The Crisis of Marxism, The Crisis of Politics

I must first apologize for the title of this essay. I am not interested in the crisis of Marxism but in the crisis of politics—I mean, emancipatory politics. What must be called not the “crisis” but the wholesale collapse of Marxism has been obvious to me for more than thirty years now. The events of the last five, or two, years, immensely important and significant as they are in other respects, teach us next to nothing as far as the theoretical body of Marx’s work is concerned. But this collapse has opened for us the true political question: that is, once the oxymoronic idea that the object of politics is dictated by some sort of “historical necessity” is abandoned and assuming that we do not identify politics with the management of the existing order of things or the introduction of millimetric “improvements” in this order, how can we elucidate the object of politics and render account and reason for our political choices and actions?

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