Distinctive Elements
Although there have been many schools of Marxism, such as Austromarxism or the Left Communism of Antonie Pannekoek or Rosa Luxemburg, that are sharply distinguished from Marxism-Leninism, those theorists who downplay the primacy of economic analysis are considered Western Marxists, as they concern themselves instead with abstract and philosophical areas of Marxism. In its earliest years, Western Marxism's most characteristic element was a stress on the Hegelian and humanist components of Karl Marx's thought, but later forms of Western Marxism, such as Structural Marxism, have been just as strongly antihumanist.
Western Marxism often emphasises the importance of the study of culture for an adequate Marxist understanding of society. Western Marxists have thus elaborated often-complex variations on the theories of ideology and superstructure, which are only thinly sketched in the writings of Marx and Engels themselves.
Read more about this topic: Western Marxism
Famous quotes containing the words distinctive and/or elements:
“It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.”
—James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938)
“There surely is a being who presides over the universe; and who, with infinite wisdom and power, has reduced the jarring elements into just order and proportion. Let speculative reasoners dispute, how far this beneficent being extends his care, and whether he prolongs our existence beyond the grave, in order to bestow on virtue its just reward, and render it fully triumphant.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)