的把握方式发生了根本的变化。这一变化表现为：如果说此前西方马克思主义者总是倾向于将支配社会生活的资本问题转变为一种渗透于人的社会生活的方方面面的日常生活批判，那么从1970年代以后，西方马克思主义者们则开始将日常生活批判重新还原为一种资本批判：从精神分析所指认的人的主观心理，到生命政治所触及的现代社会治理方案，从微观到宏观，这一时期的诸多研究总是试图将所有这些表象都还原为横贯其间的资本逻辑。于是，出现了一群并不那么“典型的”西方马克思主义者们。他们不仅仅是马克思主义的研究者，他们更多地只是作为现代社会的诊断者。马克思所构筑的资本批判，只是他们用以批判这个社会的一个有效路径。

IV. Two Stages in the Development of Western Marxism: Taking the Critique of the Logic of Capital as a Clue

四、西方马克思主义发展的两个阶段：以资本逻辑批判为线索

Therefore, in terms of the transformation of the research paradigm concerning the issue of capital, our investigation of the developmental trajectory of Western Marxism must take the internal changes in the logic of capital within capitalist society as a clue, dividing contemporary capitalist society into two stages, with the Bretton Woods system of the 1970s as the boundary. Although throughout the entire development of Western Marxism, the exploration of the opportunity for revolution and the subject of revolution became two core theoretical issues running through it, the significant changes in the development model of contemporary capitalism brought about two completely different modes of analysis and critique in the earlier and later stages.

于是，我们有关于西方马克思主义发展脉络的考察在其有关于资本问题的研究范式转变的意义上说，不得不以资本逻辑在资本主义社会的内在变迁为线索，将当代资本主义社会以1970年代布雷顿森林体系为界，划分为两个阶段。虽然整个西方马克思主义发展历程中，对革命之契机与革命之主体的探讨，成为了贯穿始终的两大理论核心问题，但由于当代资本主义发展模式的显著变迁，带来了前后两个阶段截然不同的分析和批判模式。

The earlier stage is classical Western Marxism. The capitalism it confronted was dominated by physical capital. The economic categories constructed around the issue of capital therefore primarily took “commodity” and “value” as their focus. Under the presupposition of the system of “needs,” with the confrontation between labour and capital as its core problem, it explored major theoretical issues such as “history” and “revolution.” Among these, the logic of capital, as a potential “invisible” hand, dominated the daily life of modern society, while cultural production, which carried the entire logic of capital, became its manifest critical path, and thereby constructed an artistic utopia as the critical goal.

前一个阶段为经典西方马克思主义，它们所面对的资本主义以实体资本为主，围绕资本问题所构筑的经济范畴也因此将以“商品、“价值”为主，在“需要”体系的预设下，以劳动与资本的对峙为其核心问题，探讨诸如“历史”与“革命”等重大的理论问题。其中，资本逻辑作为一种潜在的“看不见”的手左右现代社会的日常生活，而裹挟着全部资本逻辑的文化生产成为其显在的批判路径，并由此构筑了一种艺术乌托邦的批判旨归。

