ABSTRACT
In the past two or three decades, marxist theory has been going through a remarkable, but lop-sided and uneven revival. On the one hand, it has come once again to provide the principal pole of opposition to ‘bourgeois’ social thought. On the other hand, many young intellectuals have passed through the revival and, after a heady and rapid apprenticeship, gone right out the other side again. They have ‘settled their accounts’ with marxism and moved on to fresh intellectual fields and pastures: but not quite. Postmarxism remains one of our largest and most flourishing contemporary theoretical schools. The post-marxists use marxist concepts while constantly demonstrating their inadequacy. They seem, in fact, to continue to stand on the shoulders of the very theories they have just definitely destroyed. Had marxism not existed, ‘post-marxism’ would have had to invent it, so that ‘deconstructing’ it once more would give the ‘deconstructionists’ something further to do. All this gives marxism a curious life-after-death quality. It is constantly being ‘transcended’ and ‘preserved’. There is no more instructive site from which to observe this process than that of ideology itself.
