Beyond Marxism?

The ‘Crisis of Marxism’ and the Post-Marxist Moment

Stathis Kouvelakis

Forthcoming In Alex Callinicos, Stathis Kouvelakis, Lucia Pradella (eds.), Handbook of Marxism
and Postmarxism, Routledge, 2020

Two centuries after his birth, Marx’s image in the mainstream media and academic circles can
be summed up by the motto “Marx is alive but Marxism is dead”. The Marx who is still alive is
usually presented as an “economist” who provided a lucid view of capitalism and of its internal
contradictions. This view has periodically re-emerged in the decades that followed the
collapse of the Soviet bloc: each time a crisis breaks out, representatives of the mainstream
confess that somehow “Marx was right”, or, at least, more lucid than those economists who,
once more, have proved unable to foresee the coming crisis and its long-term effects in
contemporary societies. Thus, shortly after the start of the 2008 recession, Nouriel Roubini, a
senior economist for the Clinton administration, the IMF and the World Bank, declared to the
Wall Street Journal: “Karl Marx had it right. At some point, capitalism can destroy itself”
(Roubini 2011). More recently, commenting on the impact of new digital technologies, the
Bank of England governor Mark Carney said that “we have exactly the same dynamics as
existed 150 years ago – when Karl Marx was scribbling the Communist Manifesto” (Drury
2018). Debatable as they might be in terms of their analytical value, such statements reveal
however that the idea of a structural contradiction within capitalism still seems inseparable
from the name of the author of Capital.

The unexpected international success of the French economist Thomas Piketty’s book Capital
in the Twenty-first Century (Piketty 2014) is a deeper symptom of the impact of the Great
Recession on mainstream public opinion. Piketty, a self-avowedly non-Marxist supporter of
social-democracy, demonstrates with a wealth of empirical data a tendency to the
concentration of wealth that is inherent to the “normal” functioning of capitalism. The
tendential divergence between the rate of return to capital and the rate of growth leads to
social polarization if the state doesn’t intervene, via taxation, to attenuate the effects of the
accumulation of assets at the top of the social ladder. By contesting the belief in the
progressive character of this system, a cornerstone of bourgeois common sense since Bernard
Mandeville and Adam Smith, this approach raises an even more serious challenge to the
legitimacy of the system than the simple recognition of the inevitability of crises.

Piketty’s conclusion is that taxing wealth is necessary to avoid the economic and social
instability fuelled by the polarization within advanced Western societies between a tiny
minority of asset-owners and the working majority. What in previous circumstances would
look like a moderate social-democratic redistributionist proposal, and indeed considered as
such by Piketty’s critics from the left (Duménil and Lévy 2014, Duménil and Lévy 2015, Lordon
2015), proved nevertheless sufficient for the defenders of neoliberal orthodoxy to make its
author appear as a “modern Marx” (The Economist 2014). It is true that, despite Piketty’s firm
denial of any Marxian or Marxist influence (Chotiner 2014), the title of the book, as well as its

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length and long-term historical perspective, indicates at least an implicit ambition to compete
with the 19th century German thinker. Its success – nearly three million copies sold worldwide
– resonated strongly with the anti-inequality agenda put forward by the Occupy movement.
It confirmed the loss of legitimacy of neoliberalism in the very area in which it has most
successfully captured the public mind in its heyday.

The paradox of this renewed acceptance of Marx’s vision of capitalism is that it goes together
with an almost consensual rejection of any version of the political project defended by its
author. The reasons are all too obvious: the collapse of the regimes that claimed his legacy
combined with the turn towards a national but nevertheless ruthless form of capitalism where
parties claiming to be “communist” are still in power – with Cuba standing (temporarily?) as a
solitary exception. The weekly Die Zeit, Germany’s most serious outlet of the liberal left,
summed up this common sense of the time in its dossier published under the characteristic
title “Hatte Marx doch recht?” (Was Marx right?). The guiding line was that “despite all the
new enthusiasm for Marx, history teaches that his dream of the overthrow of circumstances
in reality ended catastrophically. For the working class, it usually turned out badly when it
brought about the revolution. In the Russia of Lenin and Stalin, in Cuba or, in this century, in
Venezuela. In China, too, workers first had to suffer hard and pay millions in their lives before
the market opened their doors” (Nienhaus 2017).

Still, according to the same publicist, Marx might prove useful even at a political level by
providing capitalism with a brake on its own self-destructive tendency, which the rising forces
of right-wing “populism” can only reinforce:

It becomes more pleasant for all when the establishment reacts in fear of the masses’
revenge. After the world wars of the 20th century, many countries discovered a way to
redistribute the profits of capitalism, harnessing its power to make it usable for
everyone: the interventionist state. So far, nations have resisted the tendency of
capitalism to self-destruction. But today, a remarkably high number of people are
withdrawing from the system: managers, financial jugglers, politicians. Marx would
have unmasked as a sham America’s current turn to protectionism. The world should
still make an effort to continue to discredit Marx, the revolutionary predictor. To do
that, one should necessarily read Marx, the analyst, and Marx, the world economist
(Nienhaus 2017).

