Marxist humanism was the attempt, made by philosophers on three continents during the middle decades of the twentieth century, to rebuild Marxism around a single recovered insight: that Marx’s critique of capitalism began as a critique of what capitalist relations do to human beings, and that the categories of alienation, self activity and species life were not youthful decorations on an otherwise economic theory but the standard by which the whole critique measured its object. The humanists held that a worker estranged from the product of labour, from the act of production, from fellow producers and from the distinctively human capacity for free and conscious activity was not merely underpaid or politically excluded. Such a worker was diminished in a way that wages alone could not describe, and a socialism that reproduced that diminishment under new management had failed by the only criterion that finally mattered.

That claim sounds gentle, almost obvious, until its setting is restored. Marxist humanism was not born in a seminar room, and it was not a plea for kindness inside an otherwise intact doctrine. It formed at the moment when the official Marxism of the communist states faced its gravest internal crisis, when the secret speech of 1956 and the uprisings that followed it forced communists and ex communists alike to ask how a movement speaking the language of emancipation had produced bureaucratic command, police surveillance and the suppression of workers by states claiming to rule in their name. The humanists answered that the failure was not accidental. A Marxism reduced to laws of history, stages of development and the administration of production had lost the critical core of Marx’s own thought, and recovering that core meant returning to writings that official doctrine had treated as immature, marginal or best forgotten. Their opponents, most formidably Louis Althusser, answered that the supposed recovery was itself the error: that Marx had become a scientist precisely by abandoning humanist philosophy, and that a Marxism rebuilt on human essence would explain nothing and console much.

What is Marxist humanism?

Marxist humanism is a tradition reading Marx through the early writings, treating alienation and human self-realisation as the core of his critique. It emerged after 1956 as a basis for criticising bureaucratic state socialism from within Marxism, and was opposed by structuralist Marxists as unscientific. Its adherents insisted that emancipation meant restored human self activity, not just changed ownership.

A school of thought is best introduced by the problem it formed to solve, and the problem here was double. Intellectually, the humanists confronted a Marxism that had hardened into a doctrine of inevitable progress, in which history moved through fixed stages, the party administered the transition, and the actual experience of workers under both capitalism and state socialism dropped out of the analysis. Politically, they confronted regimes that justified censorship, forced collectivisation and the crushing of strikes by pointing to that same doctrine. The humanist move was to find, inside Marx’s own texts, a standpoint from which both problems could be criticised at once. If alienation was the centre of the critique, then a factory regime that treated workers as instruments was condemned by Marxist criteria whether its shares were held by private owners or by a ministry. Ownership had changed hands in the socialist states. The humanists wanted to know whether domination had changed with it, and they believed the early Marx gave them the vocabulary to ask.

Geography matters to the definition as much as doctrine does. Accounts that present Marxist humanism as a Parisian fashion or a footnote to existentialism miss its institutional centre of gravity. The tradition’s most organised expression was the Praxis School of Yugoslavia, where philosophers in Zagreb and Belgrade built a journal, an international summer school and a network of correspondents that made their country, for roughly a decade, the freest meeting ground in the Marxist world. Its most famous populariser was Erich Fromm, whose edition driven recovery of the early Marx reached readers far beyond any university. Its most explicit organisational claimant was Raya Dunayevskaya, who built an American tendency that used Marxist Humanism as its very name. Its philosophical heavyweights included Henri Lefebvre in France, Herbert Marcuse in exile and then in the United States, Jean Paul Sartre in uneasy alliance, and a generation of East European revisionists in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia for whom the doctrine was never an academic taste but a wager made under police attention. Any definition that cannot hold all of those figures together is too narrow, and any history that omits Yugoslavia has misplaced the capital of the movement.

The founding text and the long delay

Every tradition has a founding document, and for Marxist humanism the document arrived eighty eight years late. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts were written in Paris in 1844 by a Marx in his twenties, working through political economy with Hegel’s Phenomenology open beside the texts of Smith and Ricardo. The notebooks were not published in his lifetime, not prepared for publication by him, and not known to the movement that formed around his later work. They appeared in print only in 1932, in two German editions that between them made the estranged labour analysis available to readers who had previously known the young Marx mainly through the more combative texts of 1843 and 1844 that had reached print earlier. Readers who want the manuscripts themselves, their structure, their three surviving notebooks and the editorial questions surrounding them should work through the economic and philosophic manuscripts guide, which owns the close reading of the text; the argument here concerns what happened once that text became available.

What the manuscripts contained, for readers encountering them in 1932 and after, was a Marx that the established movement had not prepared them for. The estranged labour section set out four related separations: the worker is estranged from the product, which confronts labour as an alien object and a hostile power; from the activity of production, experienced as forced exertion rather than self expression; from species life, the free and universal character that distinguishes human production from the one sided production of animals; and from other human beings, since a world organised by estrangement sets each producer against the rest. Around that analysis the manuscripts built a positive counter image. Human beings make their life activity itself an object of will and consciousness. They produce universally, even when free from physical need, and they form objects in accordance with the laws of beauty. Communism, in the manuscript’s boldest formulation, appears as the resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man, the genuine appropriation of human essence rather than its mere legal redistribution. Whatever else later Marxism became, it rarely spoke in that register, and the contrast is the seed of everything the humanists would claim.

Publication, however, is not the same as reception, and the delay between 1932 and the humanist turn is the first fact any honest history must explain. The manuscripts were available for twenty four years before the tradition formed around them. Herbert Marcuse greeted them almost immediately, publishing a long essay in 1932 that treated the manuscripts as a foundation for rethinking the whole Marxist project, and then watched the moment pass. The reasons for the long dormancy are not mysterious. The nineteen thirties and forties offered Marxists more urgent concerns than philosophical anthropology: fascism, war, the consolidation of Stalin’s rule, and a Comintern orthodoxy that had settled the question of the young Marx by declaring the mature work a repudiation of it. Within the Soviet codification, the manuscripts could be acknowledged as a stage on the road to scientific socialism and then respectfully shelved. In the West, the readers most inclined toward the early writings were often outside the communist parties, in the worlds of existentialism and independent scholarship, where Marx was studied rather than obeyed. A text can be printed and still be homeless. The manuscripts waited for a political situation that would make their questions urgent to people inside the Marxist movement itself.

One precursor deserves separate notice because the humanists claimed him and he spent decades qualifying the claim. Georg Lukacs had published History and Class Consciousness in 1923, before the manuscripts were available, and had arrived by a parallel route at a strikingly similar centre of gravity. His category of reification described a world in which relations between people take on the character of things and acquire a phantom objectivity that confronts them as an alien law. His account of class consciousness made the proletariat the potential subject of history rather than its object, the class whose self knowledge could dissolve the reified world. When the manuscripts appeared, Lukacs recognised his own early themes anticipated in them, since he had reconstructed a humanist Marx from the later texts and from Hegel without access to the Paris notebooks. Yet the book had been condemned by the Comintern, its author had performed self criticism, and Lukacs lived most of his later life negotiating the distance between his philosophical convictions and the discipline of a party he would not finally abandon. The humanists of the nineteen fifties inherited both his insights and his caution, and the tension between the two runs through the whole tradition.

Why did the early writings wait so long for their readers?

The manuscripts slept because availability is not urgency. Published in 1932, they entered a movement preoccupied by fascism, war and enforced orthodoxy, in which the early writings counted as a stage Marx had surpassed. Only when crisis inside communism made the question of bureaucratic domination unavoidable did readers inside the movement need a Marx who could judge existing socialism itself.

The delay also had a philosophical dimension that the humanists themselves emphasised. Between the wars, the dominant alternatives in European philosophy were not hospitable to the manuscripts’ hybrid of political economy and Hegelian anthropology. Positivists found the vocabulary of essence unscientific. Orthodox dialectical materialism found it idealist. Existentialists, who might have claimed the analysis of estrangement as kin, often preferred their own founding figures and treated Marx as an economist with an unfortunate determinism. The manuscripts therefore fell between the available shelves. Their eventual readers were formed by the collapse of that shelving system: philosophers who had lived through Stalinism, occupation, resistance and reconstruction, and who found the standard categories unable to name what they had lived through. The humanist turn was a reading event, certainly, but it was a reading event prepared by biography and by history rather than by bibliography alone.

The hinge moment

The claim that organises this article can now be stated plainly. The 1956 hinge holds that Marxist humanism is best understood as a response to a political crisis rather than as a phase in the internal development of philosophy, because the concepts it revived had been in print for twenty four years before they were taken up, and what changed in 1956 was not the evidence but the need. Historians of philosophy sometimes resist explanations of this kind, preferring to trace ideas to other ideas. Ideas do answer ideas, and the humanists read Hegel, Feuerbach and the young Marx with great care. But the timing refuses a purely internal explanation. A doctrine whose founding text waited a generation for its audience, and then acquired that audience across half a dozen countries within a few years, was answering something in the world. That something was the crisis of communism in the year of the secret speech.

In February 1956, at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a closed session report on the crimes of Stalin: the purges, the torture, the deportations, the cult of personality. The speech was an attempt at controlled disclosure by a leadership that wanted to blame a dead man in order to preserve a system. Its effects escaped control almost immediately. Copies circulated. In Poland, the death of the Stalinist leader Boleslaw Bierut and the Poznan workers’ rising of June 1956 opened a crisis that ended with Wladyslaw Gomulka returned to power in October on a wave of national and reform sentiment. In Hungary, the crisis went further. Reform communists around Imre Nagy, intellectuals organised in the Petofi Circle, students and then workers demanded and briefly achieved a government committed to leaving the Warsaw Pact and ending one party rule, before Soviet armour crushed the revolution in November and Nagy was later executed. Workers’ councils, formed in Budapest and the industrial towns during those weeks, became for many Western and Eastern Marxists the living image of an alternative: producers governing production directly, in the name of a socialism that the ruling parties had monopolised and betrayed.

The humanist turn drew its energy from precisely that gap between the councils and the parties. Across Eastern Europe, a generation of party philosophers began the work that would be called revisionism by its enemies: re reading Marx for resources against the doctrine in whose name they had been trained. Leszek Kolakowski in Poland wrote essays recovering the young Marx’s themes of responsibility and self creation. Adam Schaff, for a time the Polish party’s own philosopher, moved toward a Marxism centred on the individual and alienation understood as a phenomenon not abolished by nationalisation. In Hungary, the disciples of Lukacs who would form the Budapest School began their long attempt to build a theory of socialism with a human face. In Czechoslovakia, Karel Kosik composed the work published in 1963 as Dialectics of the Concrete, with its central category of praxis and its attack on the pseudo concrete world of manipulation and routine. Each of these projects had local causes and local enemies. What united them was the discovery that the early Marx armed a critique of bureaucratic socialism that could not be dismissed as bourgeois, because it was written in the founder’s own hand.

Yugoslavia supplied the tradition’s other precondition, earlier and more durable than the thaw. The break between Tito and Stalin in 1948 had expelled Yugoslavia from the Soviet bloc and forced its communists to justify a separate road. The justification they built, workers’ self management, introduced formally from 1950 as factories were handed in law to their work collectives, claimed to answer the very problem the humanists elsewhere were posing: how socialism could avoid reproducing alienation under state ownership. Yugoslav philosophers took the claim seriously as philosophy. If self management was the institutional negation of estranged labour, then Marxist theory needed the categories of alienation, praxis and human self activity at its centre rather than its margins. The Praxis group formed in that space. A country that had broken with Moscow, that permitted its philosophers a measure of international contact unusual in the bloc, and that grounded its legitimacy in an anti bureaucratic idea gave the humanist reading something it had nowhere else: a state sponsored opening, however conditional and however temporary, in which to build institutions.

In the West, the same years worked differently but toward related questions. The secret speech and Hungary split the Western communist parties, driving out a generation of intellectuals who carried their Marxism with them into independent journals and movements. In Britain, the exodus of 1956 produced the first New Left, the journals that merged into New Left Review, and the socialist humanism of E. P. Thompson, who had argued inside the party press for a Marxism answerable to moral experience before he left the party in the wake of Hungary. In France, the party’s orthodoxy pushed independent Marxists toward existential and phenomenological readings, a milieu Lefebvre had inhabited for decades and Sartre came to dominate. In the United States, the collapse of the old left organisations left small groups and journals to reconstruct Marxism from texts, which is the setting in which Dunayevskaya, breaking from Trotskyist organisations she had helped to build, elaborated her philosophy of Marxist Humanism through the nineteen fifties. The hinge swung at different speeds in different places. Its direction was the same: away from a Marxism identified with the Soviet state and toward a Marxism that could be used to judge that state.

What made the secret speech a philosophical event?

A party congress became a philosophical event because the speech broke the identification between Marxism and the Soviet state that orthodoxy required. Once the crimes were admitted by the leadership itself, communists needed a standpoint inside Marx from which the system could be judged, and the early writings, with their analysis of estrangement and domination, supplied exactly that standpoint.

