Marxist Humanism

DEFINING MARXIST Humanism is more than a linguistic task. It is a highly politicized task with important political implications. Marxist Humanism does not represent a single school of thought within Marxist scholarship nor does it enjoy a historical lineage that is either obvious or linear. A variety of philosophers have employed the term Marxist Humanism, or Socialist Humanism, to delineate a type of engagement with Marxist philosophy and post-Marxist theorists. These scholars have been as wide-ranging as Leszek Kolakowski, to Eric Fromm, Raya Dunayevskaya, the Yugoslav Praxis Group, and Chinese philosopher Wang Ruoshui—to name just a few.

The emergence of Marxist Humanism most directly corresponds to the appearance of a reinvigorated left in the 1960s across Western and Eastern Europe and North America. It does, however, ...