The Chinese Stance in the Study of Western Marxism

The study of Western Marxism is an important field in China’s Marxist theoretical research. Beginning in the 1990s, the study of Western Marxism gradually became a prominent discipline in China, and by the early 21st century, it had reached a theoretical peak, with a surge in translations of works and related academic achievements. The significance of tracking and studying Western Marxism lies in the fact that, although we understand, grasp, and promote the contemporary development of Marxism based on the practice of socialism with Chinese characteristics, Marxist research has always required an awareness of the spirit of the times and a world-historical perspective.

西方马克思主义研究是我国马克思主义理论研究的重要领域。20世纪90年代开始西方马克思主义研究在我国渐成显学，特别是到21世纪初，西方马克思主义研究掀起了一个理论高潮，作品译介和相关学术成果成批涌现。对西方马克思主义跟踪研究的意义在于，我们虽然是立足中国特色社会主义的实践去理解、把握并推动马克思主义的当代发展，但马克思主义的研究从来都需要时代精神的意识与世界历史的眼光。

Western Marxist scholars, because they are situated in mature contemporary capitalist countries, have a more immediate experience and detailed observation of its operational mechanisms, as well as a keener perception of its new changes. This can provide us with an important reference for a more comprehensive grasp of the historical essence of contemporary capitalism. As General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out: The world pattern is in a historical process of accelerated evolution, generating a large number of profound and complex practical problems and raising numerous theoretical issues that urgently need answers. This requires us to strengthen research on contemporary capitalism, analyze and grasp its various changes and their essence, and deepen our understanding of the laws governing the profound and complex changes in capitalism and international political and economic relations. An important characteristic of contemporary world Marxist trends is that many of their proponents critically reveal the structural contradictions of capitalism, as well as contradictions in the mode of production, class contradictions, and social contradictions, and conduct in-depth analyses of capitalist crises, the evolutionary process of capitalism, and the new forms and essence of capitalism. These views help us correctly understand the development trends and fate of capitalism, accurately grasp the new changes and features of contemporary capitalism, and deepen our understanding of the changing trends of contemporary capitalism. Regarding the new research achievements of foreign Marxism, we must pay close attention to and study them, analyzing and discriminating, neither adopting an attitude of outright rejection nor engaging in wholesale copying.

西方马克思主义学者，因身处成熟的当代资本主义国家，故对其运行机理有更切身的感受和细致的观察，对其新变化也有更敏锐的感知，能为我们更全面地把握当代资本主义的历史本质提供重要参照。正如习近平总书记所指出的：世界格局正处在加快演变的历史进程之中，产生了大量深刻复杂的现实问题，提出了大量亟待回答的理论课题。这就需要我们加强对当代资本主义的研究，分析把握其出现的各种变化及其本质，深化对资本主义和国际政治经济关系深刻复杂变化的规律性认识。当代世界马克思主义思潮，一个重要的特点就是他们中很多人对资本主义结构性矛盾以及生产方式矛盾、阶级矛盾、社会矛盾等进行了批判性揭示，对资本主义危机、资本主义演进过程、资本主义新形态及本质进行了深入分析。这些观点有助于我们正确认识资本主义发展趋势和命运，准确把握当代资本主义新变化新特征，加深对当代资本主义变化趋势的理解。对国外马克思主义研究新成果，我们要密切关注和研究，有分析、有鉴别，既不能采取一概排斥的态度，也不能搞全盘照搬。

To analyze and discriminate in the study of Western Marxism, it is necessary to have a clear historical grasp of its theoretical lineage and an accurate political judgment of its theoretical nature. Marxism was born in Western Europe during the rapid development of capitalism in the mid-19th century. Engels said that Marx’s two greatest achievements in his life were the discovery of historical materialism and the theory of surplus value. Historical materialism was born from the theoretical summation of the revolutionary practice on the European continent in the mid-19th century, while the theory of surplus value was established on the basis of a profound insight into the developed capitalism of Britain. However, from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, with the rapid development of modernization and the deep structural adjustments in major European countries, the revolutionary character of the European communist movement gradually waned. The tumultuous events in Europe from 1914 to 1917, marked by the First World War and Russia’s “October Revolution,” truly ended the 19th century and decisively opened the 20th century in a world-historical sense. The center of the world communist movement shifted from Western Europe eastward to the Soviet Union. This shift, after undergoing the Second World War, ultimately determined that the 20th-century world presented a historical divide and confrontation between two major camps: Western capitalism and Eastern socialism.

