Post-Marxism

Post-Marxism is a perspective in critical social theory which radically reinterprets Marxism, countering its association with economism, historical determinism, anti-humanism, and class reductionism, whilst remaining committed to the construction of socialism. Most notably, post-Marxists are anti-essentialist, rejecting the primacy of class struggle, and instead focus on building radical democracy. Post-Marxism can be considered a synthesis of post-structuralist frameworks and neo-Marxist analysis, in response to the decline of the New Left after the protests of 1968. In a broader sense, post-Marxism can refer to Marxists or Marxian-adjacent theories which break with the old worker's movements and socialist states entirely, in a similar sense to post-leftism, and accept that the era of mass revolution premised on the Fordist worker is potentially over.

The term "post-Marxism" first appeared in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's theoretical work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). Post-Marxism is a wide category not well-defined, containing the work of Laclau and Mouffe on the one hand, and some strands of autonomism and open Marxism, post-structuralism, cultural studies, ex-Marxists and Deleuzian-inspired 'politics of difference' on the other. Recent overviews of post-Marxism are provided by Ernesto Screpanti, Göran Therborn, and Gregory Meyerson. Prominent post-Marxist journals include New Formations, Constellations, Endnotes, Crisis and Critique and Arena.