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ANEW EDITION OF MARXISM IN THE U.S. seems to have come at a propitious historical moment not only for global society but also for phenomena that can still, with many reservations, be called Marxism, Marxist ideas, Marxist-based projects. The particular crises at hand, economic, social, political, and ecological, are so numerous and fast-breaking that headlines are likely to overtake specifics even before words reach print. But crises they are. Hence, the return to a subject that appeared, according to dominant liberal and conservative narratives, to have been dead and gone, following the collapse of the East Bloc and the transformation of China into a global capitalist giant.
The "rediscovery of Marx," not only in the United States but in many corners of the world, is bound to be a most intriguing development for new, especially young, readers. Whether this rediscovery is rooted only in the spreading catastrophes, often more acute for the young than the old, or in the perception that hardly any place remains on the planet unconquered by capitalism, may not matter much for our purposes here. Nor do we know very well, at this writing, what the future, near as well as far, will do with the rediscovery. My main effort is to make some rapidly disappearing history available to the reader, but also to point out that large chunks of this extended history keep happening, and that they count. It was my own intent, in the launching of the New Left magazine Radical America in 1967, to foster a Marxism worthy of the challenge of U.S. society, neither dogmatic (we used to say "mechanistic") nor sour, but exuberant, creative and linked directly to social movements and activists themselves. Things never work out simply and sometimes they seem not to work out at all. Still, here we are in an explosive new decade yearning for radical, useful interpretations.
All this is so obvious that, at first glance, the absence of a Marxist revival would be more mysterious. The Marxism of today is overwhelmingly a critique of an uncertain, often staggering economic and social system, a central but no longer an altogether self-confident, dominating force within a severely troubled global system. The anti-Hegelians who long ago argued for a Marxism without teleology seemed...