A Critique of British Marxism

In their enthusiasm to promote the notion of human agency, British Marxists have remained umbilically attached to the individual/society opposition, central to bourgeois ideology, and to its variants, such as subject/system and text/context. They are attached, similarly, to the notion of consciousness, whether exercised by individual or collective agencies. This book argues that such an approach is methodologically misconceived. It recommends, accordingly, the recovery of Marxism’s classical concepts, notably the ‘social formation’ and ‘modes of production’, with a consequent focus upon the notion of the ideological (as opposed to political or libidinal) unconscious. British Marxists, it elaborates, need urgently to familiarize themselves with the work of the Spanish Marxist Juan Carlos Rodríguez. This book also advocates, by extension, a reconsideration of other social modes, notably of a feudalism based not upon ‘subjects’, as under capitalism, but upon ‘lords’ and ‘serfs’/‘servants’. The result is a radically new take on the history of ideological production.