DIRECTIONS OF SELF-CRITICISM. AN ANALYSIS OF MARXISM AFTER 25 YEARS FROM THE COLLAPSE OF THE COMMUNIST REGIMES Cover Image

DIRECTIONS OF SELF-CRITICISM. AN ANALYSIS OF MARXISM AFTER 25 YEARS FROM THE COLLAPSE OF THE COMMUNIST REGIMES
DIRECTIONS OF SELF-CRITICISM. AN ANALYSIS OF MARXISM AFTER 25 YEARS FROM THE COLLAPSE OF THE COMMUNIST REGIMES

Author(s): Dumitru Borţun
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences
Published by: Editura Pro Universitaria
Keywords: humanism; anti-humanism; materialism; idealism; alienation; de-alienation; human nature; human essence

Summary/Abstract: At the celebration of a quarter of a century from the bankruptcy of the Communist regimes, we propose an honest re-evaluation of the Marxist philosophy. The vicious involvement of Marxism in the 20th century’s philosophical dialogue was due to some extra-doctrinaire causes as well as to some internal causes that we called “deformations” and “self-mutilations”: degeneration of the Marxist philosophy into a version of pre-Marxist materialism, following its institutionalization as state philosophy in the Soviet Union; the didacticist deformation, stemmed from the illuminist demand of its mass propagation; its transformation from a critical and progressive philosophy into an apologetic and conservatory political doctrine; its denaturation through the combination with different non-Marxist currents and theories; the absence of a normativity explicitly deduced from the articulation of the theory, which allowed the legitimation of the most abject crimes against man. These “deformations” and “self-mutilations” are challenged in this paper through the re-interpretation of the Marxist philosophy’s answer to the so-called “fundamental issue of philosophy”, as well as through the re-interpretation of the definition of human essence included in Thesis 6 on Feuerbach.

  • Issue Year: 2014
  • Issue No: 4
  • Page Range: 80-91
  • Page Count: 12
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