From the pages of The New York Times and The Nation to those of the American
Spectator, social commentators advanced, debunked,
and fretted over the claim that 2014 marked a comeback year for
Marxist thought. Big Finance had emerged triumphant from the 2008 crisis,
Occupy-style anarchism had foundered, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the
Twenty-First Century became a bestseller, and young Leftists of the so-called
millennial generation, the punditry went, were effecting a turn away from airy,
poststructuralist, "cultural" Marxism back to the more
nitty-gritty, all-too-solid volumes of Capital and more materialist concerns of
Marxist theory.
Writing in the Chronicle
of Higher Education in November 2013, Andrew Seal had already
anticipated and rejected such claims. "The continuities between today’s
focus on political economy and the aging Theory Era," he wrote,
"are often obscured by an exaggerated narrative of willful rediscovery of
Marx, as if our inspirations are only our own intelligent resentment of the
economy and the powers behind it." Seal offered a provocative
counterpoint: the conversation was refocused by the vast capture, not only of a
generation’s future wealth in the form of student and consumer debt, but of its
"best minds." Decades of high-achievers were scooped up by Wall
Street scouts who cruised the campuses of colleges too preoccupied with
rankings and endowment figures to concern themselves with fusty old mission
statements about social responsibility and the liberating power of knowledge.
Friends morphed into investment bankers and hedge-fund managers, ascending to
the boardrooms of the 1% as soon as the diploma ink had dried.
Indeed, Louis Althusser’s
characterization of the university as an ideological state apparatus must be
revised. Forget the state—the university has become the tool and stooge of the
transnational finance economy, which itself has shown only contempt for the
state. Steeped in pure free-market ideology and restructured along the lines of
corporate managerialism, elite colleges not only became the nurseries of
nascent Wall Street execs, but collaborated in generating huge new markets for
consumer debt.
But not without generating a
backlash. The new thrusts of Marxist theory, as Seal suggests, are a
generation’s first efforts to delineate the terrain and bleak scenery of
today’s class struggle: a rapidly vanishing commons; a desiccated public
sector; the neoliberal, corporatized university; and the despotic regency of
finance over not only democratic institutions and what used to be called civil
society, but the political imagination of that very generation.
Recent efforts in Marxist
theory attempt to understand the origins of today’s debt- and finance-based
economy, without neglecting its social and cultural aspects. Arcade has
convened a Colloquy on 21st-Century Marxisms to collect some of these thoughts.
In the interest of dialectical critique, the present colloquy also hopes to
create a space for considering the role of the academy and of public
intellectuals at this juncture in Marxist theory.
We’ve collected recent and
forthcoming materials from our partner journals and presses that take up these
new directions in Marxist thought, and invited commentary from some of the
leading voices in contemporary Marxist theory. To open the colloquy, we’re
featuring an article on debt by David Palumbo-Liu and the first
of a multi-part reflection by McKenzie Wark on 21st-Century Marxisms. We also
include the introduction to The Specter of Capital by Joseph Vogl, who offers
an analysis of the irrational and spectral nature of immaterial finance capital
through a reading of Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis. Nancy Fraser returns
to "Marx's Hidden Abode" in a lecture given at Dartmouth, and Edgar
Illas attempts to "name the system" that Marxist theory now tries to
describe and analyze.
Watch for additional
interventions from Jacobin editor Alyssa Battistoni, professor and immigration
activist Justin Akers Chacón, novelist and professor Lee Konstantinou, and New
Inquiry blogger and author Evan Calder Williams.
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