The book is organized in two parts: "Kautsky's
Marxism" (some seventenths of the main body of the text) and "Marx's
Marxism.
It does so, moreover, through proposing, quite heretically to the spirit of the 1960s and 1970s but very much in line with the current post-1989/90 situation, that
Marxism is dead.
Del Noce's particular preoccupation with
Marxism might make the ideas in the book seem less relevant to contemporary English-speaking readers, but in fact the analysis concerns a more fundamental intellectual movement that characterizes the modern world generally.
Eagleton rightly mentions that the only reason for critics' discrediting of
Marxism is its political impotence.
So is a libertarian socialism which combines the best of
Marxism and anarchism possible?
Most of the papers in Part I discuss the ways in which
Marxism has been corrupted and mangled.
The question remains, however, as to why these intellectuals eventually proclaimed their commitment to
Marxism if their systems of thought were so fundamentally intertwined anyway.
In clear, often elegant prose, Hobsbawm assertively makes a convincing case for why Marx and
Marxism deserve to survive the intellectual, political, and methodological cataclysms that eroded their influence in the last thirty years.
Because Mailer generally shifted interest away from
Marxism in his later works, I also believe the novel represents a turning point where Mailer presents certain political alternatives in sharp, apocalyptic fashion, and then reaches an impasse, resulting from a sense that
Marxism fails or at least proves inadequate as a philosophy of freedom to challenge the limitations that Mailer finds in society and the world.
21) Since Derrida tries to keep Marx alive and claim Marx's specter haunts us, Derrida is not simply using Marx as a critique against present-day anti-Marxists (although, he does use Marx to critique Fukuyama and liberal democracy), he also uses Marx to attack the "Marxists" associated with conventional
Marxism i.
Going against the tide, Castoriadis's critical opposition to and rejection of orthodox
Marxism could be seen as part of his endeavour to investigate the theoretical and political foundations of
Marxism.
The A to Z of
Marxism covers, in a comprehensive manner, the history of
Marxism and its philosophers and schools of thought.