The reference to Marx in the current mainstream discourse thus testifies its own internal
contradiction: the perception of capitalism’s structural deficiencies, the loss of legitimacy of
the policies implemented since the Reagan-Thatcher era – even in the eyes of some fractions
of the elite – only strengthen the belief in the insuperable character of the system. The
ultimate proof lies in the fact that the only conceivable usefulness of the most radical critique
ever launched against this system is to prevent its “self-destruction”, i.e. to serve its
perpetuation. Even left social scientists such as Wolfgang Streeck, a sociologist of Weberian
inspiration, cannot see any alternative to the current state of crisis. His notion of an “end of
capitalism” points exactly to this situation: an endless Götterdämmerung of capitalism during
which it goes down a path of continuous decay with no solution in sight (Streeck 2016 57-58).
This situation, according to Streeck, derives from a structural factor, i.e. the capacity of a
globalized and finance-dominated capitalism to prevent the emergence of forces able to

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challenge the system as such. His conclusion takes the form of an aporia: although the
question of an alternative to capitalism, and not simply of a better “variety” of it, should be
left open, there seems to be no effective agency capable of taking on such an endeavour
(Streeck 2016, 235).

The “Crisis of Marxism”

This pervasive pessimism could be interpreted as a consequence of the collapse of Soviet

communism, a dark variant of the (in)famous “end of History” thesis formulated by Francis
Fukuyama in the immediate aftermath of the event. A longer-term historical perspective
shows however that the aporia of the “desirable yet impossible alternative” significantly
predates the demise of “really existing socialism”. Even more interestingly, it came from
within Marxism and was formulated by some of the main protagonists of the theoretical
debates of the 1960s and 1970. In November 1977, at a conference organized by the Italian
dissident communist daily Il manifesto, its director Rossana Rossanda declared in her opening
statement that “the very idea of socialism, not as a generic aspiration but as a theory of
society, a different mode of organization of human existence, is fading from view” (Rossanda
1977). According to Rossanda, this crisis of the perspectives of the labour movement “goes
beyond the purely political domain and invests the realm of theory itself. It is a crisis of
Marxism, of which the nouveaux philosophes are the caricature, but which is experienced by
immense masses as an unacknowledged reality. Marxism – not as a body of theoretical or
philosophical thought, but as the great idealistic force that was changing the world – is now
groaning under the weight of this this history”. However, for her, “whatever the nature of the
post-revolutionary societies [of ‘really existing socialism’], they can and must be interpreted
and that Marxism offers a reliable instrument for doing this.” To be up to this task, Marxism
needs to understand that “the Gulag is the product neither of a philosophy nor of a pure idea
of power and politics”. Hence the necessity to analyse the economic and social processes that
unfolded in the years following the October revolution, instead of recycling the abstract
debates on the Leninist party and on “relation between the vanguard and the masses.”

In his own intervention, which became the most famous of this conference, Louis Althusser
confirmed Rossanda’s diagnosis of the conjuncture while offering a much darker view of the
capacity of Marxism to overcome its crisis. For him, “something has ‘snapped’ in the history
of the labour movement between its past and present, something which makes its future
unsure” (Althusser 1977). This rupture is referred to the fact that “there no longer exists in
the minds of the masses any ‘achieved ideal,’ any really living reference for socialism.” The
“crisis of Marxism” originates in the Stalinist era, during which Marxism was entrenched into
a series of ossified formulae, but Stalinism also blocked it insofar as it seemed able to provide
practical solutions and build “socialism in one country,” eventually extending it to an entire
geopolitical bloc.

However, contrary to Rossanda, the French philosopher seems more than doubtful concerning
the capacity of Marxism to “provid[e] a really satisfactory... explanation of a history which
was, after all, made in [its] name” – “almost an impossibility” as he states it. The reason for
that lies ultimately within Marxism, and cannot, as suggested by Rossanda, be resolved by the
study of historical conjunctures in the light of Marxist categories. In 1973, in his first – and
very belated – attempt to provide an explanation for this phenomenon, Althusser had

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characterized Stalinism as an essentially theoretical “deviation” which should be analysed as
the “posthumous revenge of the Second International, as a revival of its main tendency”, that
is as a “special form” of “economism” (Althusser 1976, 89). Four years later, the roots of the
problem are located in the writings of Marx, Lenin and Gramsci. The previous self-confident
affirmations on Marxism as the “new science of the continent History” (Althusser 1971, 15)
gives way to the enumeration of a seemingly endless series of “gaps” and “enigmas”. The
theoretical unity of Capital is seen as “largely fictitious” and its theory of exploitation
suspected of carrying a “restrictive conception… hindering the broadening of the forms of the
whole working class and people’s struggle” (Althusser 1977). The status of philosophy and of
dialectics in Marx is an “enigma”, as is his relation to Hegel. No theory of the state, nor of the
workers organisations is to be found in Marx, Lenin or in the entire “Marxist heritage”.
Gramsci’s attempt to fill those gaps with the “little equations” of the Prison Notebooks on
hegemony (as a combination of force and consent) just sound “pathetic”.

