David M. Kutzik and Douglas V. Porpora explore the similarities and differences between two connected but separate schools of thought: Critical Realism and Marxism.

*1970s serigraphy by Yugoslavian-born Russian artist Nikolai Lutohin.*

For almost half a century, Marxian materialism has been largely absent from academic social science. Dominant instead have been two opposing bourgeois philosophical positions. On the one side is a traditional empiricist view of science with affinities to what Engels called mechanical materialism. Dismissive of narrative explanation and confining itself to statistical relations among observable events, this empiricist tradition tends toward an undialectical, individualist approach to social issues that misses what Marxists consider material social relations.

If mechanical materialism reigns on one side of academic social science, complete idealism reigns on the other. Whether it takes the form of social constructionism or poststructuralism, it denies any access to reality as it is in itself. With nothing extra-discursive or outside the text of human discourse, there clearly are no material social structures of which Marxism speaks. Instead, from this perspective, all issues are ideational in nature.

However, arising first on the academic periphery but growing fast is another movement quite hospitable to Marxian ontology and epistemology. It could even be said to be the philosophy of science that underlies Marx’s own method. Called Critical Realism (CR), this movement began in the 1980s among a community of progressive scholars in economics, philosophy, and sociology. It is now international in scope with an official organization (The International Association of Critical Realism) and its own journal (The Journal of Critical Realism). In this article, we introduce CR and distinguish it from its two major bourgeois rivals.

Positivism and Physicalism

In an 1866 letter to Engels, Marx wrote how as a sideline he was studying Auguste Comte “because the English and French make such a fuss over the fellow.”¹ Comte is considered one of the founders of sociology, which he imagined as a social version of physics. Just as physical objects are governed by natural laws, Comte thought that if comparable social laws could be discovered, they could be deployed to engineer a utopian society. Comte’s motto accordingly was “explanation in order to predict and prediction in order to control.” Comte called his philosophy positivism to distinguish its empirical approach to social betterment from the prior criticisms of the French enlightenment, which Comte dismissed as merely negative philosophy.

Marx was evidently unimpressed, calling Comte’s approach “Scheißpositivismus.”² Whether Comte’s positivism was shit or not, it remains with us today as a kind of empiricism enshrined in what is called the covering law model of causal explanation. According to the covering model, causal explanation consists of a deductive argument that derives some event to be explained by the occurrence of a prior event and from a causal law regularly linking the two events. It has the following form:

Covering Law Model of Causal Explanation

If event A happens, then event B necessarily happens.

Event A has happened.

Therefore, Event B happened (or will happen).

Consider, for example, the explanation of suicide offered by Emile Durkheim, another major founder of sociology who explicitly built on Comte. According to Durkheim, the suicide rate of a society would rise or fall with its level of social cohesion (i.e., the extent to which individuals are closely connected together in groups and networks). Thus, if one asked why the suicide rate in the United States might be higher than before, one causal explanation would be that the level of social cohesion in the United States had dropped and that there is a causal law linking such drops with rises in the suicide rate. The higher suicide rate in other words is logically deduced from the drop in social cohesion and the law linking such drops to the suicide rate.

Rooted in Hume’s conception of causality, the covering law model inclines toward empiricism. As envisioned, causal laws link events. If the link is deterministic or nearly so, there is no need to theorize conceptually why this link should hold. The job of the scientist is just to go out and look and find which events are connected to which in this manner. When enough such laws are connected, we will have what we need by way of explanation to enable us to predict how better social outcomes can be produced.

Of course, the fly in this ointment is that for events to be explained deductively in this way, the laws linking them to their causes must be inviolable. You cannot after all deduce the occurrence of an event and thereby explain it by a law that says only that sometimes when the cause occurs, the event to be explained happens. Such a pseudo-explanation would still leave unexplained why the event to be explained happened in this case. It is because such Marxian laws as the falling rate of profit or underconsumption are not inviolable (because they can be counteracted) that the positivist philosophy of science dismisses them as genuine explanatory laws in a scientific sense.

