ABSTRACT
I will make six points telegraphically. First: Early and late, Marx painstakingly established a definition for the term “social” which involved a rationalization of the merely individual. To grasp this rationalization is class-consciousness. To be able to use it is the Enlightenment project of the public use of reason, but with the proletarian rather than a bourgeois subject. When, however, Marx used the word social or society to project or describe the goal of such a public use of reason he seemed to be relying on an unresearched, incoherent, humanist notion. In the gap between these two uses of the “social,” systemic Marxisms bloom, fester and fail. Any reformist critique of Marxism which further rationalizes the social ignores and runs the same risk. 1
