Post-Marxist Theory

Philip Goldstein

Description

Poststructuralist Marxism, or post-Marxism, is a theoretical viewpoint that elaborates and revises the work of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. Unlike traditional Marxism, which emphasizes the priority of class struggle and the common humanity of oppressed groups, post-Marxism reveals the sexual, racial, class, and ethnic divisions of modern Western society. This book surveys the different versions of post-Marxist theory: the economic theory of Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, the historical methodology of Michel Foucault, the political theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the feminism of Judith Butler, the materialist philosophy of Pierre Macherey, and the cultural studies of Tony Bennett and John Frow. Providing a coherent framework for these otherwise quite divergent theorists, Philip Goldstein outlines the history of Marxist philosophical or theoretical views and explains how they all count as post-Marxist.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: From Marx to Post-Marxism

1. Economics and Theory: Althusserian Post-Marxism

2. From Archaeology to Genealogy: Michel Foucault and Post-Marxist Histories

3. Post-Marxism and Democracy: The Political Theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe

4. Sex, Gender, and Philosophy: The Feminist Post-Marxism of Judith Butler

5. From Althusserian Science to Foucauldian Materialism: The Later Work of Pierre Macherey

6. Post-Marxism and Cultural Studies: The Reception Theory of Tony Bennett and John Frow

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Literary theory

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791484029
• Langue: English

Extrait

PostMarxist Theory

An Introduction

Philip Goldstein

Post-Marxist Theory

Post-Marxist Theory

An Introduction

Philip Goldstein

State University of New York Press

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2005 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207

Production by Kelli Williams Marketing by Anne M. Valentine

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Goldstein, Philip. Post-Marxist theory : an introduction / Philip Goldstein. p. cm. — (SUNY series in postmodern culture) ISBN 0-7914-6301-X (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-6302-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Communism. 2. Philosophy, Marxist. 3. Marxian economics. I. Title. II. Series.

HX73G62 2004 335.4—dc22

2004042983

Acknowledgments

Introduction:

Contents

From Marx to Post-Marxism

Chapter 1. Economics and Theory: Althusserian Post-Marxism

Chapter 2. From Archaeology to Genealogy: Michel Foucault and Post-Marxist Histories

Chapter 3. Post-Marxism and Democracy: The Political Theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe

Chapter 4. Sex, Gender, and Philosophy: The Feminist Post-Marxism of Judith Butler

Chapter 5. From Althusserian Science to Foucauldian Materialism: The Later Work of Pierre Macherey

Chapter 6. Post-Marxism and Cultural Studies: The Reception Theory of Tony Bennett and John Frow

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

v

vii

1

23

37

53

67

81

97

109

115

125

141

This page intentionally left blank.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Joseph Natoli, without whose encourage- ment I may not have put this book together. I am also grate- ful to the University of Delaware for the leave and the University of California at Berkeley for the facilities that en- abled me to write this book. I thank my charming wife Leslie for her close, skeptical questioning of my views, my friends at the Marxist Literary Group for the many chances to present and discuss my work, and the readers and editors ofRethink- ing Marxism, published by the Taylor and Francis Group (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/08935696.html) for their helpful comments and responses to my work. Portions of chapter 1 were originally published as “Communism and Postmodern Theory: A Revaluation of Althusser’s Marxism,” Rethinking Marxism,Rethinking Marxism10:3 (Fall 1997), and portions of chapter five were originally published as “Be- tween Althusserian Science and Foucauldian Materialism: The Later Work of Pierre Macherey,”Rethinking Marxism 16:3 (July 2004). Chapter 6 includes highly revised portions of chapter 1 of myCommunities of Value(Lexington Press, 2001). An early version of chapter 3 appeared as “Ernesto La- clau and Chantal Mouffe,” inPostmodernism: The Key Fig- ures(Blackwell Publishing, 2002).

vii

When Gayatri Spivak’s highly intellectual mother read her daughter’s translation of Mr. Derrida . . . , she said, “But dear, how are you going to reconcile your communism with this?”

—Interview with Gayatri Spivak,New York Times February 9, 2002

Introduction

From Marx to Post-Marxism

In 1973 Alice Walker flew to Eatonville, Florida, to plant a tombstone on Zora Neale Hurston’s unmarked grave. Posing as Hurston’s niece, she interviewed the physician, under- taker, and neighbors of Hurston and sought but did not find the grave in the cemetery’s waist-high grass. Afterward, she commissioned a tombstone that declared Zora Neale Hurston “a genius of the South novelist folklorist anthropologist 1901 1960” (“Looking for Zora” 116). Walker says, “We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away” (“Tale” 69); how- ever, after World War II the work of Hurston, the most pro- lific African American woman writer at that time, was neglected, and Hurston herself forced to accept employment as a maid and welfare support from the state. Moreover, to explain her ensuing oblivion, many critics fault the Marxist realists who, like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, consid- ered Hurston a “good darkie” indifferent to social injustice and class conflict. As Mary Helen Washington says, “By the end of the forties, a decade dominated by Wright and the stormy fiction of social realism, the quieter voice of a woman searching for self-realization could not, or would not, be 1 heard” (viii). As this critique of Richard Wright and the realists sug- gests, black feminism, which Walker, Toni Morrison, and

1