Socialist Politics and the 'Crisis of Marxism'

Abstract

With this provocative challenge at the conference on 'Power and Opposition in Post-Revolutionary Societies' organized by Il Mangeso during the Venice Biennale of November 1977 (Il Manifesto, Zuaderno 8, 1978), Louis Althusser introduced a wide-ranging discussion which is documented in all essentials in the present volume. In so far as it would be wrong to see this 'crisis of Marxism' imply as a left-wing variant of the general decline of values in late-bourgeois society-a kind of dance on the sinking Titanic-then it must itself be explained, or indeed explain itself, in terms of the material conditions of politics and the formulation of theory. Althusser was quite right, therefore, when he continued his intervention: 'At last the crisis of Marxism has visibly surfaced, and at last something new and living can be liberated in the crisis and out of it!'