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Marxist humanism and state capitalism continue to be relevant leftist movements despite political shifts in central and Eastern Europe. Popular disillusionment with democratic reforms and an implied movement away from capitalism are exemplified in the formerly communist countries of Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, Russia, and the former East Germany. A critical assessment of statist communism reveals structural contradictions in its agenda to break with Stalinist and social democratic orthodoxy, which are both rooted in human emancipation through modernization and objective changes in the productive forces. A truly liberated society is the objective of a radically emancipatory strand of Marxist state capitalist theory and Marxist humanist philosophy, focusing on subjectivity in historical development, Hegelian dialects, and Marxist praxis. Such a theory draws from the writings of Raya Dunayevskaya, Frederick Pollock, Tony Cliff, Erich FROMM, and Karel Kosik. 76 References. J. Sadler.
The relationship of Richard Quinney's critical criminology to Marxism is explored in this article. The originality of his version of critical criminology is discussed, from its origins in social constructionism, to his engagement with Marxism in the 1970s, to the importance in his later work of issues such as existentialism, Eastern thought, and Erich Fromm's socialist humanism. It is argued that Quinney's writings, despite several shifts of perspective, nonetheless exhibit some basic continuities and that an engagement with various forms of unorthodox, humanistic Marxism is one of these.