In contrast, in contemporary Western Marxism after the 1970s, as the second stage of development, the financialization of capital turned the logic of capital into an explicit logic that governs every aspect of modern social life. The difference between this mode of governance and that before the 1970s lies not in the fact that a particular commodity (the commodity-thing) and its value confirm the spread of the logic of capital, but rather that the spread of the logic of capital requires all existing things to become carriers of the logic of capital—that is, the birth of the capital-thing. The system of desire replaced the system of needs, becoming the psychological mechanism of the subject that constructs social interaction. However, because the system of desire is itself both the subjective expression of the laborer and the substantive attribute of the logic of capital, labor and capital form an affirmative complicity. Therefore, for Western Marxists in this stage, the critique of every aspect of social life is simultaneously a critique of capital; likewise, the critique of capital is simultaneously a critique of every aspect of social life. In other words, the distinction between economic base and superstructure that could still be made in the previous stage has become blurred in this stage. This determines that the mode of critique of capitalism by Western Marxists in this period has also undergone a transformation: first, in its appearance, most contemporary Western Marxists are atypical Marxists. They no longer take Marxist texts as their primary object of study, but instead treat Marxist texts as effective theoretical weapons for critiquing contemporary capitalist society. Second, in terms of their critical paradigm, capital, money, financialization, and so on directly become the targets of their critique. They no longer need to use concepts such as “commodity” or “value” to “represent” capital, but instead directly present capital’s self-expression. Among this, the complicity between the laborer, as the bearer of labor, and the logic of capital makes the discussion of “revolution” and its “subject” in classical Western Marxism lose its inherent research path: the laborer embedded within the system of the logic of capital, although possessing a spontaneous and active subjectivity, the exercise of this subjectivity cannot bring about the subversion of the logic of capital. The subversion of capitalism therefore not only loses its clear subject(ivity), but also can no longer rely on grand political revolutions or micro-level cultural and artistic revolutions, because in the current society where the logic of capital spreads, “revolution” has transformed into “innovation,” and politics, culture, and art have all become incarnations of the financialization trend of capital. The ghostly nature of the logic of capital also allows the logic of capital to obtain a mode of expression akin to “the dagger is revealed when the map is unrolled”[22]22 The phrase “图穷匕首见” (tú qióng bǐ shǒu xiàn) is a Chinese idiom originating from the historical account of Jing Ke’s assassination attempt on the First Emperor of Qin. It literally means “when the map is unrolled, the dagger is revealed,” and is used metaphorically to describe a situation where the true intention or hidden danger is finally exposed.: that is, “capital,” which originally appeared as a “thing” or “social relation,” finally acquires an autonomous logical form—it is becoming a framework of thought that can dominate and control other elements. The relationship between the entire real social life of human beings and this framework of thought constructed by capital was initially felt by critical theorists of Western Marxism as a pathology of reason, thereby constructing an opposition between history and reason. With the increasing spread of the logic of capital, especially after “(living) labor” enters the calculation of the “logic of capital,” the logic of capital itself has become the historical structure that derives the entire social life of humanity. In other words, the binary opposition between history and reason, and the problem of their unity, as revealed since classical German philosophy, has been dissolved by the “logic of capital.” The logic of capital has already become a kind of quasi-“absolute spirit,” and real social life has become various modes of “expression” of this absolute spirit. Whether we diagnose the logic of capital as a pathological reason or regard it as a social-historical structure that derives other things, the existence of the “logic of capital” has already become a fact we cannot avoid. The theoretical development of Western Marxism, rather than accompanying the actual evolution of capitalist society as a whole, can be said to accompany the process of the logic of capital unfolding from spontaneity to self-consciousness. Thus, although Western Marxism in these two different stages presents multiple different critical paradigms, they share a common problematic. I define this problematic as: the critique of the logic of capital that is integrated into real social life. This “critique” contains two aspects: first, describing and analyzing the ways and paths through which capital structures social life—that is, reducing real social life and personality structure to the logic of capital. Second, delimiting the connotation and extension of the logic of capital, clarifying the theoretical premises of its existence, and on this basis, exploring all possibilities for transcending capital.

