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Is Marxism Really Functionalist, Class Reductionist, and Teleological?

In the early days of the contemporary revival of Marxist thought, virtually the only critiques of Marxism came from the Right. Of course, not all leftist or critical intellectuals identified with Marxism, but few were openly hostile to the new directions of Marxist thought, and most saw in the new outpouring of Marxist writing great promise for theoretical clarification and advance. Marxists, for their part, were self-confident, certain of the basic soundness of their theoretical posture, and energetic in their attempts at reconstructing and developing aspects of Marxist theory that were seen as inadequate. The situation is quite different today. One finds innumerable references to the "crisis of Marxism." In part this is, of course, a reflection of the political impasse experienced by the Left in many countries after the optimism of the late 1960s. But the sense of crisis has also been nurtured by developments in theory. On the one hand, many Marxists are more cautious in their theoretical claims, acknowledging problems and dilemmas within Marxist theory. On the other hand, there has emerged a growing body of leftist intellectual work which is highly critical of Marxism and often explicitly anti-Marxist.2 Two characteristics of these new critiques of Marxism are particularly important. First, they are critiques on the Left, not from the antisocialist Right. The criticisms are not from apostate Marxists who have become defenders of capitalism; they are from anticapitalist intellectuals with commitments to progressive social change. In some cases, in fact, these theorists' vision of the alternative to capitalism is not radically different from the image of socialism and communism contained in Marxist theory; what is different is the view of the theory of society needed to help create such a society. Second, the critiques are not simply critiques of the insufficiencies or gaps in Marxist theory; they are critiques of Marxism. In