ABSTRACT
The global crisis has dramatically revealed the fundamental limitations of such newer approaches—including those associated with thinkers as disparate as Habermas, Michel Foucault, and Derrida—as attempts to grasp the contemporary world. In addition to eliciting the rise of movements such as Occupy and a wave of populisms in a number of countries, the crisis and the Great Recession have given new impetus to attempts to understand contemporary historical developments critically and in an encompassing manner. The notion of postcapitalism, of socialism, as a society based on industrial labor, public ownership of the means of production and central planning, began to lose its hold on the imaginaries of many progressive intellectuals, students and workers during the crisis of Fordist capitalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Karl Marx’s mature works, then, the notion of the unique centrality of labor to social life is not a transhistorical proposition.