对西方马克思主义的研究要分析和鉴别，就要对其理论脉络有清晰的历史把握，对其理论性质有准确的政治判断。马克思主义诞生于19世纪中叶资本主义快速发展的西欧。恩格斯说马克思一生最伟大的两个功绩，是发现了唯物史观和剩余价值学说。唯物史观诞生于对19世纪中叶欧洲大陆革命实践的理论总结，剩余价值学说建立在对英国发达资本主义深刻洞察的基础上。但19世纪后期到20世纪初期，伴随欧洲主要国家现代化的快速发展和社会结构的深层调整，欧洲共产主义运动的革命性日渐衰歇。1914—1917年风云变幻的欧洲以第一次世界大战和俄国的“十月革命”，真正终结了19世纪，并决定性地开启了世界历史意义上的20世纪。世界共产主义运动的中心从西欧向东转移到苏联，这一转移经历第二次世界大战，最终确定20世纪的世界呈现为西方资本主义与东方社会主义两大阵营的历史性分野与对峙。

So-called “Western Marxism” was precisely born in this century-long turning point. The early Western Marxists, represented by Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci, were situated at the tail end of the European revolutionary era. Their theories still had the political foundation of European revolutionary practice and were essentially revolutionary political theories. However, when the classical Western Marxists, represented by the Frankfurt School, stepped onto the stage of intellectual history, the new world-historical map of the confrontation between the two camps had already been established, and the era of Western political revolution had completely ended. Due to the dual disappearance of the real subject of revolution and historical possibility, the “revolutionary” character of Western Marxism was forced to shift from the political to the cultural, from the realm of social reality to the realm of subjective consciousness. The summoners and subjects of revolution changed from revolutionaries and the working class to professors on campus and their young student followers. This self-proclaimed “revolutionary” cultural critique reached its climax in the 1960s: young students, with radical resistance, stirred up the “May 1968 events” and the “anti-war movement” in the capitalist world, although their weapons were only slogans and placards. The Western 1960s were painted with the color of “revolution” by this cultural movement, yet dramatically met their political and cultural end in 1970. The real bullets of the National Guard on the campus of Kent State University in the United States instantly punctured the bubble of this “revolution,” and the radical left-wing cultural movement receded at an astonishing speed. Entering the 1970s, Western capitalist countries not only underwent profound reforms economically and politically, but neoliberalism also rose strongly in the cultural sphere. The social influence of Western Marxism and left-wing thought plummeted. Not only was revolutionary movement no longer possible, but even cultural movements could no longer be initiated. They could only persist, in various refined theoretical constructions, in a critical posture that had no destructive power against the actual order of capitalism.

所谓的“西方马克思主义”正诞生于这场世纪转折之中。以卢卡奇、科尔施和葛兰西为代表的早期西方马克思主义者置身欧洲革命时代的尾声，理论依然具有欧洲革命实践的政治基础，本质上是革命的政治理论。而当以法兰克福学派为代表的经典西方马克思主义者登上思想史舞台时，两大阵营对峙的新世界历史版图业已确立，西方政治革命的时代彻底终结。因革命的现实主体与历史可能的双重消逝，西方马克思主义的“革命性”被迫从政治性的转变为文化性的，从社会现实领域转移到主观观念领域。革命的召唤者与主体，从革命家与工人阶级变成了校园中的教授与他们的青年学生拥趸。这种自诩为“革命”的文化批判在20世纪60年代迎来高潮：青年学生以激进的反抗姿态在资本主义世界掀起“五月风暴”和“反战运动”，虽然他们的武器仅是口号和标语。西方的20世纪60年代被这场文化运动涂抹上“革命”的色彩，却戏剧性地在1970年迎来了政治和文化意义上的终结。美国肯特州立大学校园里国民警卫军真实的子弹，瞬间刺破了这场“革命”的泡沫，激进的左翼文化运动以惊人的速度退潮。进入20世纪70年代西方资本主义国家不但在经济和政治上迎来深刻改革，新自由主义也在文化领域强势崛起，西方马克思主义和左翼思潮的社会影响力骤降，不但革命运动不再可能，连文化运动都已无力发起，只能在各种精致的理论建构中，孤独地坚持着对资本主义现实秩序毫无破坏力的批判姿态。

