Rereading Marx: A Critique of Recent Criticisms

One way of keeping Marxism alive and lively is for it to be constantly reread, retaught and relearned as an oppositional response to any criticisms of it and socialism that are made (sometimes in Marx's own name). These criticisms, made most persistently under the heading of radical democracy, focus on three problems: totality, the idea of a universal subject, and teleology. What links these criticisms to Marx is that the latter is accused of distorting these issues by reducing each to a simplistic formula. It is the resistance to each of these reductions that gives Marxism the complexity it requires to continue being serviceable in the present. Reading Marx supplements the imagination of political activity so that a rather dispersed left, expanding the very terrain of the social, can recognize its socialism.