This systematic demolition makes the statements on the “crisis of Marxism” as a moment of
“possible liberation and renewal” appear as purely rhetorical. In a private letter sent a few
months later to his friend Merab Mamardachvili, Althusser refers to his intervention at the
Venice conference as a “masked talk”, a desperate attempt to “dyke up the waters somewhat”
(Althusser 2006, 3). He discounts his own work as nothing more than “a little, typically French
justification, in a neat little rationalism bolstered with a few references (Cavaillès, Bachelard,
Canguilhem, and, behind them, a bit of the Spinoza-Hegel tradition), for Marxism's (historical
materialism's) pretension to being a science” (Althusser 2006, 3). He also confesses that he’s
tempted by a definitive retreat to silence, since what he could work on is “nothing of
importance in a time when one must be armed with enough concrete knowledge in order to
be able to speak of things like the state, the economic crisis, organisations, the ‘socialist’
countries, etc. I don’t have this knowledge and I have to, like Marx in 1852, ‘begin again at the
beginning,’ but it’s late for this, given my age, fatigue, lassitude, and also solitude” (Althusser
2006, 5).

This “radical loss of morale”, to quote Perry Anderson’s words (Anderson 1983, 29), should
not be seen as an individual case – despite the highly tragic dimension of Althusser’s destiny
– but rather as a symptom of an epochal turn in the conjuncture. The course of events showed
that Althusser and those who spoke of the “general crisis of Marxism” (Haider and King 2017)
had foreseen the downturn of the revolutionary energies more clearly than those who, like
Anderson, saw it as a phenomenon “confined to Latin Europe”, essentially caused by the
defeat of the Eurocommunist strategy pursued by the local Communist parties and supported
by most of the Marxist intelligentsia of those countries (Anderson, 1983 76-77). The inglorious
collapse of the Eastern European “really existing socialism,” followed by the meltdown of the
Western Communist parties, the turn to capitalism of the Third World “socialist” or “non-
aligned” regimes (first and foremost of China) and the accelerated integration of social-
democracy in the neoliberal order, signalled the end of the historical cycle initiated by the
October revolution. The idea of Marxism as a reflective form of unity of revolutionary theory
and praxis, and of communism as the “real movement which abolishes the present state of
things”, as Marx and Engels famously put it in the German Ideology (CW 5: 49), became more
problematic than ever before. The “crisis of Marxism” was over, leaving the future perspective
of Marxism in a state of radical uncertainty.

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The “Post-Marxist” Moment
In a way, Anderson’s judgment castigating “the veritable débandade of so many leading
French thinkers of the Left since 1976” (Anderson 1983 32) has been vindicated. Indeed, unlike
its predecessor of the late 19th-early 20th century, sparked by the controversy around Eduard
Bernstein’s “revisionism”, the late 20th century “crisis of Marxism” produced little of
significance compared to the controversies which made Marxism a living tradition throughout
its history (Kouvelakis 2008a). In his 1983 essay, Anderson had already pointed out that what
Marxism in crisis shared with its predecessor (“Western Marxism” in the Andersonian
terminology) was the “poverty of strategy” (Anderson 1983, 28). More recently, Daniel
Bensaïd elaborated on the “eclipse of strategic reason” as the central dimension of Marxism’s
retreat from the 1980s onwards (Bensaïd 2007). What now appears clear is that the definitive
collapse of Marxist “orthodoxy” – which only survives as a farcical pastiche in the institutes of
the Chinese CP – also led to the dislocation of the various forms of “heterodoxy”, if not as
purely intellectual arguments at least as forces capable of intervening in the course of events.

Let’s pursue the comparison between the two “fin-de-siècle” crises of Marxism a bit further.
The late 19th century “revisionist” attack on the official doctrine of German Social Democracy
– the model party of the entire international socialist movement – triggered a high-profile
debate on the nature of the transformations of contemporary capitalism, the validity of the
Zusammenbruchstheorie (“breakdown theory”) as the cornerstone of the “orthodox”
strategy, the evolution of class structure in Western societies, the role of mass action,
cooperatives, reforms and elections. These were the issues on which Bernstein, Hilferding,
Kautsky, Labriola, Luxemburg, Sorel and many others (including major non-Marxist
intellectuals such as Benedetto Croce and Werner Sombart) argued, drawing antagonistic
approaches with long-lasting consequences within Marxism and the workers movement.

Nothing of that sort came out of the “crisis of Marxism” of the late 1970s and early 1980s. As
can be seen from the interventions of Rossanda and Althusser that set the terms of the
debate, at no moment was the shared diagnosis of the strategic impasse in the West and the
failure of Stalinism and its avatars in the East situated within the wider perspective of the
ongoing transformation of capitalism on a world scale. The term “capitalism” is indeed
remarkably absent from those exchanges, anticipating its eclipse from academic and public
debate in the period that followed. Indeed, what came quickly to prevail, at least in Latin
Europe and in the areas where Marxism was the most influential in the previous period, is
Althusser’s theoreticist approach, which located the reasons of the crisis in the “gaps” and
“enigmas” of the Marxian and Marxist canon. Rossanda’s call for a historical-materialist
analysis of the conjunctures that led to the emergence of Stalinism and the defeat of socialist
revolution in the West remained unanswered. Rather than the promised reflective and self-
critical renewal, the introverted character of the debate launched by the “crisis of Marxism”
internalized and amplified the historical defeat of which it was both an anticipatory sign and
a symptom.

