Austro-Marxists read Marx as objective science and sought values in Kantian ethics

Evidence

The Austro-Marxists, who represented the “orthodox” thinking of the Second International, in opposition both to Lenin and to the revisionism of Bernstein, laid particular stress on the scientific aspects of Marx’s work, at the expense of the element of revolutionary praxis. Having found in Marx only the objective laws of the development of society, in a strictly value-free sense, they tended to look for their values and for reasons for political choices, not in the immanent laws of the dialectic itself, but in the transcendental ethics of Kant. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2624

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Austro-Marxism as a theoretical position: value-free science in Marx plus Kantian transcendental ethics as the source of political values.
• XREF: This maps onto the historian’s ‘epistemological gap’ between is and ought — the split Gramsci elsewhere diagnoses as the divorce of theory from praxis. Useful background for later readers distinguishing Gramscian organic ideology from the Second International’s scientific reductionism. — connects to: Socialism’s roots trace to ancient moral and ethical traditions; Forms differ from Kantian categories by informing all experience and changing over time — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 21; Adler sought to fuse Kant and Marx into a distinctly socialist culture — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2879
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2624

Broader Connections

• Forms differ from Kantian categories by informing all experience and changing over time #complicates (0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 21
• Socialism’s roots trace to ancient moral and ethical traditions #expands (0.72)