Karl Marx and Contemporary Culture (English Version): Translated by Dale Medley

Mikahil Lifshitz was many things. He was a ultra-left social commentator and a classicist (or reactionary, as his critics would have it) aesthetic philosopher. In this work, we see him as commentator, taking on the pundits and scholars who produced a spate of books on "cultural criticism" in the mid-20th century. "Setting oneself up as the embodiment of reproach toward one's own era and coming up with frightening names for it, such as 'the era of disaggregation,' 'the era of alienation' and 'the era of fear' is not an option for a serious thinker. It is a moralistic pose, and nothing more."

Lifshitz turned the argument often made against Marxists back upon these cultural critics. They offered detailed criticism, but suggested only vague solutions. To Lifshitz, that was craven. His solution was sweeping, and certainly not cowardly. It was the patient wait for reason, operating through historical necessity, to produce a true Marxist state and world. It was bold of him to say that true Marxism lay in the distant future, living as he did in a Soviet Union which claimed to have already realized that goal, but he was known for his boldness and intellectual integrity. As a Jewish intellectual, he suffered under the later Stalinist years, and only revived his academic career after the turn away from Stalinism. This was one of his first publications after that rebirth.