It then comes as no surprise that the “new revisionism” that emerged from that crisis, under
the label of “Post-Marxism”, amounted to a form of disintegration from within of the
dominant Western Marxist paradigm of the previous period, that is, Althusserianism. In the
radically transformed “post-modern” atmosphere of the 1980s and after, the search for the
ultimate unity of a “structured totality” came to be seen as at best irrelevant, and most

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commonly as an expression of a desire for “closure” that can only pave the way to
“totalitarianism”. The “overdetermination” of conjunctures becomes pure “contingency”, the
“materiality of ideology” is turned into a discourse-based ontology of the “social”
guaranteeing its radical “indeterminacy”. As Fredric Jameson underlined, this move should
itself be seen as part of the broader shift from what is called “structuralism” to “post-
structuralism”, a shift that marks the passage to a new period at the political, the cultural and
the economic levels. The central notions of the 1960s theoretical revolution, from semiotics
and structural anthropology to anti-humanist Marxism, “fall-back into a now absolutely
fragmented and anarchic social reality (…), as so many more pieces of material junk among all
the other rusting and superannuated apparatuses and buildings that litter the commodity
landscape and that strew the ‘collage city’, the ‘delirious New York’ of a postmodernist late
capitalism in full crisis” (Jameson 1984, 506).

Let us examine more closely how these themes have played out in what should undoubtedly
be considered as the manifesto of this 1980s “Post-Marxism,” Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe 1985)1.

Their starting point is quite similar to Bernstein’s “revisionism”: the question of “revolutionary
agency”, with its “historical-sociological” and political-strategic implications. Marxism’s
unsurmountable flaw, according to Laclau and Mouffe, is to consider as a given the existence
of a unified social subject, the working class, in charge of a historical mission, the revolutionary
overthrow of capitalism. This vision is grounded in a deterministic vision of social relations,
which sees the centrality of class struggle (and the corresponding form of consciousness) as
guaranteed by the “determination in the last resort by the economy.” In a word, Marxism is
guilty of "essentialism" and, as a consequence, increasingly unable to grasp the forms of
subjectivation that prevail in contemporary conjunctures. "Essentialism" is actually nothing
more than an attempt, as illusory on the analytical plane as it is vain at a practical level, to fill
the constitutive indeterminacy of the social and the ensuing decentred character of the forms
of subjectivation. No wonder then that the working class never fulfilled its alleged historical
mission. Marxism is thus left in disarray when confronted with the fragmented and open
configuration of the “new social movements” (such as feminism, ecology, sexual and ethnic
minorities), irreducible to any class essentialism.

Even worse, Marxism should also be held responsible both for the authoritarianism inherent
in the Leninist type of organization and for the totalitarian regimes that claimed its legacy. A
number of features, all intrinsic to Marxian and Marxist theory, has inevitably led to this
historical disaster. At first, class essentialism cannot be dissociated from a purely instrumental
conception of democracy and of civil liberties. Marxists are expected to fight for them as long
as they are useful for them seizing power, but, as such, their class nature is seen as
irretrievably “bourgeois”. Therefore, once in power, the proletariat “would be the first to

1
Although attributed to a large number of thinkers – the Wikipedia article on the notion lists no less than 35
names, even very unlikely ones (Abdullah Öcalan, Pierre Bourdieu or Paulo Freire) - most of those who claimed
the label of “Post-Marxism” came from the Althusserian tradition: Etienne Balibar, Barry Hindess, Paul Hirst,
Gareth Stedman-Jones to name a few. Most of the themes of post-Marxism, and of the broader ‘post-
structuralist’ constellation can be identified in currents coming from other Marxist backgrounds, the such as
Italian post-operaismo, Indian “subaltern studies”, versions of post-colonialism etc. The shared prefix “post” is
an unfallible sign of their common belonging to the constellation of “post-structuralism”, or, better even, of the
“postmodern condition” to quote Jean-François Lyotard’s original formulation (Lyotard 1984).

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abolish them once the ‘bourgeois-democratic’ stage [of the revolution] was completed”
(Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 55). Secondly, Marxism extends the “ontological primacy granted to
the working class” from the social to the political level. The Leninist party, and, eventually, the
state dominated by that party, act as the sole legitimate leadership of the broader masses
regrouped under the hegemony of the revolutionary class. Hence a “predominantly external
and manipulative character” of the leadership, displaying “an increasingly authoritarian
practice of politics” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 56). But this ontological primacy of class was
also extended to an epistemological privilege. The party becomes the depository not only of
political correctness but also of science. Once Marxists are in power, their vision led directly
to totalitarianism, defined as the forced unification of law, power and knowledge under the
auspices of a “unitary people” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 187). Laclau and Mouffe emphasize
that the “possibility of the authoritarian turn was, in some way, present from the beginning
of the Marxist orthodoxy; that is to say, from the moment, in which a limited actor – the
working class – was raised to the status of a ‘universal class’ ” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 57).
Marxism is doomed to disaster by its desire to “suture” the social, that is, to reduce – if
necessary through violence – its constitutive openness under a single, unitary, meaning,
provided by the alleged truth of revolutionary class consciousness.

