On the issue of defining «Western Marxism»

This article addresses the problem of defining «Western Marxism» and its use as an analytical category in the history of philosophy. The author demonstrates that the key characteristics of Western Marxism – philosophocentrism, distancing from political practice, and academic institutionalization – are associated not so much with geographical belonging as with specific historical conditions of Marxist theory’s development. Drawing on European historiography (P. Anderson, M. Jay, R. Jacoby, G. Therborn, D. Losurdo), the article reconstructs the main approaches to defining Western Marxism and analyzes the critique levelled against them. The turn to non‑European contexts – in particular, the experience of Marxist reception in China and Japan – makes it possible to clarify the applicability of this concept and to identify different trajectories of Marxist thought beyond Europe: the functional transformation of Western Marxism within the framework of socialist state‑building (China) and its metamorphosis into a form of critical theory akin to the European variant under conditions of a blocked revolutionary perspective (Japan).