Introduction: The struggle before us

Abstract

The introduction to this Special Issue of the journal Art & the Public Sphere, titled ‘The Struggle Before Us’, addresses the aims and outcomes of the project. It reiterates the themes of the call for papers and focuses on the impact of postmodern theory and the cultural turn on socialist class struggle. The political tendencies within radical democracy, Marxist autonomism and left populism are related to the growing influence of the anti-liberal and anti-Marxist – because anti-universalist – academic trends of privilege theory, critical race theory, intersectionality and decoloniality. This is related to political developments since the Cold War and the rise to hegemonic status of a petty-bourgeois mode of cultural appropriation. The introduction takes issue with the notion that post-Fordism represents the termination of the so-called classical phase of socialism and argues instead that contemporary contradictions between identity and class are inscribed within the ongoing struggle between labour and capital. A lecture by Alain Badiou is used to complete the analysis, with definitions of Marxist militancy related to Marx’s class-oriented transformation of German idealism, English political economy and the French workers’ movement.