During this period, the connection between many Western left-wing critical theories and Marxism in the intellectual-historical lineage had become very thin. To what extent they still maintained theoretical consistency is questionable. From the perspective of the “Cold War” world pattern, it was the confrontation between the Eastern socialist camp and the Western capitalist camp that provided historical space and political gaps for the critique and resistance of Western Marxism. With the drastic changes in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the world-historical map of the 20th century underwent another great transformation. With the disappearance of the substantive external confrontation between the two camps of socialism and capitalism, many Western left-wing conceptual critiques even lost their basic theoretical seriousness and political sincerity. Critique became bubbles of constantly renewed rhetoric, resistance became a game, and posture became performance.

而这一时期许多西方左翼批判理论与马克思主义在思想史脉络上的联系已非常稀薄，在多大程度上还具有理论一致性，值得怀疑。从“冷战”的世界格局看，是东方社会主义阵营与西方资本主义阵营的对峙，为西方马克思主义的批判与反抗提供了历史空间和政治缝隙。伴随东欧剧变、苏联解体，20世纪的世界历史版图再次发生巨变。伴随社会主义与资本主义两大阵营实体性的外在对抗的消失，很多西方左翼的观念性批判甚至丧失了起码的理论严肃和政治真诚，批判变成语词不断翻新的泡沫，反抗变成游戏，姿态变成表演。

Chinese scholars’ tracking research on Western Marxism began after reform and opening up, but the rapid rise in theoretical interest in Western Marxism in the 1990s also had the background of the end of the “Cold War.” The salvo of Russia’s “October Revolution” brought Marxism to China. It was through the integration of Marxism-Leninism with China’s revolutionary practice that we found the correct path for adapting Marxism to the Chinese context, achieved revolutionary victory, and established New China. The dramatic collapse of Soviet-style Marxism meant that Chinese-path Marxism needed to reconfirm its own historical position within a new world-historical map. In this process, Western Marxism, as a dual possibility of new intellectual resources and new dimensions of justification, attracted the theoretical attention of Chinese scholars, but its theoretical significance may also have been magnified and misrecognized due to special historical circumstances. The fundamental reason why China did not follow the “drastic changes in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union” in experiencing a socialist subversion is that reform and opening up explored the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

中国学者对西方马克思主义的跟踪研究自改革开放后就已开始，但西方马克思主义在20世纪90年代理论热度的迅速升温，也有“冷战”结束的时代背景。俄国“十月革命”的一声炮响为中国送来了马克思主义，我们是在马克思列宁主义与中国革命实践的结合中找到马克思主义中国化的正确道路，取得革命胜利，建立了新中国。苏联式马克思主义的轰然倒下，使中国化马克思主义需要在新的世界历史版图中重新确认自身的历史方位。在这个过程中，西方马克思主义作为新思想资源和新辩护维度的双重可能性受到中国学者的理论关注，但它的理论意义也可能因特殊的历史境遇而被放大和误认。中国之所以没有跟随“苏东剧变”发生社会主义颠覆，根本原因是改革开放探索出了中国特色社会主义道路。