Ernst Bloch belongs in this account as the hinge’s East German witness. Bloch had returned from exile to a chair at Leipzig and to the hope that a humanised socialism could be built in the new state. His great work on the principle of hope, with its recovery of utopia, anticipation and the not yet conscious as serious philosophical categories, gave humanist Marxism a metaphysics of the future to set beside its critique of the present. The Hungarian rising and its suppression ended Bloch’s East German career in effect: students of his were arrested, his teaching was curtailed, and when the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 he remained in the West and accepted a chair at Tubingen. The pattern of his biography, hope institutionalised and then disciplined, recurs across the tradition’s map with only the details changed. Humanist Marxism repeatedly found patrons, platforms and print inside the socialist world, and repeatedly discovered that the tolerance extended to it was a loan that could be called in.

What the humanists claimed

Stripped to its core, the humanist reading made four connected claims, and the tradition is misunderstood whenever any one of them is mistaken for the whole. The first claim was textual: the early writings are not juvenilia but the matrix of the mature work, and Capital should be read as the developed form of an inquiry that begins with estranged labour. The second claim was anthropological: Marx held a conception of human nature, expressed in the vocabulary of species being, free conscious activity and the rich human being with rich needs, against which existing societies could be measured and found mutilating. The third claim was critical and political: alienation does not disappear when the means of production are nationalised, because it is rooted in the separation of producers from control over their activity and its products, a separation that a bureaucratic state can reproduce as faithfully as a market. The fourth claim was methodological: praxis, the self transforming activity of human beings making their own history, is the centre of Marx’s method, so that any Marxism treating people as the bearers of impersonal laws has inverted its founder. The full treatment of the anthropology itself, its roots in Feuerbach and its transformation in Marx’s hands, belongs to the companion study of Marx’s species being, which owns that concept; what matters here is the use the tradition made of it.

Socialist humanism was the name under which the broadest version of these claims travelled, and the naming deserves attention. Fromm’s edited symposium of 1965, Socialist Humanism, gathered contributors from Yugoslavia, Poland, the Soviet Union’s margins, the West and the global South, and its very table of contents argued that the position was a world conversation rather than a sect. Fromm’s own framing insisted that Marx’s humanism was neither an anthropology of the past nor a sentiment but a protest against the crippling of human powers, directed equally against capitalist commodification and against a socialism of mere administration. The breadth was real, and so was the cost of breadth. A label capacious enough for Yugoslav praxis philosophers, French existentialists, British moralists of the labour movement and American former Trotskyists will conceal disagreements as reliably as it advertises agreement. The tradition’s internal arguments, taken up below, were not distractions from its identity. They were its identity, worked out in public.

Praxis deserves its own paragraph among the core claims because the Yugoslavs made it do the work that species being did elsewhere. In the usage of Gajo Petrovic and his colleagues, praxis named the distinctively human mode of being: free, creative, self transforming activity through which people produce both their world and themselves. The concept carried a built in standard. Activity that is imposed, fragmented, monitored and emptied of purpose fails as praxis, whatever its output, and institutions can therefore be graded by the scope they leave for self directed creation. That grading was the point. A philosophy of praxis could endorse workers’ self management not as a management technique but as the institutional form of the human essence, and could condemn both the capitalist factory and the Stalinist ministry from a single premise. Critics who found the vocabulary inflated had to concede its polemical architecture: it made the humanist critique of actually existing socialism systematic rather than episodic, a theory of the regime’s wrongness rather than a list of its abuses.

The humanists also made a characteristic claim about Marx’s development that structured their reading of everything else. Against the notion of a young philosopher replaced by a mature scientist, they proposed continuity with growth: the categories change their form, the vocabulary hardens, the economic analysis deepens beyond recognition, but the question persists. Alienation reappears inside Capital as the fetishism of commodities, where social relations between producers assume the fantastic form of relations between things. The realm of freedom in the third volume, where human development becomes an end in itself beyond the sphere of necessity, restates in economic prose the manuscripts’ image of rich human activity. Readers persuaded by that continuity read the corpus whole. Readers unpersuaded saw a retrospective projection, the early texts illuminated by a light they never cast. The periodisation dispute is large enough to have its own dedicated treatment in the comparison of the young Marx and the mature Marx, and it returns below as the hinge on which the Althusserian attack turns.

How did the humanists read the later Marx?

The humanists read the later Marx as the early Marx developed rather than replaced. Commodity fetishism continued the analysis of estrangement by other means, the realm of freedom restated the manuscripts’ image of rich self activity in economic terms, and the critique of political economy preserved the anthropological question inside a scientific form that concealed it from careless readers.

One further claim separated the serious humanists from the merely sentimental use of their vocabulary. The position was not that Marxism should care about people, a proposition no tendency in the movement has ever denied in words. It was that a specific philosophical anthropology did specific analytical work: it explained why domination could survive a change of ownership, it supplied the standard by which socialist institutions themselves were to be judged, and it identified the agent of transformation not as a party acting on society from above but as producers recovering control of their own activity. Where those three functions are absent, humanist language is decoration. Where they are present, the position has teeth, and the regimes that suppressed the Praxis philosophers understood the teeth better than many later commentators who filed the school under harmless moralising. The distinction between humanism as anthropology and humanism as mood is the one the tradition’s historians must keep sharpest, because conflating the two is the commonest error in the secondary literature and the one the audit of this article’s misreadings below takes up first.

A geography in three continents

How did the Praxis School organise its challenge?

The Praxis School organised its challenge institutionally rather than conspiratorially. A journal founded in Zagreb in 1964, an international edition in several languages, and a summer school on the island of Korcula from 1964 drew philosophers from both blocs into open argument, while the group defended self management against the party bureaucracy in print.

Yugoslavia first, because Yugoslavia was first in institutional weight. The Praxis group took its name from the journal Praxis, founded in 1964 under the editorship of philosophers including Gajo Petrovic and Danko Grlic in Zagreb, with a Belgrade circle around Mihailo Markovic, Svetozar Stojanovic and their colleagues, and Zagreb figures such as Predrag Vranicki and Rudi Supek. An international edition carried the argument abroad. Alongside the journal stood the Korcula Summer School, held on the Adriatic island of Korcula from 1964, which in its strong years drew several hundred participants, among them figures of the standing of Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Henri Lefebvre, Lucien Goldmann and Jurgen Habermas, together with East European revisionists who could meet Western colleagues on Yugoslav ground as nowhere else. Sessions ran through the nineteen sixties and into the nineteen seventies. For a Marxist philosopher in Budapest, Warsaw or Prague, Korcula was a window cut into a wall. For Western Marxists, it was proof that the argument about humanism and bureaucracy was being conducted by people who lived under the system they criticised, at a professional level the Western journals had to respect.

The content of the Praxis position can be stated without romance. The group held that Yugoslav self management was an unfinished and contested beginning, not an achieved model, and that its degeneration into technocratic and market forms reproduced alienation in new dress. They criticised the League of Communists’ monopoly of political life, the privileges of the bureaucratic stratum, nationalism among the republics, and the reduction of self management to workers administering decisions made elsewhere. Markovic developed a theory of meaningful work and of the conditions under which participation is real rather than ceremonial. Stojanovic pressed the analysis of the bureaucratic stratum and paid for his independence with periods of official disgrace. Petrovic gave the school its philosophical signature, an ontology of praxis built through a critical engagement with Heidegger as well as Marx. The school’s unity was methodological rather than doctrinal: begin from human self activity, judge institutions by their service to it, and refuse the alibi that history excuses their failures. That refusal, repeated in print for a decade, is what the regime finally decided it could not house.

The end came in stages that repay precise telling, because embellishment would weaken the evidence. Student protest in Belgrade in 1968, which the Praxis philosophers broadly sympathised with and which Tito first conciliated and then contained, raised the group’s political profile beyond comfort. Through the early nineteen seventies the Serbian party leadership pressed the University of Belgrade to remove eight dissident academics, the Belgrade Eight, from the Faculty of Philosophy. In January 1975 a law tailored to the purpose removed them from teaching. The journal Praxis ceased publication in 1975, its funding and premises withdrawn, and an attempted continuation abroad under the name Praxis International, based in Oxford from 1981, testified both to the network’s survival and to its loss of a home. The summer school had already ended after 1974. No Praxis philosopher was shot, and the comparison with the fates available elsewhere in the bloc should be kept honest. They were silenced as teachers and publishers inside a state whose founding ideology they had taken at its word. The tradition’s historians are entitled to the sober version of that sentence, and the sober version is damning enough.

France supplied the tradition’s most various personnel. Henri Lefebvre had been elaborating a humanist Marxism since the nineteen thirties, through a career that combined party membership, wartime resistance and an independence of mind that the French Communist Party tolerated until it did not: he was excluded from the party in 1958 after years of friction. His critique of everyday life, begun in 1947 and resumed across the postwar decades, extended the analysis of alienation from the factory into consumption, leisure, housing and the administered texture of ordinary days, arguing that capitalism survived by colonising the quotidian and that revolution therefore had to transform daily life or fail as decoration. The Parisian milieu also contained Lucien Goldmann, whose genetic structuralism mediated between Lukacs and the human sciences, and Kostas Axelos, whose meditations on Marx and technique carried the discussion into a speculative register. Roger Garaudy, for a period the French party’s leading philosopher, attempted an official humanism from inside, arguing for dialogue with Christians and for a reading of Marx centred on human initiative, until his expulsion from the party in 1970 closed that experiment. French Marxist humanism was thus never one doctrine. It was a field of forces in which party intellectuals, ex party intellectuals and anti party intellectuals argued over the same inheritance.

Sartre stood adjacent to the tradition rather than inside it, and the adjacency was productive for both sides. The lecture of 1946 that declared existentialism a humanism had already staked his claim to the vocabulary. His Search for a Method, published in 1957 and then as the prolegomenon to the Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960, attempted to graft existential categories of project, scarcity and the practico inert onto a Marxism he described as the untranscendable philosophy of the age. The humanists gained from Sartre a sophisticated account of how structures are lived, mediated and sometimes transformed by situated agents, together with a famous ally whose sympathy lent the position cultural weight far beyond the academy. The price was a standing quarrel. Althusser’s structuralists treated Sartre as the humanist error in its most gifted form, the philosophy of the subject dressed in Marxist vocabulary. Praxis philosophers, more concerned with institutions than with consciousness, found Sartre illuminating on mediation and thin on political economy. The humanist camp therefore contained its own internal version of the argument that would define it from outside, which is one reason the label describes a conversation rather than a creed.

The German contribution arrived largely through exile and return. Marcuse had written his foundational essay on the manuscripts in 1932, fled fascism, and rebuilt his career in the United States, where Reason and Revolution in 1941 introduced Hegelian Marxism to an English reading public and where his later work on advanced industrial society extended the humanist critique to the affluent capitalism of the postwar boom. His presence at Korcula and his correspondence with the Yugoslavs made him the living bridge between the tradition’s prehistory and its maturity. Fromm’s trajectory ran parallel and wider. A psychoanalyst formed in the Frankfurt milieu of the early Institute for Social Research, he emigrated, settled eventually in Mexico and the United States, and in Marx’s Concept of Man in 1961 gave the English speaking world its most accessible route into the early Marx, with translations of manuscript material and an interpretation that read Marx as a prophet of human self realisation against both capitalist acquisitiveness and Soviet productivism. The book sold in quantities no Praxis monograph approached. Scholarly humanists sometimes found Fromm’s Marx too therapeutic, his alienation too close to a general condition of modern unhappiness. The debt runs the other way as well: without Fromm, the humanist turn would have remained a specialists’ affair in at least one major language.

Britain’s strand grew from the labour movement rather than the university. E. P. Thompson, formed in the Communist Party’s historians’ group and broken with the party over Hungary, argued in the pages of the New Reasoner in 1957 for a socialist humanism that restored moral agency, lived experience and the English radical tradition to the centre of Marxist politics. His historical masterpiece of 1963 made the argument by demonstration, recovering the self activity of working people whom a structural history would have treated as raw material. Thompson’s humanism always carried a suspicion of systems, including humanist systems, and his later polemic against Althusser would be fought in that spirit. Around him stood figures such as John Saville, and a wider New Left culture in which the humanist vocabulary of needs, community and moral economy circulated through campaigns against nuclear weapons and through the early sociology of culture. The British case corrects any picture of the tradition as a philosophers’ club: here humanism was a fighting creed of historians, adult educators and activists, and its institutional bases were journals, the Workers’ Educational Association and the extra mural classroom as much as the university chair.

Across the Atlantic, the American tendency made the claim to the name most literally. Raya Dunayevskaya, a former secretary to Trotsky in Mexico and a founder of the Johnson Forest Tendency inside American Trotskyism, broke with her collaborators in 1955 and founded the News and Letters Committees around a philosophy she named Marxist Humanism. Her Marxism and Freedom of 1958, subtitled from 1776 until now, read the whole of Marx through the humanist lens and, controversially, treated the Hegelian dialectic as the philosophy’s living core rather than its discarded shell. She insisted, against tendencies she had left, that philosophy was not ornament but the difference between a movement that could recognise new forms of revolt, in factories, in the Black freedom struggle, in women’s liberation, and one that could only repeat its programme. The American organisation remained small. Its significance for this history is taxonomic and documentary: it preserved, in an unbroken organisational line, the version of the position that named itself, and its archive records how the humanist reading functioned as the charter of a political practice rather than a university specialism.

