Introduction

Abstract

Whither Marxism? This question was elevated to the title of a conference that took place in April 1993 at UC Riverside and that soon became known for its proceedings published under the same title (Magnus and Cullenberg, 1995) but even more so for the book-length publication of the plenary address, titled Specters of Marx. Two decades later, Jacques Derrida’s plenary address has not only been addressed by Fredric Jameson, Toni Negri, Terry Eagleton and other contributors to the 1999 volume Ghostly Demarcations (Sprinker, 1999) but has also given rise to a full-fledged cultural-studies commonplace of the spectre. More importantly still, two decades later a response to the question in the proceedings’ title, Whither Marxism?, and even its subtitle, Global Crises in International Perspective, has begun to emerge as a set of lists. Derrida’s (1994, pp. 81–4) 1993 list of the ten plagues of the ‘new world order’ (unemployment; statelessness; the economic war; the global market; accumulation by foreign debt; the arms trade; nuclear weapons; interethnic wars; mafias; international law) was not only preceded by Jameson’s (1994, pp. 1–71) 1991 list of the four antinomies of post-modernity (constant change vs. absolute stasis; spatial heterogeneity vs. global homogeneity; a hostility to nature vs. a renewed sense of nature; Utopia vs. anti-utopia) but has also more recently been met by such disparate lists as Slavoj Žižek’s (2011, p. x) four riders of the coming apocalypse (the ecological crisis; economic imbalances; the biogenetic revolution; exploding social divisions), David Harvey’s (2010, pp. 123–83) seven activity spheres of capitalism (technologies; social relations; institutional arrangements; production processes; relations to nature; the reproduction of the species; ‘mental conceptions of the world’), Darko Suvin’s (2010, pp. 269–320) three plagues of our time (mass murder; mass prostitution; mass drug use) or even, less recently and more benignly, Arjun Appadurai’s (1996, pp. 32–43) five scapes of the globalised world (ethnoscapes; medias-capes; technoscapes; financescapes; ideoscapes).