Summary of Context and Overall Objectives of the Project
The publication of Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 changed the course of Marxism and helped to influence the trajectory of the twentieth century. Appearing first in Russian in 1927, then in the original German in 1932, and then in French in 1933-4, the 1844 Manuscripts circulated in Central and Western European intellectual circles at a time when the European continent was increasingly falling under the sway of despotism. What was most revolutionary about these writings was the incontrovertible evidence they offered of a ‘humanist’ Marx: a Marx for whom communism consisted not in the mere abolition of private property in its negative sense, as was the case in USSR under Stalin, but in the wholesale re-arrangement of socio-economic life in a manner that would enable the maximal positive fulfilment of the ‘all-round individual’. As discussion of these Manuscripts became more and more widespread, and as the anti-colonial revolutions and anti-Stalinist politics swung into full gear, a diverse but distinct group of thinkers united in greater and lesser degrees of unity around a distinctively Marxist humanist thematic arose, spread across the world from Europe, to the Americas, to Africa, to China.
Focusing on figures such as C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Erich Fromm, Aimé Cesairé, Frantz Fanon, Henri Lefebvre, the Yugoslav Praxis philosophers, and Karl Kosík, among others, the present research is focused on resurrecting the shared concerns that enlivened their works, providing the first detailed consideration of the tradition as a tradition. In so doing, it not only places the works and engagements of these Marxist Humanist thinkers in relation to the debates (over humanism, ‘the human’, race, class, gender, authoritarianism, and other factors) that structured not only Marxism but the academy and wider social life in the twentieth-century and beyond, thereby revealing the enduring interest and significance that the tradition has for the manifest challenges of the present.