与此不同的是，1970年代以后的当代西方马克思主义，作为第二个发展阶段，资本的金融化趋势让资本逻辑成为了显在的逻辑，统御现代社会生活的方方面面。这一统御方式与1970年代之前的不同在于，并不是由特定商品（商品-物）及其价值确认了资本逻辑的蔓延，而是资本逻辑的蔓延要求所有一切存在物都成为资本逻辑的载体，即资本一物的诞生。欲望的体系代替了需要的体系，成为了构筑社会交往的主体心理机制，但由于欲望的体系自身同时既是劳动者的主体性表现，也是资本逻辑的实体性属性，因此劳动与资本构成了一个肯定性的共谋。因此对于这一阶段中的西方马克思主义者来说，社会生活各个面向的批判，同时也就是资本的批判，同样，对资本的批判，同时也就是对社会生活各个面向的批判，换言之，在前一阶段中，还或可做出的经济基础与上层建筑之间的区分，在这一阶段已经变得界限模糊。由此，决定了这一时期内西方马克思主义对待资本主义的批判方式也发生了转变：首先，在其表象上，当代西方马克思主义者大多是非典型性的马克思主义者，他们不再以马克思主义文本为其主要研究对象，转而将马克思主义文本视为批判当代资本主义社会的有效理论武器。其次，就其批判范式而言，资本、货币、金融化等直接成为其批判所指，它们无须借助于“商品”“价值”等概念来“表象”(representation)资本，而是直接呈现资本的自我表达（expression）。其中，作为劳动的承载者的劳动者与资本逻辑之间的共谋，使得经典西方马克思主义对于“革命”以及其“主体”问题的讨论失去了固有的研究路径：内嵌于资本逻辑体系内的劳动者，虽具有自发的、能动的主体性，其主体性的发挥却并不能带来对资本逻辑的颠覆。对资本主义的颠覆因此不仅失去了其明确的主体（性），同时更无法依赖于宏大的政治革命与微观的文化、艺术革命，因为在当下资本逻辑蔓延的社会中，“革命”转变为“创新”，政治、文化与艺术都成为了资本金融化趋向中的一个化身。资本逻辑的幽灵化，同时也让资本逻辑获得了一个图穷匕首见式的表现方式：即原初表现为“物”“社会关系”的“资本”终于获得了一种自主性的逻辑形态，即它正在成为可以左右和支配其他要素的一个思维架构，整个人的社会现实生活与这一资本所构筑的思维架构之间最初被西方马克思主义批判理论家感受为一种理性的病理学，从而构筑了一个历史与理性之间的对峙，随着资本逻辑的日益蔓延，特别是“（活）劳动”进入到“资本逻辑”的计算中之后，资本逻辑自身已经成为派生整个人类社会生活的历史性结构。换言之，自德国古典哲学以来所揭示的历史与理性之间的二元对峙以及其统一的问题被“资本逻辑”消解了，资本逻辑已然变成了一种类“绝对精神”，社会现实生活成为了这一绝对精神的各种“表达”方式。不管我们是将资本逻辑诊断为一种病态的理性，抑或将其视为一种派生其他的社会历史性结构，“资本逻辑”的存在都已然成为了一个我们无法回避的事实。而西方马克思主义的理论发展历程与其说是伴随着整个资本主义社会的现实演化，不如说是伴随着资本逻辑从自发到自觉的展开过程。由此两个不同阶段中的西方马克思主义，虽然呈现出多个不同的批判范式，却拥有着共同的问题意识。我将这一问题意识界定为：对融贯于社会现实生活之内的资本逻辑的批判，这一“批判”包含着两个方面的内涵：其一，描述和分析资本架构社会生活的方式与路径，即将社会现实生活以及人格结构还原为资本逻辑。其二，为资本逻辑的内涵和外延进行划界，澄清其存在的理论前提，并在此基础上探寻超越资本的全部可能性的。

