Marx After Marxism

In The Left Circles of the Anglo-American academies, marxism no longer commands the prestige it did in the 1970s. ¹ Its place has been taken by varieties of post-structuralism, post-modernism, and post-colonialism. This has understandably produced a sense of a “crisis” among some marxists and spawned a body of literature aimed at defending the accepted tenets of marxism. The authors of this genre accuse other marxists of having sold out to the lures of post-modernism. ² This article, from a historian who still takes Marx seriously, is born of this same situation but contains a somewhat different response to it. My response does not pretend to be universal in scope, nor does it seek refuge in any denunciation of “Western” academic fashions. For to be a marxist is to work within European traditions of thought anyway. There cannot be, at least for a non-western marxist, any indigenist argument for ignoring theoretical movements in the West. I assume that whether or not one agrees with the likes of Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, and others, one needs to engage with their writings which have drawn some serious question marks across ideas like “emancipation,” “universal history/subject,” etc., that never looked problematic within the marxist canon. But I also think that this engagement has to issue from our particular positions. In my case, this is one of an academic intellectual who lives and works in Australia—and is therefore subject to the currents of global and local positioning that this creates—but who nevertheless also thinks out of an imaginary base in India (I say this particularly in the context of my involvement the Indian/transnational project Subaltern Studies). My remarks on rethinking the current problems of marxist history-writing should be situated in that context.