In its own way, the covering law model also inclines toward materialism, in fact a very reductive materialism that in the contemporary analytic “philosophy of mind” is still with us. It is called physicalism. The idea is this: the laws of physics are inviolable, and since everything, including human beings are composed of elementary particles connected by inviolable laws, if we just know how these elementary particles behave, we could in principle predict how everything behaves that is made up of them. Thus, although it sounds far-fetched, quite a number of contemporary academic philosophers contend that the behavior of all that exists including our own could in principle be incorporated in one grand quantum wave function of the universe.³

In his own day, like Marx, Engels was unimpressed with such reasoning, which he described as mechanical materialism.

The materialism of this last century was predominantly mechanical, because at that time, of all natural sciences, mechanics and indeed only the mechanics of solid bodies—celestial and terrestrial—in short, the mechanics of gravity, had come to any definite close. Chemistry at that time existed only in its infantile, phlogistic form. Biology still lay in swaddling clothes; vegetable and animal organisms had been only roughly examined and were explained as the result of purely mechanical causes. As the animal was to Descartes, so was man a machine to the materialists of the eighteenth century. This exclusive application of the standards of mechanics to processes of a chemical and organic nature—in which processes, it is true, the laws of mechanics are also valid, but are pushed into the background by other and higher laws—constitutes a specific but at that time inevitable limitation of classical French materialism.⁴

What the mechanical materialism of Engels’s day left out is what is still left out of current day physicalism. That is the dialectical dynamic of emergence. But if causation is understood as involving inviolable laws as per the covering law model, there is no room for emergence, which can only be understood as some mysterious break in the laws. This physicalism, which would reduce mind to brain and brain to chemistry and eventually to physics, is the kind of materialism that reigns outside of Marxian circles.

The Idealist Turn of the New Critical Theorists

Today, the positivist covering law paradigm reigns supreme in the realm of data-driven economics, quantitative sociology and psychology. In contrast, the qualitative social sciences and critical humanities reject the tenets of positivism and reductionist materialism in favor of a completely idealist approach rooted in continental, and especially French, cultural theorizing.

Occupying the space previously occupied by the old Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and what Perry Anderson called Western Marxism, the new critical theory is distinguished by a radical social constructionism linked to cultural-linguistic reductionism focused on the discursive. Under the broad branding of “post” — post-modern, post-structuralist, post-Marxist and the like, contemporary critical theorists aim to overcome Enlightenment affirmations of progress, science, reason, and objective truth.

This new critical theory begins with a turn away from humanism and social structure toward what Marx classically called the political and cultural superstructure. It thus reverses the core premise of the German Ideology, i.e., that social being determines consciousness.⁵ Instead, aligned now with emergent new social movements, the new critical paradigm maintains precisely the opposite, namely that culture, ideology, and beliefs are the primary source of oppressive social conditions, found now not in political-economic constructions but in those of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Thus, in place of an old political-economic left, there is now predominantly a cultural left.

The key elements of this new critical theory came together in France during the intellectual crisis provoked by the collapse of the 1968 radical left uprisings and is closely associated with Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida. All three led to what has come to be called post-structuralism.

All three figures were strongly influenced by Louis Althusser, whose version of Marxist structuralism arguably provided the intellectual exit ramp from Marxist materialism. Althusser’s contribution to this exit ramp was twofold. First, he proposed a novel reversal of the Marxist base-superstructure relationship: Althusser argued for the primacy of hegemonic mechanisms of ideological control while demoting political-economic factors to importance only in the “last instance” of crisis. Second, whereas Sartre had declared existentialism a humanism, Althusser claimed that Marxism definitely was not. Instead, taking aim at humanistic Marxism, Althusser sought to reduce the theoretical role not just of Hegel’s transcendental subject of history but even that of concrete human subjects. Instead of purposively acting agents, Althusser reduced human agents to Trägern, i.e., mechanical carriers of larger structural forces.⁶

No longer Marxist, Foucault carried these Althusserian themes further. His contribution was a completely idealist ontology that exalted discourses over objective reality, over social relations, and over coherent human subjects. In this ontology, not only is reality equated with what it is discursively constructed to be, but social relations are recast as webs of intersecting “discourses.” Human agents in turn are reduced to “bodies” occupying the “subject positions” where discourses meet and intersect. These discourses “discipline” the human subjects to “perform” the “practices” that act out the discourses. In this way, for a whole generation, Foucault managed completely to reconceptualize power not as the resource of people occupying key social positions but as a feature of discourses that discipline and subjugate their human carriers.