The Caribbean strand, intertwined with the American, ran through C. L. R. James. The Trinidadian historian of the Haitian revolution and of cricket, a Pan Africanist and a revolutionary organiser on three continents, had co led the Johnson Forest Tendency and shared its conviction that the self activity of ordinary people, workers occupying their factories, colonised peoples in revolt, was the substance of socialism rather than its beneficiary. His later work, including Facing Reality in 1958 with Grace Lee Boggs and Cornelius Castoriadis’s French collaborator Pierre Chaulieu in its intellectual orbit, took the Hungarian workers’ councils as vindication. James brought to the humanist conversation something its European philosophers sometimes lacked: an account of creativity and self organisation learned from anti colonial struggle and from the shop floor, and a prose style that made the philosophy read like history. Placing James beside Petrovic and Fromm is not eclecticism. It records the fact that the humanist turn happened wherever Marxists confronted the distance between emancipation promised and emancipation delivered, and that the confrontation was global before the scholarship admitted it.

Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia formed the tradition’s eastern front line, where the stakes of the argument were measured in careers and liberty rather than citations. In Hungary the Budapest School gathered around the ageing Lukacs: Agnes Heller, Ferenc Feher, Gyorgy Markus and Mihaly Vajda elaborated theories of needs, of everyday life and of the dictatorship over needs they diagnosed in the Soviet type societies, in which a planning bureaucracy decided what people required and called the decision socialism. Condemned in a party resolution of 1973, several were driven from academic posts; Heller and Feher eventually emigrated to Australia and then New York. In Poland, Kolakowski’s revisionist essays of the late nineteen fifties, with their insistence on responsibility, hope and the impossibility of a final reconciliation between the individual and history, made him the most dangerous philosopher in the bloc to its custodians, and his expulsion from the party in 1966 and dismissal from Warsaw University in 1968 marked the Polish thaw’s end. His later monumental history of Marxism, written in exile, judged the whole tradition, humanists included, with a severity his younger self would have resisted, which is itself a chapter of the humanist story: some of its makers concluded that the patient could not be saved. In Czechoslovakia, Kosik’s dialectics of the concrete gave the revisionist moment its most systematic philosophy, and the Prague Spring of 1968, in which reform communists promised socialism with a human face, gave the vocabulary a government’s programme for one season before Warsaw Pact tanks annulled it in August of that year. Kosik was expelled from academic life after the invasion and worked in obscurity for two decades. The eastern record establishes the point the 1956 hinge predicts: humanist Marxism flourished exactly where the crisis of the regime was sharpest, and was suppressed in proportion as it mattered.

The humanist map

The tradition is easier to hold in the mind as a geography than as a reading list. The humanist map below sets the principal figures and groups side by side, with the setting that formed each of them and the fate that overtook them, because in this case the fate is evidence: a doctrine’s institutional history tells a reader how seriously power took it.

Figure or group	Country and period	Central claim	Key work	Political context	What happened to them
Georg Lukacs	Hungary, 1923 and after	Reification deforms consciousness; the proletariat can become the subject of history	History and Class Consciousness (1923)	Postwar revolutionary defeats and Comintern discipline	Condemned by the Comintern, performed self criticism, lived under lasting suspicion
Erich Fromm	Germany, the United States and Mexico, 1941 to 1965	Marx is a humanist critic of alienation in both capitalism and bureaucratic socialism	Marx’s Concept of Man (1961)	Exile from fascism and the Cold War contest over Marx’s meaning	Reached a mass readership; kept his distance from parties and schools alike
Herbert Marcuse	Germany and the United States, 1932 to 1979	The manuscripts ground a critique of domination in affluent industrial society	Essay on the manuscripts (1932) and Reason and Revolution (1941)	Exile, then the American university and the protest movements	Became a reference point for the New Left while remaining an academic philosopher
Henri Lefebvre	France, 1947 to 1970s	Alienation colonises everyday life, so emancipation must transform the quotidian	Critique of Everyday Life (begun 1947)	French Communist Party orthodoxy and its discontents	Excluded from the party in 1958; taught and wrote outside its discipline
Jean Paul Sartre	France, 1946 to 1960s	Existential categories of project and praxis complete a Marxism of structures	Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960)	Efforts to reconcile the intellectual left with Marxism outside party control	Stood adjacent to the tradition, claimed by it and never enrolled in it
The Praxis School	Yugoslavia, 1964 to 1975	Praxis, free self transforming activity, is the standard by which institutions are judged	The journal Praxis and the Korcula Summer School	Self management Yugoslavia after the break with Stalin	Journal closed in 1975; the Belgrade Eight removed from teaching by a tailored law
Raya Dunayevskaya	United States, 1955 to 1987	Marx’s humanism and Hegel’s dialectic form one philosophy of liberation	Marxism and Freedom (1958)	Splits inside American Trotskyism and the freedom struggles of the postwar decades	Built a small durable organisation that kept the name Marxist Humanism in use
C. L. R. James	Trinidad, Britain and the United States, 1930s to 1980s	The self activity of workers and colonised peoples is socialism in action	Facing Reality (1958)	Anti colonial struggle and the Hungarian workers’ councils	Organised and wrote across three continents without an institutional base
The Budapest School	Hungary, 1960s to 1970s	Soviet type societies impose a dictatorship over needs	Works on needs and everyday life by Heller, Feher and Markus	Reform debate inside Kadar’s Hungary	Condemned in 1973; leading figures lost posts and later emigrated
Karel Kosik	Czechoslovakia, 1963 to 1989	Praxis and the concrete totality against the pseudo concrete of manipulation	Dialectics of the Concrete (1963)	The reform movement that culminated in the Prague Spring	Expelled from academic life after the 1968 invasion; worked in obscurity
E. P. Thompson	Britain, 1956 to 1978	Socialist humanism restores moral agency and experience to Marxist politics	The Poverty of Theory (1978)	The 1956 exodus from the Communist Party and the first New Left	Became the leading English language polemicist against Althusserian structuralism

Read as a single document, the table corrects the two laziest habits in the literature on this subject. One habit treats Marxist humanism as a mood of the Parisian nineteen sixties, which the Yugoslav, Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Caribbean and American rows refute by existing. The other habit treats the tradition as a purely textual affair, as if the positions could be weighed without the fates, which the final column refutes in every eastern row. A school whose members were dismissed, exiled, expelled and silenced across four countries was not engaged in a parlour dispute about the young Marx. It was contesting the legitimation of regimes, and the regimes replied in the currency they had.

The table also displays the tradition’s genuine sprawl, which any honest account must register as a weakness alongside a strength. The central claims in the third column are cousins, not twins. Reification, praxis, moral agency, self activity and the critique of needs share a family resemblance centred on human self determination, yet they imply different politics and different methods, and their authors disagreed with one another in print, sometimes sharply. Lukacs thought Fromm’s Marx softened into psychology. Praxis philosophers found Thompson’s moralism under theorised. Sartre’s existential Marxism struck the Yugoslavs as brilliant on mediation and negligent on institutions. The map therefore shows a field held together by a common enemy, bureaucratic and structural accounts of Marxism that wrote the subject out, and by a common textual loyalty to the early Marx, rather than by a shared system. That looseness made the tradition capacious and teachable. It also made it vulnerable to the charge, pressed by its strongest critic, that humanism named a sensibility in search of a theory.

Internal disagreements

The first internal quarrel concerned Hegel. For Dunayevskaya, the dialectic was the engine of the whole position: Marx’s humanism and his Hegelian method were inseparable, and she accused rival humanists of keeping the conclusions while discarding the logic that produced them. Fromm, by contrast, wrote as a humanist of the Enlightenment and of psychoanalysis as much as of Hegel, and his Marx speaks in the accents of prophetic ethics and the psychology of character. The Praxis philosophers occupied a third position, using praxis to mediate between the dialectic and the theory of institutions, and regarding both Fromm’s therapeutic idiom and Dunayevskaya’s Hegelian absolutism as one sided. These were not quibbles over emphasis. They decided what a humanist did next: organise a movement around a philosophy, address a reading public about the sickness of modern life, or build institutions in which self management could be studied and defended.

A second quarrel concerned psychology and the theory of needs. Fromm’s social character, the idea that a society moulds the psychic structure its members require, gave humanism an account of why people consent to their own alienation, an account the more Hegelian strands lacked. The Budapest School’s theory of needs took the problem in a political direction: who decides what people need, and by what right, became the question through which the whole Soviet type order could be indicted. Marcuse’s use of Freud, with its distinction between necessary repression and the surplus repression imposed by domination, supplied yet another mechanism. Against all such borrowings stood purists, including some within the camp, who suspected that importing psychoanalysis or a philosophical anthropology of needs diluted the political economy that made Marxism distinctive. The quarrel was never settled, and it left the tradition with a permanent ambiguity about its own foundations: philosophical anthropology, moral philosophy, or a method for reading history. Different heirs have chosen differently ever since.

A third quarrel concerned the party and the state, and it cut deepest because lives depended on it. Yugoslav humanists worked, for a decade, in the shelter of a state that found their philosophy useful against Moscow and tolerable at home, until it did not. Polish and Hungarian revisionists negotiated with parties that alternately patronised and purged them, and each figure had to decide how much loyalty the hope of reform from within justified. Lukacs chose, again and again, to remain, accepting humiliations that younger humanists found indefensible and defending the choice as the price of staying inside history rather than commenting on it. Western humanists faced the milder version of the same dilemma in reverse: freed from discipline, they risked irrelevance, and their journals and campaigns struggled to find a politics equal to their philosophy. Thompson’s answer was the movement, the campaign, the adult education class. Sartre’s was the fellow travelling engagement he could never stabilise. Dunayevskaya’s was the small organisation built to carry a philosophy through an indifferent age. The tradition never produced a shared answer to the question of its own political form, and that failure belongs in any assessment beside its intellectual achievements.

A fourth disagreement, quieter but consequential, concerned religion. The nineteen sixties saw sustained dialogues between Marxist humanists and Christian thinkers, in Czechoslovakia and Poland most intensely, where the churches were among the few institutions with an independent account of human dignity. Garaudy made dialogue a programme in France. Some believers in the humanist camp welcomed the encounter as proof that the anthropology was genuinely universal. Others, Althusser’s allies loudest among them but not they alone, treated the dialogue as evidence for the prosecution: a Marxism that could merge with Christian humanism had plainly ceased to be a science and become a worldview among worldviews, trading analysis for uplift. The humanists’ reply, that a theory indifferent to the language in which most people articulate suffering has disarmed itself, anticipates the wider argument about standards and critique to which this article returns. What the episode shows for the historian is that the boundary of the school was contested from the start, by friends as much as enemies, and that the elasticity critics mocked was partly the record of a real attempt to speak beyond the converted.

What the tradition fixed, and what it broke

Set against the Marxism it inherited, the humanist turn repaired three genuine defects. It restored the subject. The codified doctrine of the nineteen thirties had produced a philosophy in which history moved by laws analogous to those of nature, classes were positions in a mechanism, and consciousness lagged behind being with mechanical regularity. Against that picture the humanists reasserted, with texts in hand, that Marx’s history is made by people under inherited conditions, that needs and purposes are historical forces, and that a theory unable to describe experience from inside will misdescribe it from outside as well. It restored the critique of socialism’s own institutions. Before the humanists, the Marxist vocabulary for condemning a workers’ state that shot strikers was embarrassingly thin, confined to charges of betrayal or incorrect leadership. After them, alienation under nationalised property was a theorised possibility with a literature behind it, and every subsequent Marxist discussion of bureaucracy has used tools they forged. And it restored the early texts to the canon, permanently. Whatever the verdict on continuity, no serious reading of Marx after the humanist turn can pretend the manuscripts of 1844 are an embarrassment to be footnoted. That much of their victory survived their defeat.

The breakage was real too, and candour about it is the price of the defence offered later in this article. The humanists loosened the connection between Marxist philosophy and Marxist economics at exactly the moment when the economics needed defence. A generation formed on alienation and praxis often had little to say about value theory, the falling rate of profit or the transformation problem, and ceded that ground to others. They replaced one one sidedness with a risk of its opposite: where orthodoxy had dissolved people into structures, an incautious humanism could dissolve structures into people, treating exploitation as a failure of recognition and history as a drama of consciousness. The tradition’s weaker texts do exactly that, and its critics quoted them fairly. It also spent its best energies on the critique of existing socialism while the capitalism of the postwar boom was mutating into forms, consumer credit, mass media, suburban administration of life, that only some of its members, Lefebvre and Marcuse pre eminently, had the tools to analyse. A balanced ledger must record that the school’s map of its enemy was clearer than its map of its own society’s future, and that its institutional defeats fell on a movement already arguing with itself about foundations it had not finished laying.

What did Sartre contribute that the school lacked?

