МАРКСИЗМОТ ДЕНЕС - ПАТОТ ОД НЕОПХОДНО ДО ИЗЛИШНО ЗНАЕЊЕ И НАЗАД
MARXISM TODAY: FROM OBLIGATORY TO SUPERFLUOUS KNOWLEDGE (AND BACK)

Summary/Abstract: This article describes the process of Marxism’s “amnesia” as an obligatory academic knowledge and its transformation in the times of sociopolitical and economic “transition” – resulting in newly established disciplines and newly coined terms in the humanities, especially in the domain of literary studies and, furthermore, in the current trend of cultural studies. Considering my personal teaching experience in the late 1980s, when Marxism was considered obligatory knowledge, applied in a variety of academic disciplines, I remember that, in the meantime, it happened to be “slightly”, still effectively, put aside, deemed superfluous in the subsequent curriculum and textbook references. This, voluntary and ideologically motivated academic, as well as epistemological, “escape” (or, shift) from Marxism came out to be manipulative, due to its intentional blurring or silencing of the real cause of our current crisis, profound problems, and hard asymmetries of this neoliberal epoche. The politics of identity, as a dominating principle in contemporary political debates and sociopolitical stratification, founded on the national as well as cultural identification and differentiation, in its consequences, remains profoundly ignorant or neutralising – as to the real source of political power, rising from the class division and economic (class) inequality. Thus, numerous authors, originating from various academic as well as socio-cultural backgrounds, to name just a few, like the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis (Slavoj Zizek, Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupancic, Rastko Mocnik); leftist philosophers and literary scholars like Alain Badiou, Terry Eagleton, Gayatri Spivak, Armando Gnisci, Boris Buden – are nowadays critically pointing at the basic controversies of the academic trend of “culturalisation“ or simplifying euphemistic presentation of differences as primarily (inter)cultural instead of class (economic) ones. It finally confirms the inevitable role and actual relevance of Marxism today in the epistemological debates, taking place in contemporary humanities, and concerning the paradoxes of neoliberalism, since it is only Marxism that dares to challenge and critically analyse the common discourse of (inter)cultural differences and diversities as primarily class-based asymmetries.

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