In light of this, strictly speaking, the object of Western Marxist critique is not capitalist society as such; what their critique actually targets is the logic of capital that governs every aspect of social reality. Axel Honneth, a successor of contemporary social critical theory, in reviewing the unifying problematic of the Frankfurt School’s social critical theory, points out that “regardless of the diversity of methods and objects, the different authors of the Frankfurt School agree on the idea that the living conditions of modern, capitalist society produce social practices, attitudes or personality structures that are sedimented in a pathological deformation of our rational capacities, and it is precisely this theme that constitutes the unity within the plurality of voices of critical theory. Such heterogeneous work may also be bound by this unity, and they tend to aim at investigating the social causes of the pathology of human rationality.” (Axel Honneth, 2022, Preface, p. i) Here we must pay particular attention to the fact that Honneth’s identification contains insights on two dimensions: first, the social critical theory dominated by the Frankfurt School always attempts to attribute the social mode of life manipulated by the logic of capital to a pathological rationality. Second, consequently, the critical theory’s method of sublating the logic of capital ultimately points toward the path of exploring human rationality. The critique of reason and its restoration became the main program of capital critique for the social critical theory of this period. To go further, at this stage the logic of capital had clearly not yet become conscious of itself as an autonomous force governing social life. It was still conflated with reason and subsumed under the basic order of a pathological reason. Hence, the therapeutic prescription of social critical theory was limited to the examination and restoration of “reason.” And once “reason” is taken as the anchoring point of critique, the metaphysical presuppositions of traditional philosophy implicit in reason inevitably cause all critical theory to gradually distance itself from the political economy that analyzes the structure of capital itself, and instead turn toward the path of ethics and political philosophy with a strongly normative character. From Habermas’s theory of communicative action to Honneth’s theory of recognition, this theoretical turn is exemplified, constructing a critical theory directed at capitalism that is a critique without capital. It is precisely on this basis that Honneth identifies the core defect of Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory as: “they were too strongly dominated by the idea that all subjects, regardless of their group affiliation, are incorporated into the capitalist social system without resistance.” (Ibid., Preface, p. vi) At the same time, he is puzzled that in Lukács’s theory of “reification,” “why all phenomena in which a person or even their own inner life becomes a thing or is treated as a thing must be traced back to capitalist commodity exchange; for the emergence of this objectifying, dignity-depriving mode of behavior, there are many other reasons besides mere economic compulsion (i.e., viewing the surrounding world and oneself with the attitude of a market participant)…” (Ibid., Preface, p. xix) Thus it can be seen that Honneth’s puzzlement and the theoretical defects he perceives in the Frankfurt School fundamentally stem from his refusal to accept the early Western Marxists’ view of the immanent logic of capital (the commodity form) in capitalist society as the root of contemporary social pathology, and instead he reinterprets all facts such as “reification” and commodification as a specifically human “forgetting of recognition.” (Ibid., Preface, p. xix) Here, Honneth appears to enrich the premises of early Frankfurt School social critical theory, constructing a more general foundation for the formation of ethical society based on “recognition” and presupposing irresolvable social conflicts and contradictions. But in reality, by weakening the critical path of the logic of capital, he misses the essence of grasping contemporary capitalist society, with the result that today, Western Marxist thought has not only lost the commonality of a unified school, but more importantly, has fundamentally lost the essential weapon for effectively criticizing capitalist society. After they increasingly dispersed into representatives of scattered left-wing currents, their critique of capitalism has increasingly taken only two paths: first, the successors of the Frankfurt School, represented by Honneth, have become social theorists committed to constructing normative ethics and political philosophy, completely losing the subversive critique of capitalist society inherent in social critical theory. Second, thinkers represented by the radical left-wing currents, tinged with a strong religious color, have, in their tireless textual research and deduction of certain philosophical concepts, completed a series of revolutionary discursive constructions with a strong thought-experiment character, such as Agamben’s “The Coming Community” (la comunità che viene) or the “Commonwealth” envisioned by Negri and Hardt. What they ultimately achieve is merely a radical revolutionary gesture, not a truly feasible subversive path. In this sense, the two paths lead to the same end: both are an effective compromise with the existing capitalist society. This compromising posture of Western Marxism toward capitalist society, conversely, further confirms that in the development of the new contemporary form of capital, the logic of capital, as a spontaneous mechanism governing everything, plays an increasingly prominent role. In light of this, in its evolution, Western Marxist thought has finally turned from critical theory into non-critical theory. Its fundamental problem lies in its inability to maintain a conscious critical awareness in the face of the new form of the logic of capital. Yet, by studying the process of the evolution of Marxism, we can, through its unremitting efforts based on the critique of the logic of capital, discern the basic trends of capitalist development since the 20th century, as well as the many possible paths for criticizing capitalism, thereby providing some intellectual reference for our own reflection on and critique of the new forms of contemporary capitalism. For this reason, the study of contemporary Western Marxist theory, whether in the past or in the future, is of great value for the construction of China’s autonomous discursive system of Marxism.

