Stathis Kouvelakis

The theoretical problem Bensaïd tries to confront from the 1990s onwards is the problem of the categories that are necessary to account for the traumatically new experience of history opened up by the defeat of the revolutionary experiments of the twentieth century. Hence the necessity of new answers to these fundamental and inexhaustible questions: How are we to understand history in its relation to human practice and to politics? Can we talk of ‘necessity’ in history, of ‘laws of history’, of ‘determination’, or ‘determinism’, or of modes of causality operating within it? How are we to conceive the notions of ‘historical possibility’, of ‘conflict’ and ‘struggle’? Bensaïd’s contribution will focus on a dialectical notion of temporality that implies a primacy of politics over history and a break with the traditional Marxist notions of a historical subject as an internally homogeneous and fully-sovereign collective force.

Today’s rediscovery of Nicos Poulantzas’s works seems to have overlooked his works on fascism, which are demoted to the level of historical and historiographical documents. Here, I argue against such an understanding. In my view, Poulantzas’s theory of fascism and the state of exception constitute the pivot around which his intellectual and political itinerary was organized. Poulantzas only became a Marxist theorist, properly speaking, from the moment that he began to work on the question of fascism and thus to mount a militant intervention on the strategic questions central to a properly Marxist theory of politics. Poulantzas combined these questions with a further notion, without doubt more surprising coming from a Marxist theorist: namely, ‘totalitarianism’. Far from being limited to an object of polemic, this category would serve both to indicate a persistent problem and to provide a spur to venture down new paths.

In the past two decades, Marxism has enjoyed a revitalization as a research program and a growth in its audience. This renaissance is connected to the revival of anti-capitalist contestation since the Seattle protests in 1999 and the impact of the global economic and financial crisis in 2007-8. It intersects with the emergence of Post-Marxism since the 1980s represented by thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, Chantal Mouffe, Ranajit Guha, and Alain Badiou. This Handbook explores the development of Marxism and Post-Marxism, setting them in dialogue against a truly global backdrop. Transcending the disciplinary boundaries between philosophy, economics, politics, and history, an international range of expert contributors guide the reader through the main varieties and preoccupations of Marxism and Post-Marxism. Through a series of framing and illustrative essays, readers will explore these traditions, starting from Marx and Engels themselves, through the thinkers of the Second and Third Internationals, the Tricontinental, and Subaltern and Post-Colonial Studies, to more contemporary figures such as Huey Newton, Fredric Jameson, Judith Butler, Immanuel Wallerstein and Samir Amin. The Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism will be of interest to scholars and researchers of philosophy, cultural studies and theory, sociology, political economics and several areas of political science, including political theory, Marxism, political ideologies and critical theory.