As opposed to Marxism, Post-Marxism as defined by Laclau and Mouffe categorically rejects

class determinism to emphasize the constitutive role of discursive articulations and the
indeterminacy of the social. Discourse holds a sort of ontological primacy since “our analysis
rejects the distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices” (Laclau and Mouffe
1985, 107) insofar as nothing can be considered as external to discourse and/or irreducible to
discursive articulations – including the economy (76-77). As a notion, “discourse” is thus
equivalent to the Heideggerian “Being” (filtered by Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’), whose
meaning remains always hidden, and therefore adequate to the “impossibility of the real”
(Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 129), the impossibility of achieving the fullness of a “presence”, of
a fixed essence that would amount to its closure. It is only through the practice of discursive
articulation that the openness of the social can give rise to forms of political subjectivation,
but always and solely in a contingent, partial and temporary mode. “Hegemony” is the proper
name of this practice: it consists in establishing chains of equivalence between the
heterogeneous demands emerging from the social and transforms the very identity of the
terms that come under this articulatory relation. This approach thus makes intelligible the
irreducible plurality of political subjects that succeed the defunct centrality of workers while
contributing positively to their emergence.

Liberal Democracy as the Ultimate Horizon

Laclau’s and Mouffe’s theoretical ambition goes however further than an epistemological
claim. The task they attribute to Post-Marxism is to turn the theory and practice of hegemony
decisively in the direction of democracy. The relation between the two terms appears indeed
as an ambivalent one, subjected to a tension between a “democratic and an authoritarian
practice of hegemony” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 57). From the outset the political space of
modernity appears as divided between these two modes of subjectivity. The modern political
actor corresponds to a “popular subject position”, constituted by the chain of equivalence
defining an “us” as opposed to “them”. Its logic is the two of an antagonism. But antagonism
is irreducibly plural, it cannot be subsumed under any single, allegedly “objective”,

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contradiction. The “democratic subject position” recognizes this impossibility and opens up a
common space, in which these antagonisms can only coalesce in a partial and contingent way
through their articulation with other elements. Ecological, feminist, national or workers’
movements can therefore take many, sometimes diverging, forms depending on the way they
are discursively articulated. The logic of the “democratic subject position” isn’t the two but
the many, the radical pluralism of identities: “pluralism is radical only to the extent that each
term of this plurality of identities finds within itself the principle of its own validity” (Laclau
and Mouffe 1985, 167). We are here in the field of the multiplicity of Wittgensteinian
“language games” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 179) understood as a proliferation of discursive
operations across an increasingly complex social terrain made of fragmented and autonomous
spheres. This multiplicity should be preserved at all costs since its negation would amount to
that “suture of the social”, which is the original sin of Marxism but, also, as we shall now see,
of right-wing authoritarianism.

This dual character of the political space leads therefore to a fundamental consequence: the
relation between the two modes of political subjectivity is of complementarity but also of
tension. The creative character of politics requires the deployment of the logic of equivalence.
But the antagonism carried by that logic can potentially constitute a threat to pluralism, and,
as a consequence to democracy as the common ground which allows the differentiation (of
“separation of spaces”) that is required by the construction of equivalences to operate.
Equivalence and plurality need therefore to limit each other, and, most significantly, the first
should never pretend, or be allowed, to absorb the second. This imperative can also be
formulated as the necessity to “balance” equivalence by autonomy, or “equality” by “liberty”.
It doesn’t take much effort to recognise here the terms in which liberalism has always framed
the question of democracy: the threat of an egalitarian democracy that would undermine the
“separation of spaces” – in Marxist terms the (relative) separation of the political and the
economic as the distinctive dimension of capitalism2 – should be removed, or at least
contained, in order to preserve the space of liberty. As stated by Laclau and Mouffe,

the demand for equality is not sufficient, but needs to be balanced by the demand for
liberty, which leads up to speak of a radical and plural democracy. A radical and non-
plural democracy would be one which constituted one single space of equality on the
basis of the unlimited operation of the logic of equivalence and did not recognize the
irreducible moment of plurality of spaces. This principle of the separation of spaces us
the basis of the demand of liberty. It is within it that the principle of pluralism resides
and that the project for a plural democracy can link up with the logic of liberalism
(Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 184).

The spectre looming behind this threat is nothing else than revolution, not only socialist
revolutions but also the French Revolution – at least in its Jacobin moment3 – held as equally

2
See Wood, 1981.
3
Laclau and Mouffe only praise the French Revolution, following Hannah Arendt, François Furet and Claude
Lefort to whom they refer themselves, for its “1789 moment”, that is for inaugurating a “new mode of institution
of the social”, symbolized by the Declaration of the Rights of Man seen as providing the discursive basis for the
“struggles for political liberty” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 155). This is typically the traditional liberal view of the
Revolution, always carefully separating the “good” 1789 moment from the “bad” 1793 one, the former
representing the conquest of liberty and the latter standing for the drift toward ‘tyranny’ and ‘totalitarianism’.

