In the 1960s, in the heydays of the emergence of leftist thinking in the United States, there was no reason whatsoever to believe that any new leftist philosophy or movement, among the many that were slowly gathering strength, would necessarily take their ideas from the traditional Marxist thought. Quite the contrary, the idea of a post-Marxism was being born. As a matter of fact, even the so called neo-Marxists were raising fundamental questions whose answers tended to jeopardize the relevance of Marxism for their contemporary society. This does not mean, of course, that it was being rendered obsolete, because as a contribution for philosophizing about nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, it was still considered as valid a mode of thinking as any other, however, its existence well into twentieth-century consumer capitalism was, in fact, either dead or dying. To be honest, the possibility of a proletariat revolution seemed exceedingly remote in American soil. The energy once dedicated to these progressive radical thoughts was, by the second half of the 1960s, being channeled to other concerns, in other words, the concerns of the industrial workers were shifted and were now the concerns of activists for “peace, ecological balance, feminist rights, and racial empowerment” (LEITCH, 1988, p. 395).

As we can see, any shadow of popular revolution was then growing steadily away from factories or syndicates. Even though difficult to compare, that specific decade-old kind of class struggle seemed out-dated, though, of course, far from eradicated, anyways as compared to the imminent dangers of nuclear war, on an international stance, and racial segregation, on a domestic stance. This is to say that different problems were attracting the full attention of emerging popular movements and at the same time undermining the chances of growth in Marxism in the American left. Outside the country, the credibility of Marxism was being shaken by specific issues of the space age, namely Soviet interventions on Czechoslovakia and in Afghanistan, workers going on strikes against Marxism in Poland and genocides in Cambodia attributed to left wing partisans (LEITCH, 1988).

Whatsmore, influential non-Marxist intellectuals the likes of Noam Chomsky, Rudolph Bahro and Sheila Rowbotham, were rising to prominence with credible non-Marxist ideals. The convergence of all these affairs made the establishment of a post-Marxist movement not only predictable but downright expected.

In the literary-critic world, post-Marxist cultural-criticism projects and modes of analysis were being practiced and advocated by academic intellectuals such as Paul Lauter, Kate Millet, Florence Howe, Elaine Showalter, William Spanos, Robert Scholes and the Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt and Palestinean-American Edward Said.

References:

GREENBLATT, Stephen J. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

LEITCH, Vincent. American literary criticism from the thirties to the eighties. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Search term : Afghanistan Culture