The Ideal Immanent Within the Real: On Peter Hudis' Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism

Paul Kellogg

doi:10.18740/s4bw2p

Abstract

A discussion of Hudis' <em>Marx's Concept of an Alternative to Capitalism.</em>

Highlights

The overall aim of Peter Hudis in Marx’s concept of the alternative to capitalism is to unearth “the prefigurative”—the vision of a new post-capitalist world—from the writings of a Marx usually seen as agnostic on the question
There was a strand of the 1960s and 1970s New Left which identified the late 19th and early 20th century heirs of Marx and Engels as being imprisoned by the objective: overly relying on the laws of motion imputed to capitalism
This “objectivism” led inexorably to a praxis of passivity: calmly waiting upon the final crisis, to which those laws of motion would inevitably drag us. This objectivism was often called “Second International Marxism” (Colletti 1974), invoking the theoretically over-determined, but often inert politics of the Socialist International, an inertia on full display when the vast majority of its member parties collapsed into national chauvinism with the outbreak of the Great War in 1914

Summary

Introduction

The overall aim of Peter Hudis in Marx’s concept of the alternative to capitalism is to unearth “the prefigurative”—the vision of a new post-capitalist world—from the writings of a Marx usually seen as agnostic on the question. The search for this prefigurative Marx raises an old issue: how do we reconcile the objective with the subjective, the objectively determined laws of motion in the economy with the emergence of a mass revolutionary subject?

Results

Conclusion