Abstract

In the last decade, it has become something of a cliché to note that Marxism lacks a theory of politics. As Jürgen Habermas said more than 15 years ago: “Due to the introduction of the superstructure into the base itself, the classical dependency relationship of politics to the economy was disrupted.” Similar theses have taken a variety of forms. For some, the inadequacy of Marxist political theory is the result of recent developments, particularly the appearance of the welfare state in place of the watchdog state; the novel political arrangements characterizing this new historical epoch require a new theory of the state