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CRITICAL THEORY HAS ITS POLITICAL roots in what has been termed "the heroic phase" of the Russian Revolution. This was the period from 1917-1923 in which the radical democratic vision of workers' councils - or "soviets" - dominated both the communist movement and its radical offshoots. Based on the slogan of "All Power to the Soviets!" that was employed by Lenin to topple the Constituent Assembly, and justify the communist seizure of power, these years were marked by councilist uprisings throughout Europe as a gruesome civil war devastated the Soviet Union. Though workers' councils never actually ruled Russia,1 these ill-fated revolutionary attempts and the "offensive strategy" of the Communist International gave the new revolution a certain libertarian and Utopian aura.
If philosophy is, as Hegel once remarked, "its epoch comprehended in thought" then the most radical intellectual reflection of this turbulent period, wherein the "pre-history" of humanity seemed near its end, lay in the writings of Antonio Gramsci, Karl Korsch, and Georg Lukacs.2 These three thinkers became the most sophisticated representatives of what came to be known as "Western Marxism." Unconcerned with the textual exegesis of what Marx "said" about this or that issue, they evidenced a new concern with transforming the "totality" of capitalist social relations and abolishing the cultural "hegemony" of the bourgeoisie. Gramsci, Korsch, and Lukacs had little use for economic determinism or the parliamentary reformism of European social democracy. They despised the ways in which orthodox Marxism shoved the actuality of revolution into the future.3 These Western Marxists were instead advocates of political voluntarism, or direct action,4 on the part of the working class without any particular regard for historical stages or structural constraints. All of them highlighted the role of proletarian "consciousness," and their approach was predicated on the legacy of philosophical idealism rather than the positivism, or the putatively "scientific" character of Marxism. Lukacs liked to quote Vico that "the difference between history and nature is that man has created the one but not the other." He and his comrades were adamant about the need to understand Marxism as a social theory and break it off from a "dialectics of nature."5 Each after his fashion, indeed, saw the dialectic as a critical method capable of dealing with changing conditions...