After Marxism [Paperback]

Ronald Aronson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0898624169 | ISBN-13: 978-0898624168 | Publication Date: November 23, 1994

After Marxism calls for a new radical coalition centered around morality and utopian sensibility. The book explores the kinds of commitments, values, and approaches to social realities that may still be described as radical today. These include the determination to end every form of oppression; a freedom to combine many different theories and kinds of analysis; an open and experimental attitude; an appreciation of modernity's great promise of being on our own; an understanding that radical social change encompasses attitudes and behaviors, as well as structures and systems; and a commitment to uniting the various potential radical groups, strands, and energies into a new radical coalition, a heterogeneous "we" founded on a deep sense of solidarity.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"With this book Ronald Aronson makes a brave and lucid contribution to the assessment of the central event in the intellectual life of our time--the complex disabling of Marxism as social politics and as a working ethos. The account he gives of his personal political odyssey is a fine example of this kind of reflection, and his readings of Adorno, Foucault, and other actors in late Marxism are insightful. For those engaged in the collective effort to define a postMarxist democratic radicalism, After Marxism will constitute a solid tool and touchstone." --Norman Rush, author of Mating

"Aronson is an engaging, down-to-earth guide to left-wing theory in the post-Marxist era. After convincingly putting Marx in his place in the museum of noble ideas, he introduces a challenging array of contemporary radical thinkers. Throughout, he makes it clear that after Marx' there are still revolutions to launch and worlds to win." --Barbara Ehrenreich, author of The Worst Years of Our Lives

"This is not a sectarian book by an author with an axe to grind. On the contrary, it strikes me as a painfully honest work by someone openly searching for his bearings in a changed world...Aronson remains sympathetic to the Marxism he leaves behind, taking with him the still usefull elements of its theoretical apparatus and its utopian vision of the future." --Stephen L. Newman, York University

"Thought-provoking....Its account of Marxism is both useful and accessible to students." --Jean-Pierre Boule, Nottingham Trent University, UK

"....Aronson's engaged and wide-ranging book combines a critical analysis of Marxism, a personal-political autobiography, and an outline of a new radical project...." --Moishe Postone, Contemporary Sociology

"...this work, from a resolutely leftist author who is evidently pained by his own intellectual conclusions, presents a powerful challenge to anyone still laying claim to the title of Marxist." --Terry Eagleton, Fadical Philosophy 82

About the Author

Ronald Aronson, Ph.D., received his doctorate in the History of Ideas at Brandeis University, where he studied with Herbert Marcuse. A community organizer in the early days of the New Left, he served as an editor of the journal, Studies on the Left. He has written and edited four books on Jean-Paul Sartre, several articles and a book on South Africa, as well as a book that studies the problem of hope in the contemporary world. He is professor and Graduate Chair of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Product Details

• Paperback: 322 pages
• Publisher: Guilford Press (November 23, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0898624169
• ISBN-13: 978-0898624168
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 1.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,543,903 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A book strangely out of touch, July 20, 2007

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Haines Brown (Hartford, CT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: After Marxism (Paperback)

I read Aronson because I believed he would offer a healthy challenge to conventional Marxist thinking, but I was disappointed. The author writes well enough (although I found him increasingly superficial and tedious toward the end), and it is always good to read a critique of various intellectual trends. However, the book's flaws are so profound that they undercut its benefits.

Aronson would define Marxism as a practice, as a relationship between certain values and ideas that develop through their practical application in ever changing circumstances. This point is probably valid enough, but at the same time he tries to define Marxism in essentialist terms, as having a set of inherent traits that determine its basic character in all times and places (an eschatology, a scientism, an authoritarianism, a reductionism, etc.). This interpretive contradiction is very damaging to the book's argument.

There is no question that Marx could be ambivalent, and so how we read him depends on whether or not we are sympathetic to his aims. Aronson does not give Marx a sympathetic reading, and the reason apparently is that he feels betrayed by the intellectual outlook that he acquired under Marcuse and by fruitless years of struggle within the New Left movement. Similar to the "Neocons", his sense of betrayal apparently turned him against the practice that was central to so much of his life, and he now bitterly does everything he can to distance himself from it.

Aronson is also anxious to distance himself from the working class (which he tends to reduce to the industrial proletariat, just as the scope of his concern for the most part is limited to Europe and the USA).

For example, despite post-World War II intellectual developments, Aronson still clings to a positivist notion of science: since facts are empirical and causality unequivocally deterministic, the world can only be perceived and grasped in static terms that are a reflection of what exists; since we cannot represent processes (what is becoming something other) in thought, we cannot develop a critical view of the world that goes beyond a reflection of existing realities. As a result of these dated assumptions, Aronson comes to the post-Modern conclusion that theory and science, to the extent they are detached from the existing world, amount only to rhetoric. Science addresses only static and deterministic realities, and theory lacks truth value. As a result, the working class in unable to offer any critical challenge to capitalism, although the author later assumes that individuals can. Perhaps this is because he sees the agent of change not as having the potency of a social class, but as individuals who happen to enjoy a private capacity for effective action and so can enter into voluntary agreements in a pursuit of their shared interests.

We have the advantage today of over a decade greater distance from the events of '89 and '91. We cannot happily resign ourselves to capitalism and foolishly ignore the working-class majority of the world's population. The book showed its age even when written, and today its effect is to betray any agent in the struggle for constructive change, although the purpose of the latter part of the book is to define the parameters of such an effort.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Good Only If You Want to Take Temperature of early '90's, June 11, 2008

By 

Howard J. Covitz "hc_computer_books" (Pascoag, RI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: After Marxism (Paperback)

The author prematurely pronounced the death of Marxism. Author was foolishly optimistic about capitalism in 1994, which now rings as simply a Marxist trying to come to terms with the end of the Soviet Union.