Marx after Marxism

Marxism after communism

It is with apprehension but also conviction that I defend Marxism today1apprehension because we live in a period that is suspicious of visions of alternative futures, skeptical of grand historical narrative, dismissive of materialist explanations, rejecting of class analysis while tolerating capitalism's defects and pathologies as unavoidable and natural; conviction because we live in a period ...

Marx and Mackinnon: The Promise and Perils of Marxism for Feminist Legal Theory

Catherine MacKinnon, perhaps the dominant voice of North American feminist legal theory over the last two decades, developed her feminist theory of law through an extended metaphor with Marxism. Marxist thought thus became thoroughly intertwined with MacKinnon’s particular brand of radical feminism in the minds of many feminist legal scholars and activists. As MacKinnon’s work has fallen out of...

Sociological Marxism

From the middle of the 19 century until the last decade of the 20, the Marxist tradition provided the most systematic body of ideas and social theory for radical critics of capitalism as an economic system and social order. Even those critics of capitalism who did not directly identify with Marxism relied heavily on Marxist ideas about class, exploitation, commodification, the state, ideology. ...

Marxism and Method

Marx, Karl

Marx was drawn towards politics by Romantic literature and his earliest writings embody a conception of reality as subject to turbulent change and of human beings as realizing themselves in the struggle for freedom. His identification with these elements in HEGEL's thought (and his contempt for what he regarded as HEGEL's apologetic attitude towards the Prussian state) brought Marx to associate...