Consigned by post-structuralism and marginalist economics to an obsolete micro-niche in humanities departments, academic marxism-even on the rare occasion it can genuinely help us understand the world-is as detached from the goal of classless society on paper as it is in reality. At best it is the silent God of a negative theology, a desperate mantra of abstract negation with no plausible hope to be found in the existing tendencies of capitalist society. Communism-the vision of humanity emancipated from class society-is generally disregarded as a fantasy, or even as undesirable in principle. This is no one individual’s failure, but an inevitable result of the collapse of working-class power and socialist politics in the late 20th century. Direct action after direct action, dedicated leftists put their bodies on the line without anything resembling a convincing vision of a better world. Today the situation seems to be the opposite. I-once mocked the intellectualism of his Marxist opponents by quipping “we have too many ideas and not enough action”.
The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin-both a political rival of Marx in the First International and translator of the first Russian edition of Capital, Vol.
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