Sartre contributed a machinery of mediation. His categories of project, scarcity and the practico inert explained how free activity congeals into structures that then constrain their makers, which let humanists describe institutions without abandoning agency. The Yugoslavs and others borrowed the machinery selectively, since his account of political economy and of the party remained thinner than theirs.

One more item belongs in the credit column, because it shaped how Marx is taught everywhere the tradition reached. The humanists made the history of Marxism itself a human story, a sequence of readings, exiles, journals, summer schools and police files, rather than a catechism of correct positions. Students who meet the tradition through the Praxis story or through Thompson’s polemics learn that doctrines have addresses and dates, that a journal can be a political act, and that the question of who may speak for Marx has been answered in practice by dismissals and closures as often as by arguments. That pedagogical legacy is easy to underrate because it has been absorbed into the common practice of intellectual history. It was not common practice in the Marxist movement of 1950, where the history of the doctrine was officially a history of its enemies’ errors. The humanists, who suffered from that official history, wrote a better one by living it in the open.

The Althusserian attack

The strongest criticism of Marxist humanism came from inside Marxism, and it came with a name, a method and a slogan. Louis Althusser, a philosopher at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and a member of the French Communist Party, argued through the essays collected in For Marx in 1965 and in the collective volume Reading Capital of the same year that the humanist reading rested on a fundamental error about Marx’s development. Between the young Marx and the mature Marx, he claimed, there lay an epistemological break, a term borrowed from Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy of science: around 1845, in the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology, Marx broke with the ideological problematic of human essence, alienation and the subject, and founded a science, historical materialism, whose concepts, mode of production, forces and relations of production, structural causality, had no need of a human nature at their centre. The early writings belonged to Marx’s prehistory. To build Marxism on them was to rebuild it on what Marx had discarded. The fullest account of the man and his system belongs to the intellectual biography of Louis Althusser; the task here is to state his case against the humanists as strongly as he made it, since a school article that weakens the opposition has failed its readers.

The positive doctrine behind the attack was theoretical anti-humanism, and it must be understood as a thesis about explanation rather than a confession of coldness. Althusser distinguished, carefully, between humanism as a practical ideology, which could motivate resistance to oppression and which he did not ask anyone to abandon in the street, and humanism as a theory, which he asked Marxists to abandon in the study. As theory, humanism explains social formations by reference to a human essence realised or frustrated in history. That explanatory form, he argued, is the signature of ideology, not of science. A science of history must explain forms of individuality themselves: why this epoch produces the possessive individual, that one the citizen, another the bearer of labour power who experiences himself as a free seller. In the structural account, individuals are supports, bearers of relations they did not choose, and the process of history is a process without a subject, driven by contradictions within and between structures rather than by the self unfolding of an essence. Where the humanist sees alienation, the structuralist sees a concept that presupposes what it should explain, an original wholeness from which humanity has fallen and to which it might return, a religious form wearing secular dress.

The textual evidence for the break was marshalled with great skill. Althusser pointed to Marx’s own polemics of 1845 against the true socialists and their cult of Man, to the sixth thesis on Feuerbach with its declaration that the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual but the ensemble of social relations, and to the long silence of the mature work on the vocabulary of estrangement, which survives in Capital mainly as commodity fetishism, a concept whose logic, he argued, is structural rather than anthropological. He pointed, too, to Marx’s explicit mockery of moralising criticism and to the absence, in the economic works, of any appeal to a human nature violated by capital. The later Marx, on this reading, criticised capitalism not because it frustrated an essence but because its contradictions generated crises, immiseration in relative forms, and the material conditions of its own supersession. To the humanist claim that the standard of critique must come from somewhere, the Althusserian replied that the standard is immanent in a different way: a mode of production is judged by the gap between its possibilities and its actuality, between what its forces of production make feasible and what its relations fetter, a judgement requiring no anthropology beyond the history itself.

The political consequence drawn from the doctrine was as sharp as the doctrine. Humanist Marxism, in the years after 1956, had become in Althusser’s analysis the ideology of a retreat: the revisionism of parties seeking respectability, the moral protest of intellectuals unwilling to analyse the structures that produced Stalinism, and, most pointedly, the official humanism with which the Soviet leadership itself had begun to decorate its rule after the secret speech, proclaiming that everything was being done for the sake of man while changing nothing in the relations that subordinated actual men and women. A slogan that the regime and its critics could share, Althusser implied, was a slogan that had ceased to analyse anything. Moral condemnation of Stalinism, however justified as sentiment, explained neither its emergence nor its reproduction; only a science of the Soviet social formation could do that, and humanism was an obstacle to building one. The attack therefore presented itself as the truly political position and the humanists as the true quietists, a reversal of the obvious appearances that gave the polemic its sting and much of its success with younger militants who wanted rigour rather than consolation.

What did Althusser mean by an epistemological break?

Althusser meant a discontinuity in the questions a thinker can ask, borrowed from Bachelard’s account of scientific revolutions. Around 1845, on his account, Marx abandoned the problematic of human essence and alienation for the concepts of a science of history, so the early writings belong to a different intellectual world from Capital and cannot govern its interpretation.

Justice to the attack requires registering how much of the Marxist landscape it reorganised in its favour. The break thesis gave readers a principled way to handle real differences between the texts of 1844 and those of 1867, differences the humanists sometimes minimised with embarrassment. The concept of ideology as a material practice, lodged in institutions and rituals rather than in false ideas alone, outlasted the school that coined it and passed into the common stock of social theory. The insistence that capitalism be analysed as a structure of positions, and not as the sum of capitalists’ intentions, corrected a genuine vulgarity in agitational Marxism and, at its best, in humanist Marxism too, where exploitation could slide toward a story of wicked owners and suffering workers. And the demand that Marxists explain Stalinism structurally rather than merely denounce it morally remains a standing challenge that no verdict in the humanists’ favour should be allowed to dissolve. The school article that treats Althusser as a villain of the piece has learned nothing from the episode. He was the tradition’s most useful enemy, because he forced its defenders to say exactly what their anthropology explained that a structural account could not.

The direct comparison between the two camps, their shared texts, their divergent methods and the debates through which they defined each other, is developed in the dedicated study of humanist and structuralist Marxism, which owns that head to head treatment. The wider current within which both camps fought, the heterodox Marxisms of the European twentieth century that ran from Lukacs through the Frankfurt School to the structuralists themselves, is mapped in the western Marxism complete guide. Readers who place Marxist humanism inside that larger map will see it more accurately: not as the natural heir of the whole heterodox tradition, but as the branch of it that staked everything on the subject at precisely the moment when the most formidable rival branch staked everything on structure.

The humanist replies

The replies came at several levels, and they are strongest when kept distinct. The textual reply disputed the break’s location and its absoluteness. Defenders of continuity pointed to the persistence of the estrangement problematic inside the Grundrisse, the vast preparatory manuscripts of 1857 and 1858 that Althusser’s periodisation had to treat awkwardly, since they postdate the supposed break by more than a decade and yet speak the language of alienation, of labour’s conditions confronting the worker as alien property, with an intensity rivalling 1844. They pointed to the fetishism section of Capital itself, to the discussion of the working day with its moral rhetoric of robbery and vampires, and to the third volume’s realm of freedom, arguing that a science which had expelled the subject kept readmitting him through its most famous pages. Althusser’s later qualifications, his admission that the break was long and uneven and that traces of the old problematic persisted, were taken by the humanists as a retreat dressed as a refinement. On the narrow textual question, the honest summary is that the evidence supports development with real discontinuities of vocabulary and method, and that both the absolute break and the seamless continuity are constructions laid on a messier record.

The philosophical reply went to the standard of critique. If exploitation, domination and stunting are merely structural descriptions, the humanists asked, why should anyone act against them, and in the name of what? A science of formations can map a society’s contradictions, but contradiction is a relation between structures, not a reason for a person to risk a livelihood or a life. Marxism as a political project needs agents who experience their condition as intolerable, and intolerable by reference to something: to the capacities they might exercise, the life they might lead, the human powers that their society develops in general and denies them in particular. That reference is what the anthropology supplied, however unfashionable its vocabulary. Thompson put the point in his own idiom when he argued that moral experience is not an intrusion into historical knowledge but a form of it, that people learn what exploitation is partly by suffering it and naming the suffering, and that a Marxism ashamed of its moral vocabulary would lose the working class audience it claimed to serve and deserve to. The reply does not deny that normative language can degenerate into sermon. It denies that the alternative, a value free science of society in service of a party, is available, and it notes that the structuralist camp’s own politics quietly relied on the values it forbade in theory.

The historical reply attacked the break thesis as an alibi. Thompson’s great polemic of 1978, The Poverty of Theory, aimed at Althusser’s whole apparatus, its theoreticism, its contempt for evidence, its reproduction inside the academy of the very authoritarianism it claimed to oppose in politics: a system that could not be falsified by experience, policed by initiates, and wielded, in his account, as an orrery of errors. Behind the polemic stood a historical suspicion shared by many humanists: that the doctrine of the break functioned, whatever its author’s intentions, to quarantine the questions the early Marx raised about the Soviet type societies. If alienation was juvenilia and humanism ideology, then the bureaucratised state could not be indicted in Marx’s name for the estrangement of its producers, and the party that embodied the science need answer only to history’s laws as interpreted by itself. Althusser, who had his own quarrels with his party’s leadership and who intended his intervention partly as a blow against its reformist drift, would have rejected that account of his motives. The humanists answered that doctrines have careers independent of motives, and that the career of theoretical anti-humanism in the seminar rooms of the West was to license a generation’s indifference to the lived record of the states built in Marx’s name. Judged as polemic, the charge overshoots. Judged as a question, about who benefits when a critical concept is retired, it remains the sharpest the humanists ever asked.

The political reply, finally, was biographical and institutional, and it was the one the structuralists could answer least comfortably. The humanists could point to a record: journals closed, professors dismissed, philosophers exiled, a summer school extinguished, for a doctrine that its critic described as harmless moralising. Power had not found it harmless. The Althusserian school, by contrast, flourished inside the most prestigious institution of French higher education and within a party whose discipline Althusser criticised in theory while observing in practice, through the years when that party still defended much of the Soviet record. Thompson pressed the contrast without mercy, and it would be evasive to pretend it carries no weight. Ideas are not refuted by the biographies of their holders. They are, however, located by them, and a reader deciding between two Marxisms in 1975 was entitled to notice which one had been suppressed by the regimes both claimed to oppose, and which one had been granted a chair, a seminar and a party card. The humanists’ strongest implicit argument was always their archive of consequences.

How did Thompson answer the structuralist case?

Thompson answered with evidence, experience and contempt for systems that float free of both. The Poverty of Theory attacked Althusser’s apparatus as an unfalsifiable theoreticism that reproduced authoritarian habits inside scholarship, and defended moral judgement and historical agency as forms of knowledge that a Marxism of structures had no right to discard and no means of replacing.

A fair hearing must also record where the replies failed to land. The humanists never produced an agreed answer to the charge that species being was an essence doing explanatory work it could not perform, and their defences tended to substitute examples for theory: the undoubted presence of alienation language in the Grundrisse showed persistence, not validity. Their normative argument, powerful against a crude scientism, met a subtler Althusserian position that accepted values as ideology in the neutral sense, indispensable for practice and irrelevant for truth, and the two sides often argued past each other on that point for a decade. And the institutional argument, for all its force, cut less cleanly than its users admitted, since the Yugoslav state had first sheltered the Praxis School for its own reasons, and since courage under one regime is not a certificate of correctness in philosophy. The replies established that humanism could not be dismissed. They did not establish that its anthropology was true, and the most thoughtful humanists, Markovic among them, conceded as much by rebuilding the position as a critical theory of institutions rather than a doctrine of essence. That concession, made inside the tradition, is the bridge to the assessment that follows.

Misreadings that follow the tradition

Five misreadings recur so reliably that correcting them is part of explaining the school. The first treats Marxist humanism as the simple view that Marxism cares about people. Every Marxist tendency claims benevolence; the humanists claimed an anthropology, a theory of needs and capacities that did analytical work against two opponents, the market’s reduction of labour to a cost and the plan’s reduction of the producer to a quota. Strip the anthropology away and the position evaporates, which is why its defenders resisted the compliment that their doctrine was just decency with footnotes. The compliment and the insult were the same gesture in different tones: both avoided engaging the claim that a theory of human nature sat at the centre of Marx’s critique and that removing it changed what the critique could say.

The second misreading makes the tradition a Western European affair, a conversation among Parisian intellectuals with German footnotes. The map in this article exists to refute it. The tradition’s institutional centre was Yugoslav, its most exposed practitioners were East European, its most literal organisation was American, and one of its most original voices was Caribbean. The western academy discovered the debate through Althusser because Paris exported theory efficiently and because the Anglophone world read French philosophy more readily than Serbo Croatian journals. Reception history distorted the geography, and the distortion flatters the importers. A history that begins with Praxis, as any history organised by institutions must, tells a different and better story, in which Western humanism appears as one province of a movement whose capital lay on the Adriatic and whose frontiers ran through Warsaw, Budapest and Prague.