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responsible for the totalitarian path eventually pursued by Stalinism. It is essential to
understand, according to the authors of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, that the “logic of
totalitarianism” is a “new possibility which arises in the very terrain of democracy” (Laclau and
Mouffe 1985, 186). Its impulse comes from the tendency of the logic of equivalence to expand,
and this happens when “it ceases to be considered as one political space among others and
comes to be seen as the centre, which organizes and subordinates all other spaces” (186). As
history has shown, “every attempt to establish a definitive suture and to deny the radically
open character of the social which the logic of democracy institutes leads to what [Claude]
Lefort designates as ‘totalitarianism’ ” (187). This is why every temptation to seek “a nodal
point around which the social fabric can be reconstituted” should be categorically rejected
(188). But this is precisely what the “classic concept of revolution, cast in the Jacobin mould”
is about, since “it implied the foundational character of the revolutionary act, the institution
of a point of concentration of power from which society could be ‘rationally’ reorganized. This
is the perspective which is incompatible with the plurality and the opening which a radical
democracy requires” (177-178). Such a perspective is equally shared by Marxism and
Jacobinism: “this change introduced by Marxism [class] into the principle of social division
maintains unaltered an essential component of the Jacobin imaginary: the postulation of one
foundational moment of rupture, and of a unique space in which the political is constituted”
(152).

‘Totalitarianism’ exists however also in a symmetrical right-wing version, that of fascism’s

“authoritarian fixing of the social order” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 188). Totalitarianism as
such is therefore “a political logic and not a type of social organisation” and this is “proved by
the fact that it cannot be ascribed to a particular political orientation” (187). This position is
the logical consequence of the radical decoupling of the political from any socio-economic
determination and its reduction to a discursive construction. Fascism and communism differ
to the extent that they represent different “particular political orientations”, corresponding
to different “types of social organisation”, however this opposition is of secondary importance
(hence the use of the term ‘particular’ to refer to their respective ‘political orientations’)
compared to what both share: a common desire “to establish a definitive suture and to deny
the open character of the social which the logic of democracy institutes” (187). It is not difficult
to trace in this “anti-totalitarianism” a variant of the Cold-War discourse that became
dominant during the Thatcher-Reagan era. Far from being a new (or even a 20th century)
construction this anti-totalitarianism is the heir a liberal tradition descending in a straight line
from Burke’s and Tocqueville’s view of the French Revolution as a catastrophe resulting from
a desire to rebuild society from scratch, i.e. according to “abstractions” and “preconceived
systems” (Losurdo 2015).

The “radicality” of “radical democracy”, as Laclau and Mouffe name their project, should
therefore not be confused with any notion of “revolution.” They make it clear that by the term
“radical alternative” they are “evidently not referring to a ‘revolutionary alternative’, involving
the violent overthrow of the existing state, but to a deepening and articulation of a variety of
antagonisms, within both the State and civil society, which allows a ‘war of position’ against
the dominant hegemonic forms” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 75). Rather than Gramsci, the
literal but actually superficial reference, the model for this “war of position” is provided by
Alexis de Tocqueville’s notion of “democratic revolution” as a movement of expansion of
rights into new spheres within the limits imposed by the respect of “pluralism” and of the

9
“separation of spheres” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 160-163). This “revolution” was conceived
by the French liberal thinker as the movement of a gradual but continuous erosion of
traditional hierarchies, as a movement of permanent mobility and circulation of individuals
and wealth across the social ladder. Likewise, for the theorists of Post-Marxism, it allows the
questioning of “relations of subordination” both by “old” and “new” social movements and
the extension of “rights” to new fields. The “new social movements” (ecology, feminism,
minorities) appear however as the most appropriate vehicles for such a strategy, since they
are explicitly based on non-class principles and flexible modes of identity and alliance
formation. They appear therefore as the driving social force within societies characterized by
an increasing autonomization of social activities. However, really existing workers struggles
(as opposed to the illusory messianic vision of the proletariat) can and should also be
understood in that way. These struggles, dismissed as “reformist” by Marxists, “correspond
more in reality to the mode adopted by the mobilisations of the industrial proletariat than do
the more radical earlier struggles” (157). Their modernity lies in the fact that, contrary to the
radically hostile to capitalism visions of the semi-artisans still caught in the preindustrial
imaginary depicted by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, “the
relations of subordination between workers and capitalists are thus to a certain extent
absorbed as legitimate differential positions in a unified discursive space” (157).

