Joseph Heath, a distinguished academic philosopher from Canada, has now published two essays proclaiming and detailing the death of Marxism.
His first essay, “John Rawls and the Death of Western Marxism” is stimulating and engaging. But while Heath knows a good many things about Marx and Marxism, he writes as if he knows the first and last things about them (he’s not alone in this; we can only assume it is an occupational tendency). In response, Vivek Chibber has provided a capable defense of what is living and dead in Marxism. Since then, Heath has written a second essay, “Key Stages in the Decline of Academic Marxism.” Despite its decidedly more modest title, this similarly aims to drive yet more nails into “the coffin of Marxist theory.”
The first point to make is that liberals have been declaring Marxism dead ever since Marxism was born. And these coroners are almost always liberals — reactionaries find Marxism to be permanently alive, corporeal, and dangerous, a constant threat that needs to be killed. Moderate conservatives, meanwhile, think of Marxism as spectral or supernatural, and therefore, unkillable. But liberals are always claiming it’s dead. This isn’t to say that they are wrong necessarily, it’s just that they never seem to expect that it will come back to life. Yet, every few years respectable journalists and academics, often the very same ones that write smugly about how Marxism was always doomed, are forced to write gravely and sagely about why “Marxism is back.”
In our own time, socialism rose from the grave in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. A few years later, this magazine was founded and succeeded, surprisingly, in promoting long-dead Marxist ideas among a new generation of young people…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Dustin Guastella
