Anti-Marxism as Putrefied Theology

Thesis 11, 2010

During those early days of the 1980s, the outlook for democratic reformist politics looked bleak. Inside the US, Reagan was becoming a popular president, and the world outside seemed increasingly, if not fatally, endangered by a Cold War between an anti-social capitalism in the West and a totalitarian Marxism in the East. The Marxism that was becoming a major theoretical force on my home turf, among the university disciplines, was setting itself up as an aggressive antagonist to the classical tradition of sociology that I was myself struggling to revise and sustain. This environment set the conditions of my ‘Marxism project’, as I was calling it. I wished to show that the Marxist tradition had no monopoly on fundamental criticism or egalitarian social reform. In the broad sweep of religious history I document below, I read Weber’s sociology as laying out the cultural origins of an egalitarian and critical project. Religious rationalization allows community membership to be extended to lower classes; criticism to be applied to corrupt and undeserving authority; and unhappy fate to be challenged by world-mastering reason.

1993

Joelle Roumani, 2019

A Summary of Marxism Criticism

2018

The essay referred to herein is in fact a brief summary, precision-cut and sharp to the point, as only the quintessential technocrat can deliver it, of all the issues and problems generations of intellectuals have agonized on for more than a century -and it is prompted by the ongoing bicentennial of Karl Marx' birthday. It is very tempting to offer a brief review given we believe we can make a contribution to better understanding of XIX century's giant of philosophy 1 .

Ctheory, 1984

The "Politics of Western Marxism" sounds redundant, as if Marxism itself does not imply a politics. Yet today any reflections on Marxism must recognize its fractured condition ; political, philosophical and economic pieces do not fit together. National forms of Marxism offer contending versions of basic events and texts. Marxist scholarship itself has long succumbed to the intellectual division of labor, fragmenting into fields, subfields and sometimes boutiques. Marxist psychoanalysts and Marxist economists cannot communicate ; a common vocabulary and experience belong to the past. Marxism has emphatically devolved into a plural, Marxisms, with scores of warring varieties ; many are poisonous. To admit this does not damn the whole Marxist enterprise. Liberal capitalism tolerated, and tolerates, slavery, apartheid, authoritarianism and global starvation, and few suggest that these suffice to junk it. Yet the regular misdeeds of Marxism cannot be written off as inevitable but deplorable ; nor can they be neatly attributed to a hostile environment or billed against all Marxists, a Rosa Luxemburg as well as a Joseph Stalin. At the very least they require a careful sifting of the distinct strands of Marxism. Marx's remark that "history" does nothing-it is particular individuals in particular circumstances who act-must be applied to Marxism itself. "Marxism" does nothing ; it is particular Marxists who act in particular circumstances. Nevertheless, microscopic studies of malignant forms of Marxism may forget the larger issues. Politics cannot be isolated and delivered to appropriate experts, as if politics were of no concern to the Marxist philosophers or sociologists. A political project belongs to the heart and soul of Marxism; and if it is continually adjourned, ignored or relegated to specialists, eventhe smallest Marxist field suffers. The malaise that afflicts much Western Marxist scholarship derives from the loss of political vitality. This is not an individual failing or the failing of many individuals. Radical politics seem stalled ; they belong to the past or only fleetingly to the present. The sporadic politics of nuclear freeze or ecology do not sustain a Marxist academic superstructure. Yet without a living contact with radical politics, Marxist studies turn arid. Scholars elaborate the relationship of Marx to Hegel or advance post-structural textual methods, but without a political echo, even the participants begin to wonder : what is the point? ' These reflections are based on my book, Dialectic ofDefeat Contours ofWestern Marxism (New York

Class, Race, Corporate Power, 2020

In what follows, I note how two standard contemporary reference works describe Marx and then contrast those to Marx's "auto-bibliography" which presents a different set of texts as important to the author's self-conception. I then focus on one of the latter set of texts and suggest an approach to understanding Marx that emphasizes his identity as a revolutionary theorist and which, perhaps helps us better understand why he did not give priority to working out a theory of the state in a traditional theoretical manner. At the very least, I hope that this discussion will draw attention to the priority that Marx gave to his revolutionary commitment, a priority that may become neglected when Marxist thought and scholarship is detached from political practice.

Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes, 2012