This last formulation is particularly revealing of the way “radical democracy” is ultimately
understood as a struggle between “logics” contesting existing forms of inequality and
subordination but always within an unchanged overall framework. This unnamed totality
turns out being nothing else than capitalism, the system in which the “legitimate differential
positions” of workers and capitalist can as it were persist in their being. Indeed, only capitalism
allows the “openness of the social” based on the “separation of spheres which constitutes the
indispensable condition for political pluralism, or, in other terms, for the “institutional
diversity and complexity which characterizes a democratic society” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985,
190-191). It is therefore perfectly consistent with their line of thought to define “the task of
the Left” as a move “to deepen and expand [liberal-democratic ideology] in the direction of a
radical and plural democracy” (176). The claim made twice, and almost in passing, about the
necessity to “put an end to the capitalist relations of production”, as “one of the components
of a project for radical democracy” (178) and without this entailing the “elimination of other
inequalities” as its consequence (192), appears thus as little more than a rhetorical gesture
aimed at giving a residual left-wing flavour to an enterprise of systematic demolition of the
very idea of anticapitalism as the basis for any consistent emancipatory project.

The Revenge of Totalization

Laclau’s and Mouffe’s 1985 book and the work that followed on “agonism” and “populist
reason” had a long-lasting impact not only in the intellectual debate but also in the new
political sequence opened-up by the 2008 crisis, as testified by the rise of “left-populist”
movements in Europe such as Podemos and France Insoumise. Many of its themes are shared
other theorists who, notwithstanding divergent theoretical frameworks and political
conclusions, found themselves in agreement with what it breaks from – class politics, the
critique of political economy – as well as with some of the positive elements that take centre

10
stage: a version of the “linguistic turn” and the rehabilitation of the categories of political
liberalism. Habermas’s theory of “communicative action”, Honneth’s “politics of recognition”,
Foucault’s notions of “power” and “discursive formations” (but also his late fascination with
ordoliberalism) are obvious cases of such an evolution. In their work from the 1980s onwards,
even figures who kept closer ties with Marxism and anticapitalism such as Toni Negri followed
a partly convergent trajectory, elaborating on themes such as “immaterial labour”, the
“multitude” as the new subject of politics and the expansion at the world-scale of the US
constitution as the horizon of social movements in the new reality of an allegedly post-
imperialist and post-national “Empire”. “Post-Marxism” became thus the name of a broader
constellation that expressed a substantial part of the “objective Spirit”, to quote Hegel’s term,
of the historical moment marked by the defeat of the revolutions of the 20 th century.
Not that everyone agreed with this turn of events. The Post-Marxism advocated by Laclau and
Mouffe was, as could be expected, met by strong rebuttals coming from Marxist theorists,
with Ellen Meiksins Wood and Norman Geras making the most significant contributions (Wood
1986, Geras 1990). What came essentially under criticism was their distorted understanding
of Marxist concepts and their thinly disguised belief in the virtues of liberal democracy. The
paradox here is that, despite the intensity of the polemics, Marxists and Post-Marxists shared
the same terrain, that of a conceptual discussion moving in the terrain of intellectual history
and Marxist theory, with some sparse references to the political conjuncture of the moment
in order to denounce the toothless politics attributed to Post-Marxists. Thus, although most
of the Marxist reaction to Post-Marxism was driven by a strong rejection of Althusser4, it
adopted de facto the “theoreticist” approach of the “crisis of Marxism” expressed by the
French philosopher. These polemics have little, if anything, to offer concerning the
transformations capitalism, the state and the social structure were undergoing in the 1980s.
At a moment of deep retreat of the left and of social movements, critical thinking and
emancipatory politics came out even weaker from the late 20th century “crisis of Marxism”.

A new picture only started emerging when the contradiction created by the fall of “really
existing socialism” and the now unchallenged domination of neoliberal capitalism at a global
scale began to unfold. Various trends, each with a distinctive temporality, converged, shifting
gradually the terms of the debate.

The first of these is the dissent that developed from within the Post-Marxist constellation. Its
most significant expression was Slavoj Žižek’s turn towards a critique of the theoretical matrix
from which his previous work had developed (Žižek 1999, Butler, Laclau and Žižek 2000).
Although Žižek’s entire trajectory is grounded on the writings of Althusser and Lacan, his
fondness for Hegel and for dialectical thinking always made him always appear as a highly
atypical post-structuralist. From the late 1990s onwards, he moved to an internal but
systematic contestation of the positions of Laclau and Mouffe, enlarged to those of other
figures such as Judith Butler or Jacques Rancière. Starting from a notion assimilating
subjectivity to the Hegelian labour of negativity, Žižek now affirms the necessity of a global
alternative to capitalism. He thus rejects the compulsive Post-Marxist insistence on the radical
“openness” and “indeterminacy” of the social, emphasizing that capitalism acts as the force
closing violently the possibilities of the Real by imposing the centrality of class antagonism. He
thus comes to share Fredric Jameson’s longstanding view that totalisation isn’t a matter of

4
For a different perspective see however Elliott 1986.

11
choice but something imposed by the existing, albeit unrepresentable, totality that is
capitalism.

