Table Of Content
From Marxism to Post-Marxism?
From Marxism
to
Post-Marxism?
GÖRAN THERBORN
This paperback edition published by Verso 2018
First published by Verso 2008
© Göran Therborn 2008, 2018
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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Contents
INTRODUCTION: Our Time and the Age of Marx
1. Into the Twenty-first Century:
The New Parameters of Global Politics
2. Twentieth-Century Marxism and the Dialectics of Modernity
3. After Dialectics: Radical Social Theory in the North at the Dawn of the
Twenty-first Century
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION
Our Time and the Age of Marx
Karl Marx, born in 1818, is about the same age as Latin American independence.
The first calls for independence were issued in 1810, although the decisive
anticolonial battles of Mexico and Peru were fought in the 1820s. In Latin
America, preparations for bicentenary celebrations in 2010 have already begun.
Marx is of course younger than the protagonists of the Latin American liberation
struggles – younger than, for instance, the Liberator himself, Simón Bolívar,
recently revived as the spiritual guide of the revolution in Venezuela – for he
was born in the dark years of European reaction, of the Holy Alliance of
counter-revolution. But the seeds of modernity had been deeply planted in the
economic and the cultural soil of Western Europe, and Karl witnessed their first
flowering. The Communist Manifesto appeared – much ahead of its time, with its
vision of globalized capitalism and working-class struggles – during ‘the
Springtide of peoples’, the February–March revolutions of 1848.
In terms of his literary counterparts, Marx is much younger than, say, Rumi,
Dante, Cervantes or Shakespeare, and as a social and political theorist younger
than, for instance, Hobbes and Locke – who in his day were the heroes of
Cambridge academic politics – not to speak of classical sages such as Plato,
Aristotle, Confucius and Mencius.
Nowadays, it is much harder to determine how long an intellectual will last
than to predict the likely lifespan of the average human being. What can we say
of Marx’s ability to endure? As we approach the bicentennial of the man’s birth,
is the body of work that bears his name (long?) dead, dying, ageing, or
maturing? Is its resurrection possible? Certainly, it would be impossible to argue
that the founder of historical materialism is timeless or eternally young.
Any appropriate response would have to take into account the fact that Marx
was a great articulator and a multidimensional personality. He was an
intellectual, a social philosopher of the radical Enlightenment, a social
scientistcum-historian, and a political strategist and leader – first of the diasporic
Communist League and then of the International Working Men’s Association.
Over the decades, these multiple personae have been assigned vastly different
meanings and implications. Politics is inescapably a central piece of the legacy
of Marxism, but nobody has ever claimed that Marx was a major political leader.
He has served as a source of political inspiration and as a social compass for
political navigation, but Marx the politician is long dead. Few, if any, social
scientists and historians would deny that social and historical methodology,
understanding and knowledge have progressed in the 125-odd years since
Marx’s final illness put an end to his work on the manuscript of Capital. But
here matters are more complicated, because social analysis, contemporary as
well as historical, continues to draw upon ‘classics’, not only for inspiration but
also for topics of research, concepts, interesting aperçus and intriguing insights.
Emile Durkheim, Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber are coeval classics in
this sense, as are Ibn Khaldoun and Machiavelli, although several centuries
older. And great philosophers never die – they have their periods of hibernation
as well as of flowering, which usually last a stretch of time somewhere between
that of Kondratiev cycles and climatic epochs.
This book is more concerned with Marx-ism than with Marx. But as far as
Marx in our time is concerned, my impression is that he is maturing, a bit like a
good cheese or a vintage wine – not suitable for dionysiac parties or quick gulps
at the battlefront. Rather, he is a stimulating companion for profound thought
about the meanings of modernity and of human emancipation.
For his forthcoming bicentenary, I would propose three toasts. First, to Karl
Marx as a proponent of emancipatory reason, of a rationalist scrutiny of the
world, with a commitment to human freedom from exploitation and oppression.
Second, to his historical materialist approach to social analysis – in other words,
to his understanding of the present as history, with particular attention paid to the
living and working conditions of ordinary people and to the economic and
political materiality of power – an approach not to be followed as if laid out in a
manual, but rather as a broad directive accompanied by the motivation to pursue
it further. Third, Karl should be celebrated for his dialectical openness – his
sensitivity to, and comprehension of, contradictions, antimonies and conflicts in
social life.
Marx-ism has, I think, an uncertain future, for reasons explained below. But
