Gajo Petrović

Works

• 1967Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century

  Essays presenting Marx as a philosopher of human beings as free, creative beings of praxis, against Stalinist dialectical materialism.

Position

Petrović read Marx, above all the early manuscripts, as a philosopher of the human being as a being of praxis: free, creative, self-creating activity. On this basis he rejected the “dialectical materialism” codified under Stalin as a metaphysics that turns human beings into objects of objective laws, and argued that Marx’s thought must be turned critically against socialist societies too, Yugoslavia included – in the spirit of Marx’s demand for a “ruthless criticism of all that exists”, which the Praxis circle made its own. In later work, above all “Thinking Revolution” (Mišljenje revolucije, 1978), he took up Heidegger’s question of being and interpreted revolution as a transformation of being itself, not merely of institutions. The Praxis circle was one of the main centres of humanist Marxism in Eastern Europe, alongside the Budapest School of Lukács and Heller and Karel Kosík in Prague; Leszek Kołakowski discussed it in “Main Currents of Marxism” (1978). Representatives of official Yugoslav Marxism accused the circle of abstract humanism and anarchism. Later commentators have asked how far its call for freedom and self-management remained bound to the framework of a one-party state, and whether the turn to Heidegger made the concept of praxis too abstract to guide political action.

Life & context

Gajo Petrović was born on 12 March 1927 in Karlovac, Croatia, then part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. After the Second World War he studied philosophy in Zagreb and for a time in the Soviet Union. He took his doctorate in Zagreb with a study of Plekhanov’s philosophy and taught at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb, where he became professor. His early books dealt with English empiricism and analytic philosophy as well as with Marx. In 1963 he was among the founders of the Korčula Summer School, which until 1974 brought together philosophers from East and West, among them Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Lucien Goldmann and Jürgen Habermas. In 1964 he founded, with Rudi Supek and others, the journal “Praxis”, whose international edition appeared from 1965; he edited it until it had to cease publication in 1974 under pressure from the League of Communists. Unlike their Belgrade colleagues, who were dismissed from the university in 1975, the Zagreb members of the Praxis circle kept their posts. Petrović died in Zagreb on 13 June 1993.

Further main works

• Philosophy and Marxism (Filozofija i marksizam, 1965)
• Philosophy and Revolution (Philosophie und Revolution, 1971)
• Thinking Revolution (Mišljenje revolucije, 1978)