Marxism: Looking Backward and Forward: Essay 4

Abstract

Marxism is an enterprise in social investigation and in that sense a field of study, of scholarship, of science. It propounds questions for analysis and attempts to answer them, and does both by means of an approach and methodology more or less peculiar to itself. But Marxism is of course much more than this. Its origins and its principal modes of existence have been intimately bound up with a revolutionary movement to reconstitute society. Its successes and its failures have thus always been judged by standards very different from those of the academic world. They have been judged in the arena of political action. And from this point of view, Marxism as a theory of revolutionary change has been in a condition of extreme crisis for a number of decades.

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