Marx in the Anglophone World

Abstract

The twenty-first century opened on a pessimistic note from some older voices within Anglophone Marxism. Perry Anderson relaunched New Left Review in 2000 with the claim that there no longer existed any “collective agency able to match the power of capital”,1 while inMarx’s Revenge2 Meghnad Desai argued that though capitalism is “the only game in town”, because Marx had outlined the most sophisticated account of its crisis-prone nature his work remained relevant to debates on the merits of its various forms. If Anderson’s and Desai’s pessimism dovetailed with the zeitgeist, counter-trends opened a space for more radical perspectives. Thus journals as diverse as Capital & Class, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Critique, International Socialism, Historical Materialism, Monthly Review, New Politics, Rethinking Marxism, Science & Society, and Socialism and Democracy continued to cater in differing degrees to academic and activist audiences from perspectives rooted in Marx’s legacy.