If Foucault’s ontology displaced social relations and human subjectivity with discourses, Baudrillard displaced truth to proclaim a new, post-modern Zeitgeist. For Baudrillard, post-modernity represents a rupture from a modernist past when we could still confidently draw connections between our talk and the things talked about. Included in that past was a modernistic Marxism that naively thought to connect elements of theoretical political economy with the putative material realities of capitalism.

Instead, now, in post-modern time, we witness a new “hyperreality” (Baudrillard’s neologism) comprised of signs and symbols that “in no way refer to material reality but only to other signs and symbols.” In other words, hyperreality severs any connection between our words and their referents, denying the human subject any knowledge of material reality beyond an infinite regress of signs.

Ontologically, hyperreality is a kind of nonmaterial simulation of reality that is wholly constructed culturally, a condition captured by another of Baudrillard’s neologisms, “simulacrum.” Baudrillard’s simulacrae are ultimately copies or simulations of a putative reality that does not really exist. Donald Trump’s MAGA is a perfect example, as it refers to no actual time when America really was great. Instead, the signifier floats without anything actually signified. The same for Disneyland’s various idealized “scapes” of America and its frontiers.

Hyper-reality is the ‘reality’ of media-mediated discourse in which we never encounter the persons and events being discussed but only images and soundbites that become invested with meaning only in connection with other images and soundbites, never touching anything real.

Like a French impressionist, Baudrillard paints with broad brush strokes, aiming, without the close, analytical rigor of Anglophone philosophy, to convey a felt sense of a certain reality. That is to say there is some truth to what Baudrillard is claiming about a certain segment of our reality, that relating to remediated, commercial and political imagery. Of course, we cannot even say that Baudrillard gets something right without implicitly invoking truth in its ordinary sense. In other words, Baudrillard himself can only be intelligibly understood as claiming that his hyper-reality truly corresponds to something objectively real. The problem is that when Baudrillard’s Anglophone audience gets hold of him, they translate the poetry into prose and proclaim the utter demise of all truth and ontologically objective, material reality.

Technically, post-structuralism was a response to linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralism, which understood words of a language to derive their meaning not one by one but from an entire system in which each word means what it does in opposition to kindred words. Thus, for example, the adjectives we might apply to someone’s remark – interesting, banal, provocative, and so forth — each acquire their meaning not on their own but only in contrast with the others that could have been used instead.

What characterizes all post-structuralists, however, is summed up in Derrida’s famous remark that “there is nothing outside the text”.⁷ That remark expresses a theoretical commitment to what Frederic Jameson called the “prison house of language.” It is essentially a neo-Kantian position that claims we cannot get to objective reality as it is in itself but only as it appears to us within the confines of own language or conceptual scheme.

It is for this very reason that for post-structuralism, our languages – or more broadly our discourses — become so pivotal. Kant – and structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss — had at least considered all humanity to be united by biologically conditioned commonalities of mind so that we all could agree at least on what reality is for us. By the time of the post-structuralists, however, this biological constancy had already been debunked. Thus, all we are left with are our rival languages or conceptual schemes, each yielding their own “truths,” which thus turn out to be relative. If as in Derrida’s quip we cannot altogether escape our own texts or conceptual schemes, then there is no way to speak of reality as it is independent of us. Hence, culture, and subjective meaning are all we have, leading to the ascendance of the newish discipline of cultural studies.

More recently, post-structuralists have lamented their loss of all materiality. In response, there is now what post-structuralists have called a “new materialism,” an attempt to incorporate material reality within the idealist confines of post-structuralism. Against positivism, the post-structural materialists do get one thing right: the positivist covering law model effectively sucks causal power out of things and relocates it in putative laws. It is a conception that leaves the things of the world seemingly inert.

To breathe life into everyday things and to counter what post-structuralists perceive as humanism’s dangerous exaltation of humans, the post-structuralists now promote an anti-humanism that attaches human powers to non-human things. Thus, Bruno Latour, founder of the now highly popular Actor-Network Theory (ANT), argues against any principled difference between the causal powers exercised by humans and that exercised by, say, a hammer or lawn mower. Instead, according to Latour, all things of the world stand in equal status with humans as “actants,” things that act. For her part, in an equally popular account, Jane Bennet reaches back to a pan-psychic vitalism to endow non-human and even non-organic things with the vibrancy that humans claim for themselves.

