Abstract

Tomorrow’s politics will be a politics of multiplicity. Contemporary Marxism, in its political and trade-unionist manifestations, appears as a major obstacle, given its inability to escape from totalising categories and to reflect upon the political need for innovation . Maurizio Lazzarato attempts to show that this double inability originates in an ontological view of relations, present in Marx himself, a view which needs to be reconsidered in light of the philosophy of multiplicity developed during the same period. William James’ pragmatism, for instance, allows us to understand how deeply Marx’s ontology of relation is indebted to the idealist philosophy of the 19th century, thus revealing the ontological limits of Marxist politics