Waiting for Marxo

Abstract

Abstract Samuel Beckett's play waiting for Godot recounts the story of two tramps, Estragon and Vladimir, awaiting the arrival of Godot. Within the boredom of the wait Estragon and Vladimir are forced to evaluate the purpose of their own life, their existence, the existence of God[ot] and the nature of the human condition. However, Godot never arrives and all that remains is the experience of waiting. In a similar way critical accounting is caught in an act of waiting. Waiting for Marx, for Habermas, for Foucault or for some other thinker to come and to rescue us from our predicament. In this lies some of the academic angst over the future of the critical project. Here we present an imaginative dialogue, substituting two accounting academics for Beckett's tramps. As such they do not represent real people but rather the struggle within the academic discourse for identity, self and meaning. While this dialogue might seem hopeless, reflecting the frustration present in the Beckett original, there is the possibility of emancipation as both of the characters agree to abandon the wait for Marxo and to proceed with their project, in effect fulfilling Marx[o]'s injunction that ‘the role of philosophy is not to describe the world but to change it’.