有鉴于此，严格说来，西方马克思主义批判所指的对象并不是资本主义社会，他们的批判所指的实际是统御了社会现实方方面面的资本逻辑。当代社会批判理论的继承者霍纳特在回顾整个法兰克福学派的社会批判理论的统一问题意识中指出“不管方法和对象如何分散，法兰克福学派的不同作者在如下理念上是一致的，即现代的、资本主义社会的生活条件产生出了社会的实操（Praktik），态度或者人格性结构，这些都沉淀在我们的理性诸能力的一种病理学变形（Verfor‐mung）之中，正是这个主题构成了批判理论的声音多元性中的统一性。如此异质的工作可能也会受到这种统一性的约束，它们往往会指向探究人类合理性（Rationalität）的病例的社会原因这一目标。”（阿克塞尔·霍纳特，2022，序言第i页）在此，我们需要特别注意的是，霍耐特的指认包含如下两个维度上的洞见：其一，法兰克福学派所主导的社会批判理论总是试图将被资本逻辑所操控的社会生活方式归因为一种病态的理性。其二，由此，批判理论对于资本逻辑的扬弃方式最终也都指向了探求人类合理性的道路。对于理性的批判及其修复成了这一时期社会批判理论进行资本批判的主要方案。更进一步说，资本逻辑在这一阶段显然还未能自觉为一种统御社会生活的自主性力量。它还被与理性混淆在一起，被归入一种病态理性的基本秩序。于是，针对于此，社会批判理论的诊疗方案也就仅仅局限于对“理性”的考察与修复。而一旦以“理性”为批判的铆钉点，那么理性所隐含的传统哲学形而上学的预设，必然会让所有批判理论逐渐远离对资本自身结构进行分析的政治经济学，转而在带有强烈规范性色彩的伦理学、政治哲学的路径之上。自哈贝马斯的交往理论，到霍耐特的承认理论，都诠释了这一理论路径的转向，构筑了一种面向资本主义的无资本批判的批判理论。正是基于此，霍耐特会将阿多诺和霍克海默理论的核心缺陷认定为：“他们过于强烈地被如下观念所主导，即所有主体无论其群体归属如何都毫无反抗地被编入资本主义的社会体系之中。”（同上，序言第vi页）同时困惑于在卢卡奇的“物化”理论中，“为什么一个人或者其本身的灵魂生活的所有变成物或者被像物一样对待的现象都要被溯因到资本主义商品交换；对这种客体化的、剥夺人类尊严的行为方式的出现来说，还存在着单纯经济强制（即以市场参与者的态度看待周围世界和自己）之外的许多其他原因……”（同上，序言第xix页）由此可见，霍耐特的困惑以及法兰克福学派在他的眼中所存在的理论缺陷，究其根本在于他并不认同于早期西方马克思主义者将资本主义社会内在的资本逻辑（商品形式）视为当代社会病理学之根源，转而将所有诸如“物化”、商品化的事实视为人所特有的“承认之遗忘”。（同上，序言第xix页）在此，霍耐特看似丰富了早期法兰克福学派社会批判理论的前提，即以“承认”为基底，以不可消除的社会冲突和矛盾为预设前提所构筑的一个更富有一般性的伦理社会形成之根源，但实际上，却在弱化资本逻辑的批判路径中，错失了把握当代资本主义社会之要义的根本，致使今日，西方马克思主义思潮不仅失去了作为整体流派的共同性，同时更为重要的是，根本上失去了对资本主义社会进行有效批判的根本利器。在他们日益散漫为一些零星左翼思潮的代表人物之后，其面向资本主义的批判只是日益呈现为两条道路：其一，以霍耐特为代表的法兰克福学派的后继者，成为了以规范性伦理学和政治哲学的建构为己任的社会理论家，完全失去了社会批判理论固有的对资本主义社会的颠覆性批判。其二，以激进左翼思潮为代表的思想家，则带有着浓重的宗教色彩，在乐此不疲的对某一个哲学概念的考据和推演当中，完成了一系列的带有强烈思想实验式样的革命话语建构，例如阿甘本的“来临中的共同体”（la comunitàche viene）抑或奈格里和哈特所设想的“大同世界”（Commonwealth），其最终完成的也仅是一个激进的革命的姿态，而非真正可行的颠覆性道路。从这一意义上说，两条道路殊途同归，都是对既有资本社会的一次有效妥协。而西方马克思主义面向资本主义社会的这一妥协的姿态，则从反面进一步印证了当代新的资本形态发展过程中资本逻辑作为一种统御一切的自发机制发挥着越来越鲜明的作用。有鉴于此，西方马克思主义思潮在其演变当中，最终终于从批判理论转向了无批判理论，其根本问题在于无法坚持面对资本逻辑新形态所保持着的自觉的批判意识。而沿着马克思主义嬗变过程展开研究，我们却可以在其基于资本逻辑批判所展开的不懈努力中洞悉资本主义自20世纪以来发展的基本态势，以及批判资本主义的诸多可能性路径，从而为我们面对当代资本主义新形态的思考与批判提供一些思想的借鉴。为此，对于当代西方马克思主义理论的研究无论在过去抑或在未来，对于中国的马克思主义自主话语体系的建构都具有重要价值。

Web editor: Zhang Jian

网络编辑：张剑