The third misreading holds that humanism was defeated by argument, that Althusser refuted it and the matter closed. Arguments mattered, and in the Western academy the structuralist victory of the late nineteen sixties was genuine. Yet the tradition’s eastern heartland was not refuted but administratively ended: journals defunded, chairs withdrawn, a school dissolved by law, philosophers exiled after party resolutions. In the West its displacement owed as much to fashion, to the prestige cycles of Parisian theory and then to the rise of analytical Marxism with its own impatience toward anthropology, as to any decisive counter argument. Analytical Marxism, gathering from 1978 around G. A. Cohen’s defence of historical materialism, subjected the humanists’ Hegelian idiom to a demand for clarity it rarely survived, while quietly inheriting their normative questions in a new form, since Cohen’s later work on equality and exploitation is unintelligible without the moral concerns the humanists had kept alive. Defeat, where it happened, was thus overdetermined and mixed, part argument, part police, part generational taste. Intellectual history that reports only the arguments is telling the cleanest third of the story.

The fourth misreading supposes that humanism and structuralism exhaust the options, so that a reader must enlist with one army or the other. The record shows hybrids everywhere: Goldmann’s genetic structuralism, Kosik’s dialectics of the concrete with its structural moments, the later Althusser’s own concessions, Thompson’s structural borrowings in his historical practice, and the Frankfurt School’s long refusal of the binary. The binary was a polemical device that served both camps, sharpening identities and selling books, and it survives in survey courses because it is teachable. The cost of the device is the disappearance of the mediating figures, who were often the most interesting, and of the questions both camps shared, above all how a theory of structures can leave room for the agents who alone can change them. Readers should treat the famous quarrel as the tradition’s loudest episode rather than its map.

The fifth misreading pronounces the tradition extinct. Its organisations largely are gone, its journals closed, its summer school a memory guarded by participants and historians. Yet its themes have migrated. Ecological Marxism, arguing that capitalism estranges human beings from the natural conditions of their own production, works a seam the manuscripts opened, and the metabolic language of the later Marx has been read back into the early anthropology to produce a green humanism its founders would partly recognise. Social reproduction theory, examining the unpaid and underpaid labour that sustains life itself, revived the humanist insistence that production be understood as the production of people and not only of things. Theorists of work, confronting algorithmic management and the measured minute, reach for alienation because no rival vocabulary names the experience as economically. Extinction is the wrong word for a position whose questions keep being reissued under new imprints. Dormancy and dispersal describe it better.

The strongest objection, and the verdict

The objection deserves one more statement at its maximum strength, because the verdict that follows is worth only what the objection costs it. A Marxism grounded in the self realisation of the human subject, Althusser argued, cannot produce a science of social formations. It explains structures by reference to an essence, the creative human being whose powers history alternately frustrates and fulfils, instead of explaining the forms of subjectivity themselves as effects of structures. The explanatory arrow points the wrong way, and every specific failure follows from that inversion. Alienation presupposes the unalienated essence it laments, which no evidence can exhibit. The history of modes of production becomes a theodicy, the long exile of Man from himself, with communism as the return, a structure of thought borrowed from the religion Marxism claimed to have surpassed. Politically, the doctrine issues in moral protest: it can denounce a factory regime or a bureaucratic state as inhuman, but it cannot analyse the mechanisms by which either reproduces itself, and protest without analysis is a sermon that power has learned to schedule and ignore. Worst of all, the vocabulary is available to anyone. A Soviet leader, a social democratic minister and a Yugoslav dissident could all sign the humanist manifesto, and a language that binds no one in particular obliges no one in particular. On those four counts, essence as explanation, theodicy as history, sermon as politics, slogan as programme, the case against the humanists was as strong as any internal critique Marxism produced in the century.

The humanist reply, at its best, accepts the force of the first count and contests the other three. Markovic and the Praxis philosophers, in their mature work, quietly rebuilt the anthropology as a theory of institutions and needs: the standard is not an eternal essence but the historically developed capacities of actual people, capacities that societies themselves create and then frustrate, so that the critique is immanent and historical rather than metaphysical. A worker’s demand for control over the labour process needs no doctrine of Man when the society has already taught the worker the skills that make control imaginable and then denied their use. On that reconstruction, the explanatory arrow is repaired: structures produce the capacities, the capacities judge the structures, and the circle is the dialectic the tradition always claimed to practise. Against the theodicy charge, the humanists reply that their history has no guaranteed return in it; the Praxis record, written under a regime that called itself the future, is a literature of defeats analysed rather than redeemed. Against the sermon charge, they point to the institutional specificity of their best work, self management law, university governance, the theory of needs in planning, and ask whether the structuralist alternative produced anything as concrete for the societies it analysed. Against the slogan charge, they concede the vocabulary’s availability and answer that the test of a language is the use made of it under pressure, and that their use was made at ascertainable cost.

The concession that honesty requires sits between those exchanges, and this article makes it without qualification. The humanist tradition produced less analytical work than its rivals. Althusser’s school generated concepts that reorganised several disciplines. Analytical Marxism generated arguments of a rigour the humanists never attempted. The Frankfurt School generated a research programme with empirical arms. The humanists generated, in the main, interpretations, defences, and critiques of institutions, work of real value that nonetheless left the theory of capitalism, its crisis tendencies, its value forms, its state, largely to others. A reader who asks which tendency left the larger analytical inheritance must answer against the humanists. A reader who asks which tendency kept the normative question open, the question of what socialism is for and by what standard its existing forms stand condemned, must answer for them. The verdict of this article is that Marxist humanism is best read as the tradition’s conscience and its institutional imagination, not as its science: indispensable as critique, insufficient as explanation, and misjudged whenever either half of that sentence is forgotten. Its defeat settled less than its victors announced, because the question it existed to ask has never been answered by any successor, only postponed.

Was the humanist turn a recovery or an invention?

The turn was a recovery with the creative licence all recoveries take. The texts were real, their neglect was real, and the categories were genuinely Marx’s own; the system built from them, with praxis and self management at its centre, was a twentieth century construction answering twentieth century defeats, and its makers, at their most candid, knew the difference.

Displacement and afterlife

The winding down of the tradition can be dated through its institutions rather than its ideas. Korcula held its last sessions in 1974. Praxis ceased in 1975, the year of the Belgrade dismissals. The Budapest School was broken as a group by the condemnations and emigrations of the nineteen seventies. Thompson’s polemic of 1978, magnificent and late, already has the character of a rearguard action, a defence of a position whose audience was dispersing into other projects: into the peace movement, into cultural studies, into the socialist feminism that would carry the analysis of experience forward with better tools, into the analytical school that would restate the normative questions in a colder idiom. In Eastern Europe the humanist cadres aged without successors, since a regime that had purged the teachers could be confident the syllabus would not reproduce them, and after 1989 the successor states had little use for any Marxism, humanist or otherwise, though individual figures, Heller most prominently, continued distinguished careers in the West as theorists of modernity and ethics. The tradition’s archive therefore has a peculiar shape: rich in journals, correspondence and summer school proceedings from two decades, thin thereafter, not because the arguments were finished but because the institutions that housed them were closed one by one and never replaced.

What survived institutionally was modest and real. Praxis International carried the network’s name into the nineteen eighties from Oxford. News and Letters carried Dunayevskaya’s organisation past her death in 1987 under successors she had trained. The collected editions and translations the humanists had championed, above all the early writings in reliable scholarly form, became permanent possessions of the field, so that even their opponents now teach Marx with the manuscripts on the syllabus. That curricular fact may be the tradition’s most durable victory. Generations of students who have never heard of Korcula meet the young Marx in their first term, argue about alienation before they meet the labour theory of value, and absorb, with the texts, the assumption the humanists fought to establish: that the critique of political economy is answerable to a vision of human flourishing, whether or not any particular reader finally endorses it. Victories of that kind do not appear in the minutes of party congresses. They appear in reading lists, which is where traditions actually live.

Keeping a tradition of this kind organised in a reader’s own notes is harder than summarising it, because the positions shift across decades and the same name can cover a party philosopher, a dissident and an exile at different dates. Readers building a study file on the school, with its figures dated, its journals tracked and its quarrels cross referenced, can save their notes and build a citation linked reading list free on VaultBook, which suits a subject where the difference between the Kolakowski of 1957 and the Kolakowski of exile is precisely what an essay will be marked on.

The afterlife in scholarship continues through channels the founders would find surprising. The publication of Marx’s manuscripts and notebooks in critical editions has repeatedly renewed the textual questions the humanists raised, each new tranche of material reopening the argument about continuity with fresh evidence. Historians of Yugoslavia have restored the Praxis episode to the centre of that country’s intellectual history, where it belongs, and the summer school has become a case study in how ideas travel across a divided continent: through translation, through personal networks maintained by letter, through the hospitality of a small state playing a large role between blocs. Theorists of self management and workplace democracy return to the Yugoslav experiment, and to its critics inside Praxis, whenever cooperative and participatory forms are debated, since the school produced the most searching internal account of why formally democratic production can decay into technocracy. A tradition can be dead as a movement and alive as a resource, and the distinction, obvious once stated, is routinely blurred by obituaries written at the moment of institutional defeat.

One further afterlife deserves record because it closes a circle opened in 1956. The workers’ councils of Budapest, which had served the humanists as evidence that producers could govern, reappeared in Gdansk in 1980 in another idiom, as the Interfactory Strike Committee and then Solidarity made demands for independent unions and workers’ self management inside a state that called itself a workers’ state. The Polish movement’s intellectual advisers included men formed in the revisionist debates, and its programme’s insistence on a self governing republic echoed, without copying, the humanist themes of self activity and dignity in labour. Solidarity’s fate, martial law in 1981 and negotiated triumph at the decade’s end, belongs to another history. Its presence here marks the reach of the humanist question beyond the seminar: whether people who work can also rule the conditions of their work remained, a quarter century after the secret speech, the most dangerous question in the socialist world, and the tradition that had kept the question articulate deserves part of the credit for its persistence.

Needs, institutions and the humanist imagination

The tradition’s most constructive work grew from a question its critics rarely asked: if alienation is the disease, what institutional arrangements count as the cure, and how would anyone know? The Yugoslav answer began from self management and then, in the Praxis critique, turned on its own beginning. Formal rights of workers’ councils, the school argued, could coexist with real power held by directors, banks, republican governments and the League, so that self management decayed into a legitimation device unless it was extended from the enterprise upward into planning, finance and political life, and downward into the actual organisation of work. That internal critique, developed by sociologists around the school such as Rudi Supek and by the Belgrade philosophers’ studies of participation, produced the concept of alienation’s second storey: estrangement reproduced not by private ownership but by the monopolisation of decision, information and expertise. The concept travelled well because it named something recognisable in many settings, the formally democratic institution whose members experience its outcomes as alien powers. Trade union bureaucracies, party machines, university administrations and platform cooperatives have all been analysed with tools first sharpened on Yugoslav councils, usually without acknowledgement of the source.

The Budapest School’s theory of needs supplied the complementary half of the institutional imagination. In the Soviet type economies, the school argued, the ruling stratum’s power rested less on ownership than on the disposition of needs: the centre decided which needs would be recognised, in what quantities, through which channels, and the population’s dependence on those decisions was the substance of the dictatorship over needs. Radical needs, by contrast, were those the existing order could not satisfy without ceasing to be itself, the need for meaningful work, for time, for association without permission, and their emergence in actual movements was the empirical trace of the anthropology at work in history. The framework did two things the cruder humanism could not. It explained consent, since a population dependent on the centre for housing, goods and advancement has reasons for obedience that no theory of false consciousness is needed to supply. And it gave reform a criterion: an institution is socialist in tendency insofar as it returns the disposition of needs to those who have them. Heller’s later work carried the argument into a general theory of everyday life and modernity after her emigration, which is how a doctrine forged in Budapest seminars entered the syllabus of universities on other continents.

Fromm’s version of the constructive question was characteristically different in scale. His socialist humanism proposed a programme of decentralisation, guaranteed subsistence, workers’ participation and cultural renewal, elaborated in the nineteen sixties for an American audience, and it is easy for specialists to smile at its manifesto form. The programme’s interest for the historian lies in its intended reader: not the party, which Fromm had never joined, and not the academy, which he had left, but the citizen of an affluent democracy who found both Cold War camps wanting. Humanism in that register was a public philosophy, competing with liberalism on liberalism’s own ground of the free and developed individual, and arguing that neither private accumulation nor state administration could secure the conditions of individuality. The Yugoslavs judged institutions from inside a socialist state, the Hungarians theorised the needs such a state suppresses, and Fromm addressed a republic of consumers. The family resemblance among the three projects, and their mutual incomprehension at the edges, is the tradition in miniature.

