ABSTRACT
In the last part of the twentieth century, in an era-as Jay (1988) has put it-of ‘fin de siècle socialism’, a strange, unkind, fate has overtaken Marxism. As the residual reservoirs and slivers of shattered lifeworlds are colonized by the ‘system imperatives’ of money and power (Habermas, 1987a:301-73), the Marxist critique of modernity, perversely in step with these developments, seems to have become progressively less relevant. In the late-twentieth century the commodity form has not turned out to be less total or less abstract than expected, nor have Western ‘liberal democracies’ managed to avoid new levels of triviality, vacuity and imbecility that would have befu-
dled even Marx. Capitalism today is hardly less rapacious or dehumanizing than it was in 1917. Yet as commodity relations complete their penetration and dissolution of non-Western cultures, as global economic relations become even more rationalized, and as inequalities within this world system increase, Marxism-at least in its more ‘orthodox’ Marxist-Leninist form (Lukács, 1971:1-24)—has been steadily marginalized. In the process, what used to be the definitive internal critique of a social form called capitalism-the idea of socialist transformation-has become increasingly unbelievable or has been progressively softened and diluted.
