It means that Marxism, as a self-identified political force to be reckoned with in the labor and radical movement, is dead. The era of large movements, parties, currents in movements, much less states that identify themselves as Marxist is any plausible way that might be recognizable to Marx or Engels (who didn't call themselves Marxists), or to the generations following where political effective states and forces did, is largely over.
China and Vietnam kept only the name. Cuba is hanging on by its teeth and eyebrows. There's Kerela, but it's not the wave of the future even for India. Big Communist or Marxist parties in noncommunist societies that have influence and again are recognizable Marxists (not, for example, the current Russian CP) are on the decline and have been for over 50 years.
The Marxist left is no longer a force. Marxism, once a name to conjure by, whether to inspire or to alarm, is an irrelevancy. I underline that this fact does not undermine the validity of the propositions of historical materialism or of Marxian critiques of capitalism as sociological economic-political-moral theory. The theory is pretty much as true as ever. But that's not the same as saying that Marxism is something to be reckoned with politically. Nor is that fact likely to change anytime in the foreseeable future.
I am not being a pessimist. Radical movements will revive. Insofar as Marxist theory contains truths, they will have to incorporate or rediscover these truths -- but in their own frameworks and vocabulary. Those will not be frameworks and vocabulary that structured left-labor militant politics from, say, 1890 through 1980 (to be generous about the back end).
Not only is the centrality of the Russian and Chinese revolutions in left political thinking dissipated, but the whole way of thinking and talking and acting that went with Marxism is just, well, I am sorry to say it, quaint at best. Lacks traction. Isn't going anywhere.
I say this with very mixed feelings because I myself really don't know how to go on otherwise, and I fear a very great deal of value is being lost with the evaporation or Marxism as movement. But evaporated it has; that's just something we have to recognize and life with, unless we want to joint the deluded groupies in the ISO or the RCP.
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 22, 2007, at 4:34 PM, Bradley Bauerly wrote,
> quoting the
> ineffable YF:
>
> >> "We live in the post-Marxist age."
> >
> > How many times have we heard this proclaimed, or
> who let Fukuyama in.
>
> What does it mean? Is there no more extraction of
> surplus value? Is
> there no longer the relentless cheapening of
> commodities, the
> drumbeat of competition proclaiming "March! March!,"
> the
> commodification of everything, the rule of money,
> etc.?
>
> I like the use of the definite article, though -
> there's only one
> post-Marxist age, and we live in it! Aren't we
> lucky?
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
>
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