Marcuse supplied the missing analysis of the affluent West that the school’s critics demanded. His account of one dimensional society argued that advanced capitalism integrates its opposition by administering needs themselves, so that the very capacities the humanists relied on, imagination, refusal, the sense of alternatives, are eroded by comfort and by the fusion of culture with advertising. The great refusal, his name for the aesthetic and erotic energies that resist integration, is species being translated into the idiom of Freud and of the avant garde, and its vagueness as a political programme was conceded by its author with more honesty than his critics sometimes allowed. What Marcuse contributed to the common stock was the demonstration that alienation theory could be turned, without strain, on the society that congratulated itself for having solved the problem of production. Between Lefebvre’s colonised everyday and Marcuse’s administered needs, the western humanists built the critique of consumer capitalism that cultural studies and the movements of 1968 would inherit, often stripped of the Marxist anthropology that had generated it. Inheritance without acknowledgement is a recurring pattern in this tradition’s afterlife, and it complicates every attempt to measure the school’s influence by citations alone.

How the West received it

Reception in the Western academy followed a sequence that flattered neither side. In the first phase, running through the nineteen sixties, the humanist texts were the discovery: translations of the manuscripts multiplied, Fromm’s anthology carried the argument to paperback readers, and the Praxis philosophers appeared at conferences as emissaries from a socialism that argued with itself. In the second phase, Althusser’s intervention reorganised the syllabus, especially in France and Britain, where the vocabulary of breaks, problematics and structural causality gave a generation of students the exhilarating sense of possessing a science their teachers lacked. Humanism survived that phase in the history departments, in adult education, and in the New Left’s political memory, while losing the philosophy faculties. In the third phase, analytical Marxism and then post structuralism redrew the map again, and the humanists were filed as a period style, humane, Hegelian and superseded. Each phase mistook its own settlement for the end of the argument. The textual questions, as the Grundrisse debates showed, remained open underneath every settlement, and the political question, what standard judges a socialist institution, outlived every regime that claimed to have answered it.

The British debate of the early nineteen seventies shows the reception at its most concrete. John Lewis, a veteran communist philosopher, defended a humanist Marx in the party’s theoretical journal, and Althusser replied at length with a defence of theoretical anti-humanism that became one of his most read texts in English. The exchange mattered because it was conducted inside a workers’ party’s own press, before an audience of organisers rather than professors, and because it posed the question that the whole controversy finally reduces to: should a communist’s Marx be the philosopher of human liberation or the scientist of history, and what follows for the party’s claims on its members either way? Thompson’s intervention later in the decade widened the same quarrel into a general war over the soul of British Marxism, fought through the history journals and the New Left Review, whose editors had themselves travelled from the humanist New Left of their founders toward structuralist and then other positions. The journal’s trajectory across those decades is a compressed history of the Western reception entire: founded in the exodus of 1956, humanist in its first editors, structuralist in its most famous period, and eclectic thereafter, having hosted every side of the argument it once hoped to settle.

Translation decided more of the reception than argument did, and the point generalises beyond this school. The manuscripts circulated in English in versions of very different character, and Fromm’s selection and framing reached orders of magnitude more readers than the scholarly editions, so that the Anglophone young Marx was for years substantially Fromm’s Marx, lyrical, prophetic and psychologised. The Praxis philosophers wrote in languages few Western syllabuses taught, and their English presence depended on the international edition, on conference proceedings and on the advocacy of translators and editors, which is why the school’s reputation in English long lagged its standing among those who had sat in its seminars. Althusser, by contrast, was translated promptly and taught brilliantly. Ideas travel in the vehicles available to them, and a history of Marxist humanism that ignores its vehicles, the paperback, the summer school, the exile journal, the party monthly, will mistake the logistics of defeat for the verdict of reason.

Reading Marxist humanism: sources and disputes

A reader approaching the primary material faces an unusually instructive editorial landscape. The manuscripts of 1844 exist in versions shaped by editorial decisions about order, completeness and translation, and the humanist Marx is partly a function of those decisions, since the estranged labour material reads differently as a fragment among fragments than as the centrepiece of a finished anthropology. The scholarly editions produced under the Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe have progressively clarified the manuscript record, and each clarification has been claimed by both camps, continuity readers finding the young Marx better documented, break readers finding the distance between notebooks and system better marked. The memoirs and interviews of the participants, Thompson’s essays, the Praxis circle’s retrospective accounts, the Budapest exiles’ later reflections, constitute a second archive, vivid and self serving in the proportions usual for such sources. A third archive, the least used in Anglophone writing, is the institutional one: university records, party resolutions, the files of the journals themselves, from which the calendar of tolerance and suppression can be reconstructed without relying on anyone’s memory of motives. The tradition is an excellent training ground for source criticism precisely because its partisans wrote so much about it.

The standing scholarly disputes can be summarised as four. There is the textual dispute over continuity and break, rehearsed above and unlikely to close, since it turns on how a corpus with real internal movement should be periodised. There is the philosophical dispute over the status of the anthropology, whether species being names an essence, a historically developing set of capacities, or a regulative image, with the tradition’s own survivors increasingly choosing the second option. There is the historical dispute over weight: how much of the humanist turn is explained by 1956, how much by the longer thaw in European philosophy, how much by generational succession in the universities, a dispute on which this article has taken the political side while conceding the others their share. And there is the evaluative dispute over the tradition’s rank among the Marxisms, whether it is a major creative episode or a transitional sensibility between orthodoxy and the structural and analytical schools that displaced it. On that last question the institutional evidence assembled here, the journals, the school, the dismissals, the translations, is the strongest argument for the major reading, since transitional sensibilities do not usually require special laws to silence them.

The widest reach: the year of the barricades and the councils

The tradition’s ideas reached their largest audience not through its journals but through the movements of 1968, a year that tested the humanist vocabulary in the streets of three capitals and returned a mixed verdict. In Prague, the reform programme of the Czechoslovak party itself adopted the humanist slogan, socialism with a human face, and for eight months a communist government attempted the experiment the revisionist philosophers had theorised: censorship loosened, rehabilitation of the purged begun, federalisation promised, and a public sphere reopening under the protection of the state that had closed it. The experiment’s annulment by invasion in August demonstrated, in the cruellest available form, the humanist analysis of the system’s limits: a bureaucracy confronted by its own programme, sincerely adopted, chose the programme’s burial. Kosik and his colleagues passed from the reform’s intellectual staff to its casualty lists. No episode in the tradition’s history did more to persuade its survivors that the obstacle was structural rather than personal, which is an irony the structuralists were entitled to savour and generally too polite, or too implicated, to press.

In Belgrade in June of the same year, students occupied their university, renamed it in honour of the revolutionary tradition they claimed, and demanded action against inequality, unemployment and the red bourgeoisie of privileged officials. The Praxis philosophers stood close to the movement, and the episode placed the school in its most delicate position: sympathetic to a revolt whose slogans were its own, anxious about the regime’s response, and aware that its remaining tolerance hung on the distinction between philosophy and mobilisation. Tito’s televised concession, accepting much of the students’ programme in words, dissolved the occupation and stored the grievances for later use against the professors who had articulated them. The school’s defenders cite 1968 as proof that its ideas had a social base beyond the seminar. Its critics, including later Yugoslav liberals, cite the same episode as proof that the philosophers wanted influence without responsibility, the ear of power and the credit of opposition in a single career. Both readings have evidence. The episode’s historical weight lies in showing what the humanist position looked like when it briefly acquired a constituency: not a party, not a programme, but a language in which students could indict a socialist state for betraying socialism, which was precisely the function the vocabulary had been built to perform.

In Paris and across the Western protest movements, the humanist inheritance arrived in diluted and potent forms. The slogans of May 1968 in France, with their demands for imagination in power and their contempt for the administered life, descended in part through Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life and through the Situationist International, whose leading theorist had sat in Lefebvre’s seminars before their famous quarrel over originality. Marcuse, lecturing to packed halls of German and American students, became for one season the philosopher of a movement he had not organised and could not direct, his categories of refusal and liberation quoted by people who had never opened the manuscripts of 1844. The dilution was real: alienation in movement usage often meant little more than dissatisfaction with modern life, and the anthropology shrank to a mood of authenticity. Yet the transmission performed one service the academy had not. It carried the humanist question, whether the organisation of work and life mutilates the people who live it, out of the Marxist subculture and into the general culture of the postwar West, where it has remained available ever since to movements that have never heard the tradition’s name. Generational memory now credits 1968 to a dozen sources. The documentary record, in the reading lists of its militants and the citations of its theorists, gives the humanists a founder’s share.

The year’s other lesson ran against the tradition, and honesty requires it in the balance. In France the Communist Party and its union federation, commanding the allegiance of the industrial working class whose self activity the humanists celebrated, opposed the student revolt and negotiated its end, while the workers’ own brief occupation movement settled for wage settlements of historic size rather than for the transformation of work the philosophers prescribed. In Czechoslovakia the population’s heroic resistance to invasion took national rather than socialist forms within months. The humanist wager had always been that producers, freed to speak, would speak for self management and humanised socialism. The evidence of 1968 suggested a more complicated truth: producers freed to speak say many things, including things the philosophers had not scripted, and a tradition that grounds its hopes in the subject must accept the subject’s answers when they arrive. Thompson, whose whole method rested on respecting what historical agents actually made of their experience, absorbed that lesson most gracefully. The more systematic humanisms, which needed the proletariat to ratify a philosophy, found the year harder to digest, and the divergence foreshadowed the tradition’s later dispersal into history, ethics and cultural criticism, where the subject could be studied in its recalcitrance rather than summoned as a witness.

Neighbours and boundaries: the tradition among the Marxisms

Locating a school means drawing its boundaries against its nearest neighbours, and Marxist humanism had four neighbours with whom confusion is chronic. The Frankfurt School shared the Hegelian sources, the interest in alienation and the critique of administered society, and Marcuse belonged to both maps at once. The differences were institutional and temperamental. The Institute’s tradition, especially in Adorno and Horkheimer’s wartime work, doubted that the proletariat remained available as the subject of history and withdrew the critique into philosophy, aesthetics and the analysis of mass culture, guarded by a difficulty of style that functioned as a moat. The humanists, by contrast, kept a political address: a party to reform, a state to judge, a summer school to convene. Where the Frankfurt analysis darkened toward a total administration from which only art escaped, the Praxis analysis kept returning to institutions that might be rebuilt, and the Budapest theory of needs kept a reformer’s grip on the machinery of distribution. Cousins, then, with the same grandfather in Hegel and the young Marx, divided by whether history still offered a lever and by how much hope the evidence licensed.

Gramsci presents the second boundary problem, since he is claimed, with documentary justice, by every camp. The Prison Notebooks, published in Italy after the war in thematic editions, offered a Marxism of hegemony, consent and national popular culture that humanists read as a charter for their own concerns: history made by collective wills, philosophy as the critique of common sense, the intellectual as an organiser of experience. Althusserians read the same notebooks for their concepts of ideology and the state. Gramsci’s own relation to the young Marx is mediated by Croce and by the Italian tradition, and he cannot be enrolled in a school that formed two decades after his death. His presence in this history is as a resource both sides mined, and as proof that the questions the humanists pressed, agency, consent, culture, experience, were the common property of the heterodox Marxisms rather than the invention of any one. The humanists’ distinctive claim was never to those questions in general. It was to the anthropology that answered them with a doctrine of human capacities and their frustration, and the boundary of the school should be drawn there.

Trotskyism supplied the third boundary, a permeable one, since several humanists arrived through it and carried its habits with them. The Trotskyist tradition had its own critique of bureaucratic degeneration, older than the secret speech and armed with an analysis of the Soviet state as a degenerated workers’ state resting on nationalised property. Dunayevskaya and James emerged from that milieu and broke with its central consolation, the claim that nationalised property forms by themselves marked a progressive social order whatever the producers’ actual power. Their humanism can be read as the point at which the Trotskyist critique of bureaucracy consumed its own premise: if the standard is the producers’ self activity, then property forms are instruments to be judged, not achievements to be defended, and the difference between the camps follows. Other Trotskyist currents kept the property criterion and regarded the humanists as moralists who had lost the analysis. The quarrel, little known outside the sects that hosted it, matters to the wider history because it shows the humanist standard operating as a solvent inside every Marxist tradition it touched, dissolving certainties about which institutions counted as socialist by definition.

The fourth boundary separated the humanists from liberal and religious humanisms that shared their vocabulary and rejected their foundations. Liberal humanism locates dignity in the individual bearer of rights and views collective projects with suspicion; Christian humanism grounds dignity in creation and views secular self deification as the modern error. Marxist humanism shared sentences with both and meant something else by them: dignity as the free development of each through the self activity of all, grounded not in nature or in God but in the historical production of human capacities by human beings themselves. The dialogues of the nineteen sixties, in which Marxist and Christian philosophers discovered how much vocabulary they held in common, were genuine and fruitful, and they repeatedly reached the same bedrock difference over whether the human essence the Marxists invoked was a discovery about history or a borrowing from the theology they had renounced. Althusser’s gibe, that humanist Marxism was Christianity with the labels changed, exploited that bedrock deliberately. The humanist answer, that a species which makes itself through labour needs no external guarantor for its standards, remains the tradition’s most compressed philosophical statement, and its most contested.