The closure inherent in the prevailing social order can only be broken by the foundational act
of a revolutionary subject, who bets on the constitutive void of a given situation, a vision
reminding us of Sartre’s notion of freedom as an act bringing nothingness to the world,
mediated by Alain Badiou’s theory of the Event. Leninist politics is thus rehabilitated, much to
the chagrin of Laclau, not as offering the right theory of the party but as the model of an act
of radical rupture opening up the possibility of a new order, of which the moment of the
October revolution still provides the standards (Žižek 2004). Notwithstanding significant
problems of internal consistency (see Callinicos 2001), and a persistent lack of strategic
thinking – in line with the “poverty of strategy” of Western Marxist thought – Žižek’s evolution
can be seen as a attempt to articulate decisionism to the reinstatement of the dialectical
categories of necessity and contingency (the Hegelian movement of the concept posing its
own presuppositions), as a necessary tool for the understanding of historical processes –
another strong rebuttal of the Post-Marxist/post-modern cult of “contingency”.

This break from within Post-Marxism reveals the internal instability of this constellation,
deriving from the reactive character inscribed in its very name. The ambition to supersede
Marxism while inheriting its ambition of a theory linked to a form of emancipatory project –
even if the totalizing dimension and the notion of ‘emancipation’ itself came under heavy
criticism – proved more fragile than what was widely accepted in the first decades that
followed the end of the “short 20th century”. However, this crack wouldn’t have sufficed to
change the terms of the debate had Marxist theory not proved remarkably resilient
throughout the period when (nearly) all sides proclaimed its death had arrived. A number of
thinkers of the generation of the 1960s and the 1970s, mostly based in the world of
Anglophone academia, persisted in providing ambitious totalizing analyses of the fundamental
aspects of the transformations of the existing mode of production.

To name just a few, let’s start with Fredric Jameson and his notion of “post-modernism” as
the “cultural logic of late capitalism”. Faithful to the categorical imperative of Marxism
“Always historicize!” (Jameson 1981, 9), intensified by an “unslaked thirst for totalization”
(Kouvelakis 2008b), Jameson offered a vast typology of this pervasive restructuring of social
experience characterized by a dehistoricized and dislocated (or “depthless”) sense of space
and time. As an immanent expression of a distinctive stage of capitalism, the all-pervasive
postmodern logic – rather than specific currents identifiable as “postmodernist” – acts as a
powerful counterweight to the emergence of class consciousness (or “cognitive mapping” in
Jameson’s terms).

Inspired by the work of Henri Lefebvre and other thinkers of the historical-materialist tradition
(such as Engels and Rosa Luxemburg), David Harvey has developed the (so far) most
systematic Marxist theory of space as the terrain in which the mode of production displaces
and temporarily resolves its own structural contradictions – through a process of constant
production of “spatio-temporal fixes.” Harvey extended his theory to a periodization of
capitalism, exploring the specificities of the current moment in his analysis of neoliberalism
and the “new imperialism.” At a more empirical level, Mike Davis provided extraordinary vivid
accounts of the formation of these new forms of high-capitalist hyper-spaces, from California’s

12
dystopic “city of quartz” and the urban artefacts of Dubai to the “gated communities”
booming around the globe or sprawling of slums in the cities of the global South. Davis’s
preoccupations resonate with a rising body of work from theorists such as Paul Burkett, John
Bellamy Foster, Michael Löwy and Andreas Malm on capitalism’s role in the ongoing
environmental catastrophe, the ecological dimension of Marxian thought and the eco-socialist
alternative.

This strongly “spatial” Marxism explains the strong presence of a critically oriented research
in most university departments of geography and urban studies and acts as an inspiration for
activists involved in innumerable struggles contesting capital’s spatial order. It is
supplemented by the renewal of Marxist political economy retraced by Alex Callinicos in his
chapter, “Hidden Abode”, in this volume. The realities of financialized capitalism were the
object of systematic scrutiny by economists such as François Chesnais, Gérard Duménil, Cédric
Durand, Costas Lapavitsas and Anwar Shaikh even before the 2008 Great Recession, which, as
noted previously, triggered a broader attention to the Marxist understanding of contemporary
capitalism and its crises. A widely similar picture emerges from the fields of international
relations, labour studies and of the theory of the neoliberal state and the world legal order.
Even if a strong philosophical current continued to produce an important and innovative body
of work (mostly in Italy and France, around figures such as Domenico Losurdo, André Tosel
and Daniel Bensaïd), it cannot be said anymore that the type of Marxist theorizing that
flourishes in the Western world shares the essential characteristics once attributed by
Anderson to “Western Marxism” (Anderson 1976). Although clearly a heir of the 20th century
heterodoxies associated with that tradition, it has decisively stopped concentrating on its
essentially aesthetical and speculative themes to pick up the thread of research on political
economy and social and political theory.

This renewal of Marxism signals a new intellectual conjuncture and testifies to its capacity to
withstand the challenges posed by its protean Other, capitalism, and by the failures of the
experiments conducted in its name. It comes however at a cost, that of retreating into an
essentially academic sphere, accentuating the problematic relation to political practice that
characterized the previous configuration. In that sense, the “crisis of Marxism,” as a diagnosis
on the crisis of the perspectives of the socialist and communist project, is still with us and will
remain as long as a new victorious experience of emancipatory struggle hasn’t come into
being. But one should also keep in mind that what initially appears as a purely intellectual
phenomenon often turns out to be the anticipatory sign of a deeper historical trend. The
future of Marxism as an active force aiming at changing the world could thus still surprise.

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