Critical Realism as a Recovery of Marxian Materialism

Associated mostly with philosopher Roy Bhaskar and his seminal A Realist Theory of Science, critical realism or CR was actually the product of an entire community of progressive scholars in the UK moving in the same direction. That community included heterodox economist Tony Lawson, and sociologists Charles Smith and Margaret Archer. It also included a number of scholars that specifically identified with Marxism: philosophers Andrew Collier and Peter Manicus, economist Steve Fleetwood, and social scientists Ted Benton, Andrew Sayer, and (later) Doug Porpora. In some ways, as mentioned, CR could almost be considered the philosophy of science underlying Marxian theory.

In the first place, against positivism, CR completely rejects the covering law model of causality. Whereas as mentioned the covering law drains the causal power from things and relocates it in laws, in rejecting such laws, CR returns causal power to things and the specific mechanisms through which they work. Thus, instead of one homogeneous If-then conception of causality, the result is a thick understanding, i.e., an understanding of causality as something highly differentiated. Pulling is different from pushing, which is different from exiling or commanding or duplicating. On the thick view of causality, all of our causative verbs index the many different varieties of causal process or power possessed by things.

One immediate consequence of this paradigm switch relates to determinism. When, as per the covering law model, causality is cashed out in terms of universal laws, then since laws cannot be violated, determinism must inevitably follow. In contrast, on the thick understanding of causality as represented by CR, there is no determinism. Instead, the causal powers of things can be counteracted and even neutralized by other, conflicting causal powers in a world conceived as causally open. It thus is no longer any counter to a putative “falling rate of profit” or “overconsumption” that these tendencies can be counteracted. They remain as emergent pressures to be confronted rather than empirical regularities necessarily recoverable by statistical correlations.

Although CR does not reject the use of statistics as a form of evidence, with its departure from the covering law model, CR, unlike positivism, does not consider an equation the paradigm of explanation. Instead, to embrace the interplay of multiple forces at different levels, CR envisions a full social explanation to encompass narrative history. It is indeed a different philosophical underpinning that CR offers to Marxism and the kind of analysis it typically presents.

In the sentence a paragraph above about the falling rate of profit, the word emergent was used. Yet another consequence of the switch from laws to causal powers is a clearer understanding of emergence that releases us from positivist reductionism. When causality among reality’s most elementary particles is understood in terms of inviolable laws, then their behavior determines all else built up from them. With the move to causal powers, however, the behavior of elementary particles is understood to be the product of a play of forces originating either at the same ontological level or at higher levels consisting of things composed of those particles. We are returned in other words to Engels’s dialectical materialism, of things and their powers in motion.

In short, according to CR, the varieties of causal powers form a stratified reality, in which higher causal processes of composite things emerge out of the causal powers of things lower down. At the highest, social level of ontology, reasons too, are considered by CR to be causes. Thus, in contrast with both positivism and post-structuralism, CR specifically upholds a humanism, where agents using reason are, against physically reductive positivism, more than walking test tubes, and, against culturally reductive post-structuralism, more than just the creatures of discourse. Instead, reasoning agents are a distinct category of social reality in their own right.

Speaking of categories of social reality, ontology refers, among other things, to what does or does not exist. Social ontology thus refers to the categories of things that exist in social reality. Most social ontologies are narrow, limiting themselves to or emphasizing only one category of social existent. Thus, for positivist individualism, there is no culture nor any social structure. The only social existent is human individuals with their thoughts and actions. Conversely, for post-structuralism, cultural discourses effectively swallow up both structures and individual agents.

Against these extremes, CR affirms the broadest social ontology. Under the banner of SAC, coined by sociologist Margaret Archer, CR affirms all three categories of social reality: Structure, agency, and culture. Its strong affirmation of human agency is what, against both positivism and post-structuralism, makes CR a humanism.⁸

Similarly, in its affirmation of ontologically objective or non-discursive social structure, CR further distinguishes itself both from positivist individualism and post-structural idealism. There are those in fact among the critical realists who expressly follow follows Lenin’s distinction between ideological and material social relations, the former, like marriage, concept-dependent, and the latter, like inequality and power differentials, independent of actors’ awareness.⁹ As a philosophy of science, CR thus provides support for the non-reductive materialist element in political-economic approaches.