Boundary drawing of this kind has a practical use for readers of the wider literature. Survey accounts habitually enlarge Marxist humanism until it includes every Marxist who wrote warmly about people, from Gramsci to the early Frankfurt School to sympathetic existentialists, at which point the term explains nothing and the school’s actual history, Yugoslav, revisionist, suppressed, disappears into a general glow. The narrower definition used in this article, a reading of Marx grounded in the early writings and in an anthropology of alienation and praxis, formed as a movement after 1956 and centred institutionally on the Praxis School, keeps the glow from replacing the record. Definitions in intellectual history are instruments rather than honours. This one is chosen because it lets the evidence be seen: the timing, the geography, the journals and the dismissals that a looser usage dissolves.

Inside the argument: the texts the humanists leaned on

A school’s reading habits reveal its real doctrine more reliably than its manifestos, and the humanists leaned on a small set of passages with the weight of the whole position resting on them. The fetishism section of the first chapter of Capital did the heaviest work. There Marx describes a world in which the social character of labour appears as an objective character stamped on the products themselves, so that relations between producers assume the fantastic form of relations between things. Humanist readers treated that analysis as estranged labour translated into the language of political economy: the same inversion, producers ruled by their own products, now demonstrated inside the commodity form rather than asserted from an anthropology. Structuralist readers replied that the passage’s logic is complete without the manuscripts, a theory of forms of appearance requiring no doctrine of essence. The passage bears both readings, which is why it became the controversy’s favourite battlefield, and why students meeting the dispute should begin there, with the actual page open, rather than with summaries of either camp. Arguments about Marx’s development are finally arguments about a finite set of such pages, and the tradition is best honoured by returning to them.

The Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx’s fierce marginal notes of 1875 on the draft programme of the German workers’ party, served the humanists in a different register. Its insistence that labour is not the source of all wealth, its attack on fair distribution as a slogan, and its vision of a higher phase in which labour has become life’s prime want and the springs of cooperative wealth flow abundantly were quoted by both sides with equal confidence: by humanists, for the vision of developed human powers as communism’s content; by their opponents, for the contempt toward moralising phrases and the reminder that distribution follows production. The text’s double serviceability is instructive. Marx’s late writings do contain a normative horizon, stated with unusual fullness exactly where he is scolding his own movement’s programme writers, and they contain it in a document that refuses to build a theory on it. Each camp generalised the half it needed. A balanced reading of the humanist controversy has to hold the document whole, horizon and refusal together, which is a fair emblem for the corpus the controversy was about.

The Theses on Feuerbach played the opposite role, as the structuralists’ favourite early text and the humanists’ favourite bridge. The sixth thesis, dissolving the human essence into the ensemble of social relations, was Althusser’s exhibit for the break’s beginning. The third thesis, insisting that the coincidence of changing circumstances and self change can be understood only as revolutionary practice, and the first, faulting materialism for grasping reality only as object and not as sensuous human activity, were the humanists’ exhibits for the praxis philosophy they claimed Marx never abandoned. That an eleven paragraph text of 1845 can supply both camps with charters is not an embarrassment for scholarship but a datum about the corpus: Marx’s development was a genuine movement, with real losses and real continuities, and the periodisation each side built was a rationalisation of a selection. The mature position this article has defended, development with discontinuity of vocabulary and persistence of problem, is less dramatic than either charter myth. It has the advantage of fitting the pages.

The tradition’s blind spots

Candour about a school’s achievement requires equal candour about what it could not see, and the humanists’ blind spots were neither few nor trivial. The most consequential concerned gender. A tradition built on the production and reproduction of human life had, in its classic decades, remarkably little to say about the sexual division of labour, the unpaid work of households, or the specific estrangements of women under both systems it criticised. Its leading figures were overwhelmingly men, its summer schools and editorial boards likewise, and its universal subject, Man, was accused by the socialist feminists of the nineteen seventies of performing the oldest trick in the philosophical repertoire, generalising a male experience and naming the generalisation human. The charge landed because the evidence supported it, and the later migration of humanist themes into social reproduction theory was carried out largely by feminist scholars correcting the tradition while extending it. Heller’s work on everyday life and needs, an honourable partial exception inside the classic school, shows by contrast how much territory the rest had left unmapped.

A second blind spot concerned the non European world, and it is the more pointed because the tradition prided itself on escaping Eurocentric party orthodoxies. James, with his Haitian and Pan African formation, saw furthest, and Fromm’s Mexican years gave his humanism a southern address. Yet the school’s central drama, the critique of bureaucratic socialism, was a European and North American affair, and its anthropology was rarely tested against the colonial and postcolonial situations in which most of humanity’s estrangements were being lived. Dependency theorists and liberation movements developed their own Marxisms in those decades with little reference to species being, and the humanists returned the indifference, reading the global South mainly as an audience for symposia. The omission matters for the assessment of the school’s claims to universality: its human was theorised from the experience of industrial Europe and its socialist states, and the strongest version of its doctrine, the historical account of capacities, should have warned its holders that other histories would produce other capacities and other critiques. Some of its heirs have done that work since. The classic tradition, on the record, mostly did not.

A third blind spot was economic in the plain sense. The school’s relative silence on the mechanisms of capitalist accumulation left it dependent, in its western branches, on a picture of capitalism drawn from the nineteenth century factory and the mid century assembly line, at the moment when finance, services and information were reorganising the labour whose estrangement it theorised. Marcuse and Lefebvre again stand partly excepted, since both strained the categories toward consumption, leisure and administration. Yet even their analyses remained at the level of the administered world in general, short on the sectoral and technical detail that a rival tradition, armed with value theory, might have supplied. The consequence for the school’s politics was a characteristic vagueness about transition: self management named a destination and a criterion more clearly than a route, and the Yugoslav experience, in which councils coexisted with markets, banks and a party state, raised technical questions about investment, prices and inter enterprise inequality that the philosophy of praxis framed beautifully and answered thinly. The Belgrade economists who debated those questions alongside the philosophers are the least read part of the school’s own circle, which tells its own story about the tradition’s hierarchy of prestige.

Registering blind spots of that size might seem to strengthen the prosecution beyond repair, and the tradition’s severest critics, Kolakowski in his later exile among them, concluded exactly that. The assessment offered here weighs them differently. Blind spots are the normal condition of schools, whose strength is a function of focus, and the relevant comparison is with the rivals’ own: the structuralists’ silence on lived experience and on the internal life of the socialist states, the analytical school’s long indifference to history, orthodoxy’s blindness to everything the humanists saw. A tradition should be judged by whether its central insight survives the correction of its peripheral vision. The humanist insight, that institutions calling themselves emancipatory must be judged by the self activity they permit the people inside them, has survived every correction its feminist, postcolonial and economic critics have administered, largely because those critics, in administering them, were using the insight. That is the strongest form of survival available to a school, and the tradition earned it.

Explaining Stalinism: the argument underneath the argument

Beneath every exchange about essences and breaks ran a plainer dispute that neither camp could decline: how was Stalinism to be explained? The question was unavoidable because the humanist turn began as a response to the phenomenon, and because any Marxism that could not explain the Soviet order had failed the century’s central test. The orthodox explanation, personality and encirclement, blamed a cult and a siege and exonerated the structure. The Trotskyist explanation blamed a bureaucratic caste parasitic on healthy property foundations. Liberal explanation blamed the doctrine itself, treating the outcome as the idea’s biography. The humanists developed a fourth account, and its construction shows their method at its most characteristic. Begin from the producers’ actual relation to their activity. A system in which workers confront the plan, the ministry and the enterprise director as alien powers, in which the product and the surplus are disposed of by others, in which initiative from below is a disciplinary offence, reproduces estranged labour under socialist property forms. The terror, on that account, was not an excrescence on the system but the enforcement arm of a separation that ordinary administration renewed daily, and the cult was the ideology of a stratum whose power required a single will to personify decisions no one else was permitted to share. The account’s strength is its continuity: it explains the mundane unfreedom of the ordinary workplace and the extraordinary violence of the purge years as degrees of one relation, and it predicts, correctly as the record ran, that destalinisation administered from above would soften the terror while preserving the relation, since the administrators were its beneficiaries.

The structuralist counter explanation deserves its strongest form beside that account, because the argument underneath the argument was the real one. A moralised history of Stalinism, the Althusserians argued, explains nothing: it names a villain, or a fallen essence, where analysis should identify mechanisms. The mechanisms they proposed were structural and economic: the constraints of accumulation in a backward and isolated economy, the reproduction of ideological state apparatuses inherited and built, the class composition of a party ruling a peasant country, the forms in which a planned economy generates its own information failures and coercive shortcuts. On that programme, the remedy for the Soviet order was not a recovered humanism, which the leadership could and did adopt as decoration, but an analysis of the formation precise enough to locate its real levers. The programme was largely promissory, since the structuralist school produced more methodology than Sovietology, and its members’ relation to a party that still defended Moscow imposed silences of its own. Yet the challenge it posed remains the correct one to put to any humanist history: show the mechanism, not only the meaning. The best humanist work, the Budapest analysis of the dictatorship over needs and the Praxis studies of self management’s decay, accepted that challenge and met it on institutional ground, which is why those texts, rather than the school’s manifestos, are the ones a researcher should assign first.

Posterity has distributed its verdicts between the two programmes in a pattern neither camp predicted. The archival opening after 1991 enriched the history of Stalinism with mechanisms in abundance: quotas, denunciation markets, centre periphery bargaining, the economics of the camps, the sociology of the apparatus. That literature vindicated the demand for mechanism over moralising, and it was produced mainly by historians owing allegiance to neither school. At the same time, the questions the new archives kept answering were often the humanists’ questions in empirical dress: how ordinary people experienced, evaded, internalised and occasionally resisted a system that treated them as material, and what capacities for self organisation survived inside it. The historiography of everyday life under Stalinism, one of the most productive fields the archives opened, is the humanist sensibility operating with better sources and without the philosophy. A school article should record that outcome plainly. The tradition lost the argument about method in its own lifetime and won much of the argument about which phenomena matter, and its history is unintelligible unless both halves of that sentence are kept in view.

The tradition in the university

Universities were the tradition’s second habitat, and their internal geography explains much of its uneven survival. In Yugoslavia the philosophers held chairs at Zagreb and Belgrade, which gave the school students, examinations and a curriculum, the machinery by which a doctrine reproduces itself beyond its founders’ lifetimes, and which is why the 1975 dismissals struck at reproduction rather than merely at reputation. In France the action ran through the elite training institutions and the party’s own schools, a duel of normaliens in which Althusser’s seminar proved the stronger machine. In Britain the humanists were strongest where the university met the movement, in history departments shaped by Thompson’s example and in the extra mural and adult education networks that carried Marxist discussion to trade unionists and teachers, a base that produced readers rather than disciples and a historiography rather than a system. In the United States, lacking a mass party or a state to argue with, the position lived in small organisations, in the paperback market and in individual chairs, Marcuse’s at Brandeis and then at San Diego the most famous, from which the ideas radiated to students who often received them as a general philosophy of liberation detached from the European quarrels that had formed them.

That geography carries a lesson about the kinds of knowledge each habitat rewards. Party adjacent philosophers wrote for cadres and for history, and their work is dense with the tactical question of what may be said, where, and at what cost. University philosophers wrote for peers and posterity, and their work optimises for conceptual distinction, which is why the French debate achieved its famous precision and its famous sterility in the same gesture. Movement intellectuals such as Thompson and James wrote for publics they hoped to move, and their work optimises for moral and narrative force, at the price of the systematic completeness the academics demanded. Marxist humanism contained all three habitats at once, which accounts for its extraordinary range of registers, from the Korcula proceedings to Fromm’s bestsellers to Thompson’s polemics, and also for the permanent mutual suspicion among its own branches, each of which suspected the others of betraying the doctrine to its audience. A school article that irons out those differences of register in the name of a single doctrine has missed the sociology that made the doctrine possible.

A note on the names

The variants of the school’s name are not interchangeable labels but small historical documents, and a reader who sorts them gains a map of the camps. Socialist humanism was the broad banner of the late nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties, used by Thompson, adopted as the title of Fromm’s international symposium, and elastic enough to cover party reformers, ex party independents and sympathetic non Marxists who shared the protest against both Cold War orders. Humanist Marxism functioned as the descriptive term of scholars and opponents, a classification for the reading of Marx rather than a membership. Marxist Humanism, capitalised, was the proper name of Dunayevskaya’s tendency and its philosophy, claimed with organisational precision and defended against borrowers. The humanist reading of Marx is the librarian’s neutral phrase, safe for catalogues. Polemic added its own vocabulary: revisionism was the charge under which the eastern practitioners were condemned, anthropologism the structuralists’ term of dismissal, and theoreticism Thompson’s counter charge against Paris. Keeping the names straight prevents the commonest bibliographic error in the field, the merging of a broad sensibility, a scholarly classification and a small American organisation into a single imaginary party. It also reminds the reader that naming was itself a political act in this history: to call the position socialist humanism in Warsaw in 1957 was to file a claim inside a party dispute, and to call it Marxist Humanism in Detroit was to found something. The words carried addresses, and the addresses, as this article has tried to show, are where the tradition actually lived.

