Post-Marxist Theory: An Introduction (S U N Y Series in Postmodern Culture)

155 Pages·2005·0.39 MB·English

by  Philip Goldstein

Post-Marxist Theory
An Introduction
Philip Goldstein
Post-Marxist Theory

Post-Marxist Theory
An Introduction
Philip Goldstein
State University of New York Press
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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
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: From Marx to Post-Marxism 1
Chapter 1. Economics and Theory:
Althusserian Post-Marxism 23
Chapter 2. From Archaeology to Genealogy:
Michel Foucault and Post-Marxist Histories 37
Chapter 3. Post-Marxism and Democracy:
The Political Theory of Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe 53
Chapter 4. Sex, Gender, and Philosophy:
The Feminist Post-Marxism of Judith Butler 67
Chapter 5. From Althusserian Science to
Foucauldian Materialism: The Later Work of
Pierre Macherey 81
Chapter 6. Post-Marxism and Cultural Studies:
The Reception Theory of Tony Bennett
and John Frow 97
Conclusion 109
Notes 115
Works Cited 125
Index 141
v

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 of Rethink-
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: ARevaluation 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 my Communities of Value (Lexington Press,
2001). An early version of chapter 3 appeared as “Ernesto La-
clau and Chantal Mouffe,” in Postmodernism: 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.
Apeople 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
heard” (viii).1
As this critique of Richard Wright and the realists sug-
gests, black feminism, which Walker, Toni Morrison, and
1