As a philosophy of science, what ultimately makes CR materialist in the Marxian sense is its affirmation of both epistemic and ontological realism. Ontological realism posits the existence of a reality ontologically independent of what observers may think of it. Thus, in the CR view, the earth did not suddenly start revolving around the sun only when people started to think of it that way. How people tend to think, i.e., the content of knowledge or what CR calls knowledge’s transitive dimension, is one thing, while the object of knowledge, what CR calls the intransitive dimension, remains distinct. To conflate the two, so that epistemology completely swallows up ontology is what Bhaskar calls the epistemic fallacy.¹⁰

In addition to ontological realism, CR also affirms epistemic realism, i.e., our ability, contra Kant, to know how the ontologically objective reality actually is. Of course, in contrast with positivism, CR rejects any foundationalist road to this knowledge based on a priori methodological protocols. Instead, CR considers knowledge to be attained rhetorically by the best argument so far and therefore always provisional and fallible. Whereas post-structuralism endorses the rhetoric of the Greek sophists who, like Protagoras, argued that human discourse creates reality, CR endorses the rhetoric of Aristotle, who maintained that human argument does not create reality but rather correctly identifies it.

Although still far from dominant, CR has grown beyond its modest beginnings to become a truly international force. Today, it draws to its rank many more than those who consider themselves Marxist. Even for those, however, CR with its rejection of positivist value neutrality, tends to attract those on the left. But for Marxists specifically, still among its number, critical realism offers a non-reductive materialist philosophy of science that upholds much of the analyses that Marxists undertake.

Conclusion

What we presented here is really just an introduction to CR, which in a sense, can be understood as the philosophy of science underpinning Marx’s method and historical materialism. There are still other aspects of CR that converge with a Marxian sensibility for which we had little space. When it comes to historical explanation, for example, basic CR is intrinsically dialectical in the manner Marx famously articulated in the 18th Brumaire: actors always act from cultural and structural circumstances, which their actions then either change or reproduce as starting points of a new round of action.¹¹ Bhaskar, himself, not content with this level of dialectic, then went on to devote an entire book to that topic.¹² Similarly departing from positivism in a manner convergent with Marxism, CR offers strong arguments against value neutrality in research. One example is its exposition of explanatory critique, according to which scientific explanation itself can serve to challenge those in power by undermining ideology based on relative ignorance. Critical realism thereby rescues the inherently partisan and progressive value-ladenness of science.

This brings us to the question of the relationship between Critical Realism and Marxism. This relationship has been characterized in four ways: 1) identity, i.e. there is really no substantial difference between CR and Marxism, that they are one and the same;¹³ 2) opposition, i.e., that CR is wholly different and fully incompatible with Marxism;¹⁴ 3) supplementary, i.e., CR provides important improvements to the positions of Marxism such as providing a “full blown” philosophy of science not present in the original;¹⁵ and, 4) complementary, i.e., CR does not add substantially new elements to Marxist philosophy but nevertheless provides useful additions to the theoretical toolbox, especially when it comes to the critique of poststructuralism, constructionism, and positivism in the defense of realist epistemology and emergent materialist ontology.¹⁶

We hold that Critical Realism is different from Marxism. It does not have commitments to any specific political agenda or political-economic analysis. It is not a revolutionary theory aimed at changing the world but a philosophy tightly focused on matters of ontology, epistemology and modes of scientific explanation. Within this more limited domain, we argue, CR presents a philosophy of science that reflects the core Marxian positions and provides a very useful and original supplemental toolbox for Marxist analysis and critique. We further recognize that many of the arguments and concepts developed by critical realism have been variously elaborated by Marxist philosophers, especially from the former socialist countries whose work has been almost entirely ignored by the English-speaking academy.¹⁷ We also note that the English-speaking academy has a long and strong tradition of Marxist scholarly and activist engagement with science independent of Critical Realism from J.D. Bernal to Helena Sheehan.¹⁸

Finally, we think it important to think of Critical Realism not only as a philosophical tendency or theory group but as a community of progressive scholars. It is a heterodox community, which is welcoming to Marxists and Marxian philosophical ideas. It needs to be noted that being welcoming to Marxists and Marxist ideas is unusual in the present intellectual and political climate of the academy. It offers a positive space for Marxist and non-Marxist theorists to dialog and debate as well as to forge collaborative partnerships in the common cause of fighting for robust realism and non-reductive materialism.

