Theorising the contemporary left, its tasks and prospects

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I've just read Ellen Meiksins Wood's rather turgid book (above) where she defends Marxism against the Eurocommunists (remember them?) and those post-Marxist thinkers who were in the process of abandoning class analysis to morph into the identity theorists of today.

She was writing in 1998, when the whole SJW thing was beginning to lift off. I was oblivious at the time, working hard as a network architect with no time for politics.

She's good and she's not. She skewers (although at inordinate length) a number of theorists (most of whom I'd not really heard of) who now, twenty years later, are aged and in retirement. But her analysis struggles to get beyond a restatement of timeless Marxist orthodoxies.

Wood is interesting on the state in a post-capitalist society (one where capitalist relations of production are not dominant). She understands the coordination problems and sees the naivety (her words) in thinking that the state can - as a formation - just 'wither away', or be replaced by endless popular mobilisation through 'councils'.

She is unconvincing as to whether capitalism is perennially problematic for the dispossessed proletariat - some might say that it's on an improving track on a time-averaged scale of decades. She has nothing useful to say about the transition, nor about the well-known difficulties of central-planning and the associated principal-agent problems.

So I thought that overall, her argumentation was sterile and failed to address the issues the heretics were mostly getting wrong. And I wondered where are the young theoreticians, coming into their prime today, who can truly advance a Marxist understanding of the present conjuncture?

Slavoj Žižek?

Really?