Post-marxism

Post-marxism is a term that can refer to thought after and/or influenced significantly enough by Marx. It may imply "that Marx or marxism have been refuted or superseded by historical change or theoretical developments or both" (Wolff).
Marx recognised early on that his work "and the marxism of his followers were hardly identical."Ibid.
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For Adorno and Horkheimer (relying on the economist Friedrich Pollock's thesis on National Socialism),[5] state intervention in the economy had effectively abolished the tension in capitalism between the "relations of production" and the "material productive forces of society," a tension which, according to traditional critical theory, constituted the primary contradiction within capitalism. The market (as an "unconscious" mechanism for the distribution of goods) had been replaced by centralized planning.[6]Yet, contrary to Marx's famous prediction in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, this shift did not lead to "an era of social revolution," but rather to fascism and totalitarianism. As such, traditional critical theory was left, in Jürgen Habermas's words, without "anything in reserve to which it might appeal; and when the forces of production enter into a baneful symbiosis with the relations of production that they were supposed to blow wide open, there is no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope."[7] For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for the apparent persistence of domination in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to traditional critical theory, was the source of domination itself.[8]-
conflating Marx and marxism is the hallmark of post-marxism. 
--- Richard D. Wolff and Stephen Cullenberg Social TextNo. 15 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 126-135 (10 pages)Published By: Duke University Press
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Category:Politics
Category:Political left
Category:Political far left