Living with the Fragments: Further Thoughts on Norman Geras’s Critique of Post-Marxism

ABSTRACT

This article revisits and re-evaluates a famous debate between Norman Geras and Ernesto Laclau. This exchange was one of the few direct confrontations between Marxism and post-Marxism in terms of its significance for the evolution of Marxist theory, characterised by increasing fragmentation often morphing into post-Marxist theory. The article also considers the significance of the debate in relation to the nature of Geras’s adherence to Marxism and his intellectual and political trajectory. It argues that Geras was more of a post-Marxist than he thought he was, and became more so over time, and that Laclau’s ethical reluctance was close to at least one of Marx’s “spirits.” Finally in raising the question of how anti/post-capitalist theorists should live with and without Marx(ism) this article suggests that the debate in many ways still has contemporary relevance.

KEYWORDS:

• Geras
• Laclau
• Mouffe
• Marxism
• post-Marxism

Acknowledgements

A paper given at the Mancept Workshops in Political Theory (Manchester, UK) in September 8–10th 2014 forms the basis of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributor

Jules Townshend is Emeritus Professor at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of numerous articles on liberal and Marxist theory, and of J. A. Hobson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990) and The Politics of Marxism (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1996), and Key Thinkers from Critical Theory to Post-Marxism (with Simon Tormey, London: Sage, 2006).

Notes

1 Gramsci (1971) made many uncritical references in his Prison Notebooks to Marx’s (1976) Preface and Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (e.g., Gramsci 1971, 114, 138, 162, 365, 459).