H. P. Grice's Ontological Marxism

Marxism Philosophical method, metaphysics, philosophy of social science, philosophy of history A term for ideas developed in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and later developments based on their thinking. The attempt to work out a coherent Marxist system starts with Engels himself. Later Marxists have different versions, and each believes his own to be orthodox and condemns the other versions as revisionist. In the communist countries, orthodox Marxism has been developed by Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union and by Mao Zedong in China. The central doctrines of Marxist philosophy are called dialectical materialism and historical materialism. The essential claims of Marxism are that society consists of an economic base containing forces and relations of production, a political and legal superstructure determined by the economic base, and ideology that corresponds to the superstructure. The superstructure has partial autonomy, but the development of the forces of production are the ultimate ground for historical progress through stages, from primitive society to slave society, feudalism, capitalism, and eventually socialism and communism. Persons are members of different classes according to their respective positions in the social economy. However it is seen by members of a society, history is a history of class-struggle. All existing institutions and agencies represent, consciously and unconsciously, the interest of one or another class. Even morality, which most theorists regard as an historical and cultural matter that allows room to criticize authority, is said to reflect the interests of the ruling class. In Marxist thought, class-divisions will not disappear until the ultimate stage of social development: communism. Engels held that Marxism is the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society, and thought. Marxism is not merely a theory, but a social project as well, as expressed in Marx’s claim: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world . . . the point, however, is to change it.” The publication of Marx’s early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts around 1930, and the end of the Second World War, led Marxism to became an area of flourishing academic research in the West, especially in Europe. Various interpretations of Marxism emerged to form different schools under the general title of Western Marxism. Major schools were initiated by Gyorgy Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfort School’s critical theory, represented by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas, existential Marxism, represented by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Althusser’s structuralist Marxism. Analytic Marxism, which uses the methods of analytical philosophy to examine Marxist thought, is represented by G. A. Cohen, John Elster, John Roemer, and Alan Wood. “We have today a galaxy of different Marxisms, within which the place of Marx’s own thought is ambiguous.” Thomas, in Carver (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Marx.