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Paper short abstract:

Western Marxism was influential and controversial. It bacame the foundation of the Frankfurt School in Germany. Moreover, it brought Fukumotoism to Japan. In both cases, heated debates occurred over vanguardism. By examining them, this report discusses the class consciousness of intellectuals.

Paper long abstract:

Western Marxism, which originated in the early 1920s, was a critique of traditional Marxists such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky, and emphasized the cultural and philosophical aspects. Georg Lukács, one of its pioneers, attracted the intellectual youth both inside and outside Europe, who were at risk of falling into nihilism. Thus, for the youth, Western Marxism was a means of not only social reform but also overcoming their personal and internal troubles.

On account of this characteristic, Western Marxism, while certainly influential intellectually, was also controversial. One of the most contentious issues was the legitimacy of vanguardism, on which Marxists had been divided since Rosa Luxemburg's criticism of Lenin in 1917.

In Weimar-era Germany, Lukács was criticized by Siegfried Kracauer on the grounds that participation in the Marxist movement could be an escape from personal problems. On the contrary, Walter Benjamin saw Kracauer's attitude as a “bourgeois” deception that was unconscious of the social issues. The debate over the legitimacy of vanguardism was also developed in Japan during the Taisho Democracy. Fukumoto Kazuo, the most advanced Japanese Marxist Theorist of his time, was denounced as an “elitist” by Comintern. However, after the 1930s, when the Marxist movement in Japan lost the vigorous debate it had previously enjoyed, it entered a period of winter, with many converts, due in part to severe repression by the government authorities.

Despite the differences in social and cultural backgrounds between Germany and Japan, the commonality in both cases was the social role of the intellectuals; that is, in Marxism, where the subject of the movement is the proletariat, the question was what kind of practice should be carried out by intellectuals who are oriented toward social reform. To address a topic that is still of great importance in this time of ever-widening social disparity, this report first clarifies how these intellectuals perceived their own social position in their discourses. Then, by focusing on points that were blind spots, the significance and challenges of Western Marxism are highlighted.