Reform and opening up historically transformed China’s social reality, which is fundamentally different from Western Marxism’s practice of critique confined to the realm of ideas. Some scholars have argued that it is the study of Western Marxism that “prompted people to break free from dogmatic and rigid understandings of Marx, providing a powerful intellectual weapon for the Chinese people to achieve ideological emancipation.” This undoubtedly creates a logical inversion: our theoretical starting point is the reform practice of socialism with Chinese characteristics; Western Marxism entered our theoretical field of vision as a result of this practice, not as its starting point. By tracking and studying Western Marxism and grasping the changes in contemporary capitalism and the world economy and politics, we manifest the zeitgeist consciousness and world-historical perspective of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Ultimately, this is done to better develop socialism with Chinese characteristics. In recent years, some Chinese scholars in their study of Western Marxism have gradually blurred this theoretical orientation. They have failed to grasp theoretical trends based on China’s reality, lacked necessary theoretical judgment, and taken delight in following the ever-iterating contemporary Western left-wing theories, even treating some flashy verbal froth as epochal classics and conducting meticulous textual research on them. Even setting aside this extreme phenomenon, we should note that Western Marxism takes highly modernized capitalist society as its object of critique, whereas the main historical task of contemporary China is to realize socialist modernization. Exposing the ills of highly developed capitalist modernized society has good foresight and reference significance for China’s socialist modernization, but there is after all a historical dislocation of epochal issues and an essential difference in theoretical themes between the two. If our research detaches itself from China’s social reality and the themes of the times, these simply transplanted Western Marxist critical theories will become rootless duckweed in the purely subjective realm.

改革开放历史性地改变了中国的社会现实，这与西方马克思主义仅在观念领域展开批判实践有着本质区别。有学者提出是西方马克思主义研究“促使人们从对马克思教条、僵化的理解中摆脱出来，为中国人民实现思想解放提供了强大的思想武器”。这无疑制造了一种逻辑的倒错，我们的理论起点是中国特色社会主义的改革实践，西方马克思主义进入我们的理论视野，是这一实践的结果，而非起点。通过跟踪研究西方马克思主义，把握当代资本主义和世界经济政治的变化，体现的是中国特色社会主义的时代精神意识和世界历史眼光，归根结底，是为了更好地发展中国特色社会主义。近些年来，我国部分学者的西方马克思主义研究，逐渐模糊了这个理论定位，没有立足中国现实把握理论动向，缺乏必要的理论判断，乐此不疲地追随不断迭代的当代西方左翼理论翩翩起舞，甚至将一些花样翻新的语词泡沫当作时代经典，事无巨细地考据研究。即便排除这种极端现象，我们也应注意，西方马克思主义以高度现代化的资本主义社会为批判对象，而当代中国的主要历史任务是要实现社会主义现代化。揭示高度发达的资本主义现代化社会的弊病，对我国社会主义现代化建设有着很好的预见和借鉴意义，但两者毕竟存在时代问题的历史错位和理论主题的本质差异。如果我们的研究脱离中国社会现实和时代主题，这些简单移植来的西方马克思主义批判理论，就会成为纯粹主观性领域的无根浮萍。

Theoretical reflection on the study of Western Marxism is intended to advance China’s Western Marxist research in the New Era along the correct academic direction. Our study of Western Marxism must take China’s social reality and the themes of the times as its theoretical starting point, manifesting the zeitgeist consciousness and world-historical perspective of socialism with Chinese characteristics. The world is currently undergoing changes unseen in a century; the COVID-19 pandemic that raged across the globe not only accelerated the uncertain evolution of these changes but may also become a new watershed in world history. Interacting and surging together with the century-old transformation is China’s development entering a critical historical intersection. Faced with the turbulent “chaos that dazzles the eyes like a riot of spring flowers,”[4] our thought must be able to grasp the true spirit of the times amid the complex changes. General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out: “This is an era that needs theory and

对西方马克思主义研究的理论反思，是为了推动我国西方马克思主义研究在新时代沿着正确的学术方向不断前进。我们的西方马克思主义研究要以中国的社会现实和时代主题为理论出发点，展现中国特色社会主义的时代精神意识和世界历史眼光。当前世界正经历着百年未有之大变局，一场肆虐全球的新冠肺炎疫情不但加速了大变局的不确定性演化，更可能成为世界历史新的分水岭。与世纪变局交互激荡的，是中国的发展进入关键历史交汇期。面对“乱花渐欲迷人眼”的风云激荡，我们的思想要能在纷繁变局中把握真正的时代精神。习近平总书记指出：“这是一个需要理论而且一定能够产生理论的时代，这是一个需要思想而且一定能够产生思想的时代。”站在世界与中国的双重分水岭上，包括西方马克思主义研究在内的当代中国马克思主义理论工作者，要以当代中国马克思主义、21世纪马克思主义对时代与现实做出自己的判断与回应。

Online editor: Paul

网络编辑：保罗