ABSTRACT
Epistemology was a preoccupation of Karl Marx from his earliest writings, and it has been a preoccupation of Marxists ever since. While epistemology is understood philosophically to refer to “the theory of knowledge,” and most often as the conceptualization of what constitutes “truth” or at least the justification for apparently organized thoughts, in Marxism, as in most other philosophical and scientific traditions, there are too many strands or variants to permit a single concept of what counts as a “theory of knowledge.” Likewise, there are a variety of putatively Marxist positions regarding the veracity of any knowledge claim and/or its disciplined, organized exposition. It is indeed possible to pluralize, so as to speak about different Marxist or Marx-inspired “theories of knowledge.” But, in this entry, we focus less on epistemology as the ascertainment of theoretical truth and more as a general questioning about knowledge. This questioning inquires into the object of knowledge (the known); the “subject” of knowledge (the knower); its form and content; the social processes or practices through which knowledge is produced (or, in a different language, its “causes”); and its manifold, reverberating effects.
