Post-Marxism

Post-Marxism has two related but different uses. Post-marxism can be used to refer to the situation in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union after the fall of communism, or it can be used to represent the theoretical work of philosophers and social theorists who have built their theories upon those of Karl Marx and Marxists but exceeded the limits of those theories in ways that puts them outside of Marxism.

History of post-Marxism

Post-marxism began in the late 1960s with the weakening of the soviet paradigm of communism, the rise of Maoist theory, and the advent of commercial television, which broadcast events from Vietnam and the student riots of 1968. The withering away of the grand narratives of revolution, mass culture and communism made it impossible for many theorists to use those concepts to ground their work.

Semiology and discourse

When Roland Barthes began his sustained critique of mass culture through the science of signs and specifically looking at the Mythologies of modern society, the possibility to ground social critique in linguistic, semiotic, or discursive practices began to be pursued by some Marxists. Baudrillard's For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign and much of his work around that built out from Barthes's work and criticized then current Marxism for not seeing the sign value within their own discourse.

Important post-Marxists

• Alain Badiou
• Etienne Balibar
• Paul Hirst
• Barry Hindess
• Ernesto Laclau
• Chantal Mouffe
• Moishe Postone
• Slavoj Žižek

See also

• Marxism and Marxist philosophy
• Poststructuralism
• Rethinking Marxism