The aim of this thesis is to examine the idea of realism in Western Marxism through the comparative approaches of Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre and Fredric Jameson in relation to non-Marxist theorists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. The issue of realism suffers from the controversial terminology of realism and reality. This is the reason why realism can be better viewed by Marxist perspectives that are firmly based on the category of the subject-object dialectic. This Marxian principle, thereby pertaining to the reality existing outside of subjectivity, substantiates the issue of realism as a continuing social and aesthetic project. By focusing on the category of reality in relation to the idea of realism in Western Marxist debates, this study explores the way in which the Marxist theorists understand the relationship between culture and society, and respond to the change of socio-economic conditions in each historical moment. These various discourses revolving around the issue of realism produce a similar agenda to explain the place of the artwork in the realm of culture. Such a similarity arises from their attempt to retain the idea of realism, even when they argue for an aesthetic of anti-realism. In this respect, my thesis questions the distinction between realism and modernism in Western Marxist discourses, and argues that such differentiation had been articulated by a political intention to sever Western Marxism from Stalinism. Their idea of realism is paradoxical in the sense that their formulations of realism aspire to a utopian project. This is the very way in which their idea of realism can be grasped as another facet of their political programme.

The key theoretical concern of this doctoral research is to trace the way in which Marx discovered and developed the determinations of the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class. In order to achieve this, a critical reading of Marx's 'early writings' from the perspective of his later works was carried out in the first part of the thesis. Specifically, the analysis attempted to find in both the insights and limitations of the former and clues towards the direction that Marx's later development would take. One of the original results of my reassessment of Marx's early work is to uncover the methodological significance of those texts for Marx's re-appropriation of Hegel's dialectical method and the consequent determination of social science as practical criticism. The second part of my investigation consists in a critical analysis of the ways in which these early insights crystallised in the writing of Capital. The aim of this critical reading of Marx's most important work is to provide a reconstruction which goes beyond traditional Marxist theories and their unresolved tension between the forms of objectivity and the forms of subjectivity of capitalist society. In particular, my thesis is that most readings of Marx tend to see revolutionary subjectivity as abstractly free and as the opposite of the subjectivity alienated in capital. My own investigation of Marx's critical theory aims to show that, for him, emancipatory subjectivity itself is a social form of the alienated subjectivity of the modern individual. I show that the genesis of that emancipatory subject can be found in the transformations in the materiality of social life brought about by the real subsumption of humanity to capital. Finally, the investigation attempts to thematise the intrinsic connection between these questions of subjectivity and Marx's dialectical method.