Post-Marxism

If Marxism is what comes after Marx, post-Marxism is what comes after Marxism as a theory and practice in its organised and relatively disciplined form characteristic of the twentieth century. Post-Marxism can be seen as an ex post facto category referring to developments in and after Marxism with the 1980s crisis of Marxism, the collapse of Eurocommunism, and the collapse of the Soviet empire. Post-Marxism is highly varied and contradictory in nature; it corresponds with the postmodern sense that anything goes, in theory, that any theory goes with any other theory. At the same time, post-Marxism can be more Marxist than the Marxists. The idea of post-Marxism has a complicated semantic relationship with the idea of the postmodern. Just as postmodern theory can place the emphasis on either of the two terms against the other—some postmoderns have a stronger sense of being post, or after, others of remaining in reviving modernity or modernism—so with post-Marxism. Some views in this field are more vehemently post, or after Marx or Marxism; others revive Marx or Marxism as a universal theory of the modern.

The historical semantics involved are also suggestive. In the first place, the idea of post-Marx is either truistic or ironic: We are, of course, after Marx; even the Marxists are after Marx. The “post” refers to the sense that something significant has changed since Marx; yet post-Marxism also seems often to involve a Marxist orthodoxy of a kind less frequently encountered since the 1930s or 1960s. The idea of post-Marxism therefore logically follows that of the postmodern, but with these further refractions, that Marxism (or Marx's theory) is thought to be the fundamental critique of modernity. If Marx is the great modern or modernist, and we are now after modernism, then we are also after Marx, so we must all be post-Marxist. More specifically, if, as in the Soviet experience, Marx and Marxism are identified with a particular, failed, alternative path to modernity, then for the peoples of the old Soviet empire we are definitionally post-Marxist, because postcommunist. In addition, [Page 579]the idea of post-Marxism can be aligned with the earlier sociological notion of postindustrialism and the more recent category of poststructuralism, where pluralism claimed to replace the alleged monism of structure.

So where does the post-Marxist move begin, theoretically? One obvious point indicating the shift beyond Marxism is in the work of Michel Foucault, or at least its reception, in the Foucault effect. One aspect of the Foucault effect is the opening up of orthodox Marxism to methodological pluralism. Even if Foucault's power ontology is ultimately misleading, Foucault practically pluralises power. Beyond the economic sphere or the point of production, there are other institutions based on different aspects of power, on the model of Bentham's Panopticon rather than the image of the factory in Marx's Capital. Foucault's effect for orthodox Marxists in the 1970s and after is a belated echo of the Weber effect on nascent critical theory in the1920s, where rationalisation or bureaucratisation is a world historic problem alongside commodification, alienation, or capitalism. It is impossible, however, to imagine the Foucault effect or the extraordinary hegemony of his influence without contemplating the incredible influence of French Marxism in this period. Foucault happened, for the Anglo Left, because he followed Louis Althusser. If Foucault was German, his influence would have been negligible. While Foucault's reception in the United States was mediated differently, in terms of the history of systems of thought and especially with reference to law, discourse, and sexuality, in Great Britain and Australia, Foucault was presented as what came next for Marxists after the crisis of Marxism.

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