Historicism and Politics: the Problem of Class Analysis

Abstract

The issues touched upon in the last chapter represent part of a more profound debate that evolved throughout the 1970s and 1980s concerning the coherence of Marxism as a critical social theory. Central to this debate was the role attributed to social classes as the primary agents of socio-political change. Increasingly, class was viewed as an imprecise category that failed to properly grasp the nature of political struggles in advanced capitalist democracies. These struggles were concerned less with inequalities in economic wealth and more with social identity and asymmetries in power based on, for example, sexual and racial discrimination. The challenge to Marxism by what is often referred to as ‘identity politics’ articulated by ‘new social movements’ went directly to its conception of society as being fundamentally conditioned by economic structures. New political antagonisms forced Marxists to deal with a degree of social complexity that was not anticipated in most of its classical doctrines.