Before Post-Marxism: Ellen Meiksins Wood on Modern Theory and Ancient Society

Abstract

Ellen Meiksins Wood is a subtle and original Marxist historian of antiquity and critic of classical ideology, coauthor, with Neal Wood (1978), of Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory, and author of Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy, published in 1988. She is also a prominent polemicist for Marxist theory, well known for her critiques of certain post-Marxist theories, for example, Emesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, that deny a unique role to the working class in the project of abolishing capitalism and achieving socialism. She has set forth her position most fully in The Retreatfrom Class: A New “True” Socialism, the main thesis of which is summarized in a talk delivered to the Socialist Scholars Conference in 1987 and published the same year under the title, “Why Class Struggle is Central.” In what follows, I analyze and bring into confrontation with each other Wood’s contributions in both spheres, indicating in the conclusion what I take to be a curious tension between them. This tension centers on the primacy of exploitation in the analysis of social conflict and contradictions: Wood appears to take rather a more exclusive and determinist position in the case of modem capitalism than she does with respect to the ancient city-state.