the very time when Marxism as a critical theory has been in unprecedented ascent in the English-speaking world, it has undergone a precipitous descent in the Latin societies where it was most powerful and productive in the post-war period. In France and Italy above all, the two leading homelands of a living historical materialism in the fifties and sixties, for anyone like myself who learnt much of their Marxism from these cultures, the massacre of ancestors has been impressive. What is its meaning? The transverse movements of Marxist theory in the past decade remain to be explored. The problems they pose will be our topic tomorrow.
1. Max Horkheimer, ‘Traditionelle und kritische Theorie’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Vol. 2, 1937, p.274. He went on to note that such a theorist could ‘find himself in contradiction with views prevalent among the exploited’ — indeed, ‘without the possibility of that conflict there would be no need for the theory they require, since it would be immediately available’.
2. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, London 1973, p. 197.
3. Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Marx-Engels, Selected Works, Moscow 1951, p.228.
4. Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, London 1970, p. 51.
5. Considerations on Western Marxism, London 1976.
6. Georges Canguilhem, Etudes d’Histoire de Philosophie des Sciences, Paris 1970, p. 19.
7. Negative Dialectics, p. 198.
8. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, London 1963: compare pp. 73-74 with 139-141.
9. See Considerations on Western Marxism pp. 101-102; 95-101; 102-103; 109-112.
10. Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London 1975), The Second Slump (London 1978), Long Waves of Capitalist Development—The Marxist Interpretation, (Cambridge 1978); Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, New York 1975; Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: the US Experience, London 1979.
11. See Michio Morishima, Marx’s Economics, Cambridge 1973; Ian Steedman, Marx After Sraffa, London 1977; John Roemer, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class, Cambridge Mass., 1982; Marco Lippi, Value and Naturalism in Marx, London 1979; Ulrich Krause, Money and Abstract Labour, London 1982.
12. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, (London 1973), Fascism and Dictatorship (London 1974), Classes and Contemporary Capitalism (London 1975), The Crisis of the Dictatorships (London 1976), State, Power, Socialism (London 1978); Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London 1969), Marxism and Politics (Oxford 1977), Capitalist Democracy in Britain (Oxford 1982); John Holloway and Sol Picciotto, eds. State and Capital, London 1978; Claus Offe, Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates, Frankfurt 1975; Göran Therborn, What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules?—State Apparatuses and State Power under Feudalism, Capitalism and Socialism, London 1978: see also his important ensuing work, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology, London 1980.
13. Erik Olin Wright, Class, Crisis and the State, (London 1978), and Class Structure and Income Determination, (New York 1979); Guglielmo Carchedi, On the Economic Identification of Social Classes, London 1977; Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet, L’Ecole Capitaliste en France, Paris 1971; (with Jacques Malemort), La Petite Bourgeoisie en France, Paris 1974; (with Jacques Toisier), Qui Travaille pour Qui?, Paris 1979.
14. Rudolf Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe, London 1978; Domenico Mario Nuti, ‘The Contradictions of Socialist Economics’, The Socialist Register 1979; Wlodzimierz Brus, Socialist Ownership and Political Systems, London 1975.
15. See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London 1973), Marxism and Literature (Oxford 1977), Politics and Letters (London 1979), Problems in Materialism and Culture (London 1980), Culture (London 1981); Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, Ithaca 1981; G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History — A Defence, Oxford 1978.
16. Dates: The Age of Capital, London 1975; The World Turned Upside Down, London 1975; Milton and the English Revolution, London 1977; Bond Men Made Free, London 1973; The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages, Oxford 1975; Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, London 1974; Whigs and Hunters, London 1975; Lords of Humankind, London 1972; The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, London 1981.
17. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll — The World the Slaves Made, New York 1974, and From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World, New York 1979; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, New York 1970, and Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, New York 1976; David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, New York 1967, and Workers’ Control in America, New York 1979; Robert Brenner, ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’, and ‘The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism’ Past and Present, No. 70, February 1976 and No. 97, November 1982; David Abraham, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis, Princeton 1981.
18. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, Vols. I and II, New York 1974 and 1980; Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, Cambridge 1979; James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State, New York 1973; Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, The Deepening Crisis of us Capitalism, New York 1981; Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, New York 1978.
19. Bertell Oilman and Edward Vernhoff, eds. The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses, New York 1982.
20. See Robert Brenner, ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, No. 104, July-August 1977, and the symposium on Brenner’s work in Past and Present Nos. 78-80 and 85, February-August 1978 and November 1979, with contributions by Michael Postan and John Hatcher, Patricia Croot and David Parker, Heidi Wunder, Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie, Guy Bois, J. P. Cooper and Arnost Klima, now collected together with Brenner’s formidable response, in The Brenner Debate — Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, Cambridge 1983 (forthcoming).
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