8 - Post-Marxism

Summary

The “post” in post-Marxism signifies ambivalence, a politics that is after, but not beyond, Marxism. The diversity of post-Marxism is enormous. On the one hand, for many contemporary thinkers, “the only possible future for Marxism is as one contributing strand among others in the new, post-Marxian field” (Aronson 1995: 111, Fraser cited). On the other hand, Marx has become an essential reference point for most social theory today, so that nobody can really be considered to make a serious contribution to the field without engagement with Marxism. This is the spirit in which (non-Marxist) philosopher Jacques Derrida once wrote that “there will be … no future without Marx” (Derrida 1994: 13). The dispersion and dilution of Marxism is the same thing as the breadth and depth of its influence, and this is to be welcomed. As Stuart Sim argues, however, a distinction can be made between post-Marxism and post-Marxism:

To be post-Marxist is to have turned one's back on the principles of Marxism, [whereas] to be post-Marxist is … to attempt to grat recent theoretical developments … on to Marxism, such that Marxism can be made relevant to a new cultural climate.

(Sim 1998: 2)

We are therefore concerned with post-Marxism, a particular part of the post-Marxian field. That part explicitly essays a reconstruction of Marxism, one designed to retrieve its emancipatory impulse under specfic historical and intellectual conditions.