Marxism and formalism: On Ian Angus’s Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism

Abstract

Ian Angus’s Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World renews a trend that was influential in the 1960s and 1970s. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Karel Kosik, Enzo Paci and the Yugoslavian ‘Praxis’ group opened Marxism to western philosophy in this period. Although phenomenology plays a lesser role in his work, Herbert Marcuse should also be included in this trend. Edmund Husserl developed phenomenology as a descriptive science of lived experience, the so-called ‘lifeworld’. These phenomenological Marxists, writing at a time of rising social conflict, argued that Marxism required a comparable theory to explain the revolution in consciousness happening around them. Angus’s (2021) goal is ‘to develop a phenomenological Marxism adequate to the cultural and ecological crisis of the twenty-first century’. His approach is based on a critique of formalism in science and social life. Both Marx and Husserl contrast lived experience with the formalized order of modern society. The task is to recover the meanings borne by experience in the face of the all-conquering abstractions of capitalist modernity. In this review I will articulate Angus’s approach with Lukács’s critique of reification, which underlies my own work on science and technology. Reification refers to the reduction of social relations to ‘things’ (res), that is, to impersonal interactions mediated by law-like social systems. The model for reification in this sense is the reduction of the social relation between producers and consumers to the exchange of money for goods on the market. The parallel Angus identifies between formalism in science (Husserl) and