Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Since perestroika, Russian thinkers have joined the general discussion of the contemporary relevance of Marxism. In the last two decades, this debate has intensified in the West. According to one side, Marxism is intellectually and politically exhausted. It is a prime example of the grand narrative and the Enlightenment project. In practice it has proved to be not merely incapable of raising undeveloped societies out of poverty but immensely destructive: it has served as the ideological underpinning of the most totalitarian regimes the world has ever known. According to the other side, Marxism is an enduring critical tradition that has furnished postmodernism with its key concepts and has helped to transform the primitive capitalism of Marx's time into the postindustrial welfare state of today. To meet the new challenges of globalization, world poverty, environmental degradation, and gender and racial inequality, this side argues, we must make full use of Marxism's critical potential.