In conclusion, Critical Realism offers a strong counterpoint to the positivisms, reductionisms, and idealisms rampant in the English-speaking academy. It upholds key Marxist materialist epistemological and ontological positions. Its conferences and journals provide a space for open-minded discussion of historical and dialectical materialism in a progressive, heterodox community of scholars across disciplinary and political boundaries. For philosophers, CR provides an open-minded, progressive forum for promoting and discussing realism, materialism and knowledge. For social scientists, it provides a theoretical framework for putting the science back in social science. For activists of all stripes, CR provides support for theory-building critical of the current dominant paradigm of cultural constructionism while offering a viable alternative to positivism.

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Marx, Karl. Letter of July 7, 1866 to F. Engels, in MEGA, 1965, p. 234. (retrieved 12/15/21 from https://megadigital.bbaw.de/briefe/detail.xql?id=B00133)
Ibid.
See Gribbin, John: The many-worlds theory explained in The MIT Press Reader (retrieved 2/22/2022 from https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-many-worlds-theory/)
Engels, Friedrich. 1886. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy. (retrieved 12/15/21 from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch02.htm)
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, 1845. The German Ideology, Part 1, section 4. (retrieved 12/15/21 from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm)
It should be noted that some early proponents of Critical Realism such as Ted Benton and Andrew Collier had a much more favorable view of Althusser than we are presenting here while being highly critical of his anti-humanism.
Derrida, Jacques and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 1976. Of Grammatology. Johns Hopkins University Press. Baltimore.
Archer, Margaret. 1982. “Morphogenesis Versus Structuration: On Combining Structure and Action.” British Journal of Sociology, 33:4, 455–483.
Lenin, Vladimir. 1894. What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats, part 1. (retrieved 12/15/21 from https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1894/friends/01.htm#fwV01P134F01).
Bhaskar, Roy. 2008. A Realist Philosophy of Science. New York. See especially pp. 36-38 (retrieved 12/15/21 from https://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Roy_Bhaskar_A_Realist_Theory_of_Science.pdf)
Porpora, Douglas V. (1993). Cultural rules and material relations. Sociological Theory, 11 (2): 212-229.
Bhaskar, Roy. (2008) Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. Routledge-Taylor and Francis group. New York (online version retrieved 3/8/22 https://content.csbs.utah.edu/~ehrbar/dpf.htm)
ee Brown, Andrew, Steve Fleetwood and John Roberts. “Introduction” in Critical Realism and Marxism. 2003. Routledge-Taylor and Francis group. New York. (retrieved 3/5/22 from https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.127.8337&rep=rep1&type=pdf_
See, for example Gunn, Richard. (1999). “Marxism and critical realism: same, similar or just plain different?” in Capital and Class, volume 13, pp. 87-116.
See the section by Steve Fleetwood in Brown, Andrew, Steve Fleetwood and John Roberts. Op cit. “The marriage of critical realism and Marxism: happy, unhappy or on the rocks?” (retrieved 3/5/22 from https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.127.8337&rep=rep1&type=pdf)
See the section by John Roberts in Brown, Andrew, Steve Fleetwood and John Roberts. Op cit . “The marriage of critical realism and Marxism: happy, unhappy or on the rocks?” (retrieved 3/5/22 from https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.127.8337&rep=rep1&type=pdf)
On this point, the work of Russian Evald Illenkov and the German H. H. Holz come to mind. Whereas some works by Illenkov have in recent years been translated, Holz and his colleagues writing in German remain unknown among Anglophone scholars.
In this connection it is important to mention the Social Relations of Science movement of the 1930’s, spearheaded by J.D. Bernal and J.B.S. Haldane, and the activist work of such scholars as Steven and Hillary Rose in the 1970s in connection with the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science. Taken together they provide the Marxist and activist roots of what has today become STS (i.e., Science-Technology-Society studies). In terms of Marxist philosophy of science, we consider Helena Sheehan’s masterful Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History (Verso 2018) to be without parallel and a prolegomena to any future work in the field.