The Power and the Void: Radical Democracy, Post-Marxism, and the Machiavellian Moment

Abstract

The crisis and collapse of Marxism as the dominant intellectual system of the Left was surely one of the seismic shifts in the Ideological history of the late twentieth century This was a crisis already underway well before the collapse of the East Bloc. Indeed, by 1977, the most Influential Marxist thinker in Trance, Louis Althusser, took the “crisis of Marxism” as a given fact, but he pleaded with his readers that instead of writing the epitaph for Marxism, they should give this crisis “a completely different sense from collapse and death.” It was necessary, in Althusser’s words, to show “how something vital and alive can be liberated by this crisis and in this crisis.”¹ This is a challenge that remains to this day, lhe questions that animated the Marxist tradition continue to press on us, even If many of that tradition’s answers have lost much of their persuasive power—the critique of and struggle against forms of domination that work through the visible and Invisible channels of social and economic relations, the desire for social justice and equality, as well as the attempt to envision and bring into being modes of collective life and decision making that liberate rather than oppress people.