Closing assessment

Marxist humanism began when a text found its moment. The manuscripts of 1844 waited twenty four years for readers who needed them, and the need, when it came, was created by the crisis of the regimes that claimed Marx as their charter. The tradition built on that encounter, a philosophy of praxis and alienation, an institutional centre in Yugoslavia, a popular literature in the West, a revisionist ferment in the East, changed what Marxism could say about the societies built in its name and restored the early Marx to the centre of his own corpus. Its strongest critic showed, permanently, that a humanism of essence cannot serve as a science of history, and its defenders showed, also permanently, that a science of history without a standard of human flourishing cannot say why its findings should move anyone to act. Between those two demonstrations the argument rests, unsettled in principle and settled in one practical respect: no subsequent Marxism has been able to ignore either. The school that power suppressed and fashion displaced survives in the questions it made unavoidable, in the syllabuses it stocked with the young Marx, and in the standing suspicion, wherever producers are administered in emancipation’s name, that the oldest Marx is the one who saw the problem first.

For students and exam candidates

Marxist humanism is the standard counterweight to structuralism in essays on Marx’s development, and answers score by keeping three distinctions clean. Distinguish the textual question, continuity or break between the early and later Marx, from the philosophical question, whether the anthropology is defensible, and from the political question, what the doctrine did in the world. Quote the 1956 hinge as an explanation of timing, name the Praxis School and its fate as evidence that the position mattered, and give Althusser’s objection in his own terms before answering it, since examiners reward the candidate who can state the case they then qualify. Avoid treating humanism as Marxism being nice. The position is an anthropology with institutional consequences, and essays that present it as a sensibility lose the thread that the Yugoslav dismissals make impossible to miss. A reliable structure runs definition, trigger, map, objection, verdict, in that order, and the strongest scripts keep returning to the question of what standard judges a socialist institution, because that question is where the tradition’s marks are earned.

For teachers and seminar leaders

Teaching a suppressed movement without turning the classroom into advocacy is the central craft problem here, and the material helps if it is sequenced honestly. Begin with the manuscripts and let students feel the force of the estranged labour analysis before any labels are introduced. Then set the political scene of 1956 through documents, the secret speech’s admissions and the Hungarian councils, so the humanist turn appears as a response to events rather than a taste in philosophy. Introduce Althusser only after the humanist case is strong in the room, and assign his text in his own words. Close with the institutional record, the Korcula school and the Belgrade dismissals, and ask students to weigh argument, fashion and power as causes of the tradition’s decline. The discussion that sequencing produces is the lesson: how doctrines live in journals, universities and states, and how they die there too. Assessment should test that weighing of causes directly, asking for a judgement among argument, fashion and power rather than for a recital of positions learned by heart.

For researchers, historians, and journalists

The research frontier in this field is institutional and archival rather than interpretive, and it rewards historians willing to work past the famous names. The Praxis episode needs the Yugoslav record read whole: the journal’s full run in both editions, the Korcula proceedings, the university and party files around the 1975 law, and the correspondence networks that linked Zagreb and Belgrade to Budapest, Warsaw, Paris and the American committees. The eastern revisionists require similar treatment in their own languages, since the Anglophone literature leans heavily on the figures who emigrated and published in English, which skews the map toward the West the record contradicts. Journalists covering later movements that invoke self management, workplace democracy or human dignity against bureaucratic rule will find the humanist archive the necessary background, because the vocabulary of those movements was largely coined in the debates surveyed here. Verification discipline matters throughout: dates of journals, schools and dismissals are checkable facts, the motives of regimes are inferences, and the distinction between the two is where reliable work on this tradition is separated from commemoration. The summer school’s participant lists, preserved across several national archives, also allow the network itself to be reconstructed name by name, turning a story of influence into evidence of contact, correspondence and translation that can be checked rather than merely asserted.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is Marxist humanism?

Marxist humanism is the tradition that reads Marx through his early writings and treats alienation and human self realisation as the core of his critique of capitalism. Its adherents held that human beings have historically developed capacities for free, creative and cooperative activity, that both capitalist and bureaucratic socialist institutions frustrate those capacities, and that emancipation means restoring producers’ control over their own activity. The tradition took organised form after 1956, centred on the Yugoslav Praxis School, with major figures including Erich Fromm, Henri Lefebvre, Herbert Marcuse and Raya Dunayevskaya, and it was opposed from inside Marxism by Louis Althusser’s structuralist alternative.

Q: Who were the main Marxist humanists?

The tradition’s map runs across three continents. In Yugoslavia the Praxis School gathered philosophers such as Gajo Petrovic, Mihailo Markovic and Svetozar Stojanovic around a journal and the Korcula Summer School. In the West the leading names were Erich Fromm, whose Marx’s Concept of Man introduced the early Marx to a mass readership, Herbert Marcuse, Henri Lefebvre and, in Britain, the historian E. P. Thompson. Raya Dunayevskaya led an American tendency that used Marxist Humanism as its name, and C. L. R. James brought a Caribbean and anti colonial strand. In Eastern Europe the Budapest School around Agnes Heller, the Polish revisionist Leszek Kolakowski and the Czech philosopher Karel Kosik carried the position at personal cost.

Q: What was the Praxis School?

The Praxis School was the Yugoslav circle of Marxist philosophers, based mainly in Zagreb and Belgrade, that formed the institutional centre of Marxist humanism. It took its name from the journal Praxis, founded in 1964, and ran the Korcula Summer School, which drew philosophers from both Cold War blocs to the Adriatic island of Korcula through the nineteen sixties and into the nineteen seventies. The school theorised praxis, free and creative self activity, defended workers’ self management and criticised the Yugoslav party bureaucracy from a Marxist standpoint. The regime closed the journal in 1975 and removed the Belgrade Eight from university teaching by a special law that year.

Q: Why did Althusser attack humanism?

Louis Althusser attacked humanism because he believed it blocked the development of Marxism as a science. On his account, Marx had broken around 1845 with the ideological vocabulary of human essence and alienation and founded historical materialism on structural concepts that explain forms of subjectivity instead of presupposing them. A Marxism rebuilt on the early writings therefore rebuilt itself on what Marx had discarded. Althusser also argued politically that humanist slogans, which even the Soviet leadership could adopt after 1956, moralised criticism instead of analysing the structures that produced bureaucratic rule. His alternative, theoretical anti-humanism, treated history as a process without a subject.

Q: Is Marxist humanism still influential?

The tradition’s organisations and journals have closed, so its influence is dispersed rather than institutional. Its questions persist wherever Marxist argument turns on the standard by which institutions are judged. Ecological Marxism works the manuscripts’ seam between human production and nature, social reproduction theory revived the insistence that production means the production of people, and debates about self management and workplace democracy still draw on the Praxis School’s internal critique of the Yugoslav experiment. The early writings the humanists restored are a permanent part of the Marx syllabus. Influence of that kind, embedded in reading lists and inherited questions, is real but should not be inflated into a living school where none exists.

Q: What triggered the humanist turn in Marxism?

The trigger was the political crisis of communism in 1956. Khrushchev’s secret speech admitting Stalin’s crimes, followed by the Polish October and the Hungarian revolution with its workers’ councils, forced Marxists inside and outside the communist parties to find a standpoint within Marx from which bureaucratic state socialism could itself be judged. The early writings, published in 1932 but largely dormant for twenty four years, supplied that standpoint through their analysis of alienation. Yugoslavia’s earlier break with Stalin in 1948 and its ideology of workers’ self management had prepared one national setting in advance. What changed in 1956 was the need, not the evidence.

Q: Is Marxist humanism compatible with historical materialism?

Compatibility depends on which version of each doctrine is meant. Humanists argued that historical materialism is their position developed: a theory of how human beings produce their lives and themselves under inherited conditions, in which needs, capacities and purposes are material forces rather than decorations. Althusser’s structuralism answered that the anthropology contradicts the science, since a materialism of structures must explain the subject rather than enthrone it. A widely held middle view treats the anthropology as a historically developing account of capacities rather than a fixed essence, which preserves the humanist standard of critique without claiming that an eternal human nature explains history. The dispute is genuine and remains a live dividing line in Marx interpretation.

Q: What is theoretical anti-humanism?

Theoretical anti-humanism is Louis Althusser’s name for the doctrine that Marx’s mature work explains history without reference to a human essence or a universal subject. History, on this account, is a process without a subject, in which individuals figure as bearers of structural relations and forms of individuality are effects of the structures that produce them. Althusser distinguished the theoretical doctrine from practical humanism, the moral protest against oppression, which he did not ask activists to surrender. The target was humanism as an explanatory theory inside Marxist science. The doctrine anchored his reading of an epistemological break around 1845 and his polemic against the Marxist humanists of the post 1956 decades.

Q: Was Marxist humanism a political or a philosophical position?

It was both, and its history is unintelligible if either half is dropped. Philosophically it was a reading of Marx centred on alienation, praxis and species being, with positions on Hegel, on human nature and on the continuity of Marx’s corpus. Politically it was the ideology of revisionist movements inside the socialist states, of ex communist intellectuals in the West, and of Yugoslavia’s self management experiment and its critics. The philosophy gave the politics its distinctive weapon, a Marxist critique of bureaucratic socialism, and the politics gave the philosophy its audience, its institutions and eventually its persecutors. Classifying it as a school of interpretation alone mistakes the reason regimes bothered to suppress it.

Q: What did the Marxist humanists get wrong?

Their critics’ strongest charges have survived scrutiny. The anthropology was never given a settled form, sliding between an eternal human essence and a historical account of capacities, and the slide let opponents charge it with explaining structures by a premise it could not exhibit. The tradition produced less analytical work on capitalism itself, on value, crisis and the state, than its structuralist and analytical rivals, concentrating on interpretation and on the critique of existing socialism. Its political judgement was uneven, with some figures overinvesting in reform from within parties that purged them. Its defenders answer that the normative question it kept open outlasted those failures, but the failures themselves are part of the record.

Q: How did the Hungarian and Yugoslav humanists differ in practice?

The difference was one of shelter and strategy. Yugoslav humanists worked inside a state that had broken with Moscow and legitimised itself through workers’ self management, which gave the Praxis School a journal, a summer school and a decade of semi official tolerance in which to build institutions and criticise their own regime’s bureaucracy in print. Hungarian humanists had no such shelter. The Budapest School around Lukacs negotiated with a party that patronised and then condemned them, losing posts after the 1973 resolution and in several cases emigrating. Yugoslav practice was therefore public and institutional for longer, while Hungarian practice was seminar based, more exposed, and ended in exile rather than in a domestic closure.

Q: What should a researcher verify before calling a thinker a Marxist humanist?

A researcher should verify three things before applying the label. The thinker should actually ground a reading of Marx in the early writings or in an anthropology of alienation, praxis or human capacities, rather than merely using humane language. The thinker’s setting should be established, since party revisionists, ex party independents and Western academics occupied different positions that the single label can flatten. And the chronology should be checked against documents, journal runs, publication dates and institutional records, because retrospective self description is unreliable in a tradition whose members were alternately celebrated and purged. Self identification, as with Dunayevskaya’s organisation, settles the question; thematic resemblance alone does not.

Q: Why did the humanists treat the Paris Manuscripts as a founding text?

The manuscripts gave the humanists three things no later text supplied in one place. They contained the systematic analysis of estranged labour in its four forms, which became the tradition’s critical instrument against both capitalism and bureaucratic socialism. They stated a positive image of unalienated human activity, free, universal and self directed, that could serve as the standard of critique. And they were Marx’s own words from before the codifications, which let revisionists inside the communist world argue that their position was a recovery of the founder rather than an import from outside Marxism. Their late publication in 1932, and the circumstances of that delay, added the force of a suppressed inheritance finally read.

Q: How does Fromm’s reading of Marx differ from the reading of the Praxis School?

Fromm read Marx primarily as a prophet of human self realisation whose critique spoke to the sickness of modern life in any system, and he expressed that reading through psychoanalytic categories of character and through a public, programmatic idiom aimed at readers in the affluent democracies. The Praxis School read Marx as a philosopher of praxis whose categories judged institutions, and it expressed that reading through the theory of self management, academic journals and a summer school embedded in a socialist state. Fromm’s Marx addresses the individual’s inner estrangement and prescribes cultural and psychological renewal alongside structural change. The Yugoslav Marx addresses who decides, and treats inner renewal as the fruit of transformed institutions rather than their precondition.

Q: What should a teacher emphasise about the political setting of the humanist turn?

A teacher should emphasise that the humanist turn was an answer to dated events and not a drift in philosophical taste. The secret speech of February 1956 and the Hungarian revolution of that autumn created the audience for texts that had been available since 1932, and the Yugoslav break with Stalin in 1948 had already built the one institutional shelter the tradition enjoyed. Students should see the sequence plainly: regimes admitted crimes, workers formed councils, philosophers reached for the early Marx to judge the regimes in his name, and regimes replied by closing the journals and dismissing the philosophers. Presented in that order, the political setting explains the philosophy’s timing, its content and its fate.