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Neo-Marxism is a term designating the critical renaissance of Marxist thought in the post-war period. Though the label ”neo-Marxist” is sometimes applied to thinkers who combined a fidelity to Marx’s critical and political aims with a sense of the limitations of Marxism in the face of phenomena like fascism or mass culture, its main reference is to radical political economists (such as Joan Robinson, Paul A. Baran, and Paul M. Sweezy) who sought to renew Marx’s project in a situation marked by the rise of global corporations, anti-colonial struggles for national liberation, and the politics of US imperialism.

Whereas the post-World War I Marxist concern with the cultural sphere and political subjectivity can be put under the aegis of ”western Marxism” (as opposed to ”classical Marxism”), neo-Marxism points to the attempt, during and after World War II, to reflect on the pertinence of Marxist categories for an understanding of the changed conditions of capital accumulation and the political realities that accompanied them. Having intersected the Frankfurt School (Baran was present at the Institute for Social Research in 1930), and later influencing some of its erstwhile members (Monopoly Capital was a considerable reference for Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man), neo-Marxists shared with them a conviction regarding the increasingly prominent role of the state within the capitalist system. Hence the influential use of the expression ”state monopoly capitalism” to designate a situation where the state itself becomes a ”collective capitalist” rather than the mere enforcer of the capitalist system of social relations.

The experience of Roosevelt’s New Deal, as well as those of the Marshall Plan and the rise of the ”military-industrial complex,” suggested to neo-Marxists that the orthodox Marxist understanding of crisis and development within capitalism was insufficient to grasp post-war realities. Thus, they tended to give short thrift to the labor theory of value and to regard the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as an inadequate tool in the light of the long boom of an American-led capitalist system after 1945. Following Keynes, they replaced the notion of surplus value with a far broader one of ”economic surplus.”

With regard to their understanding of imperialism, Baran and Sweezy saw monopoly capital as a system unable to absorb surplus either in terms of effective demand or through productive investments. Moreover, they conceived of monopoly capitalism as fundamentally irrational, insofar as it subordinated all dimensions of social existence (from sexuality to art, body posture to religion) to the calculated, ”rationalized” attempt to realize economic surplus. Even the capitalist rationality of quid pro quo breaks down. For Baran and Sweezy (1966): ”Human and material resources remain idle because there is in the market no quid to exchange against the quo of their potential output.”

The anti-imperialist bent of neo-Marxism, and specifically Baran’s notion that monopoly capitalism led to the ”development of underdevelopment” in peripheral settings, was a significant component in the formulation of dependency theory and the work of figures such as Andre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin. Its political influence on debates about socialism and national liberation in Cuba, Latin America and elsewhere, especially through the journal The Monthly Review, was massive.

In Anglo-American sociology, this renewed emphasis, from the standpoint of political economy, on questions of exploitation and imperialism in the new, ”affluent” society, influenced a host of research programs which have often been described as neo-Marxist. Thus, in the work of Willis, or Bowles and Gintis, we encounter a neo-Marxist sociology of education which seeks to analyze the reproduction of capitalist socioeconomic structures through curricula, as well as the forms of resistance and conflict that accompany these processes. In works by Braverman and Burawoy, the labor process and its ideological reproduction is subjected to neo-Marxist scrutiny. In the domain of class analysis, the work of Erik Olin Wright has sought to combine a Marxist analysis of class exploitation with a Weberian analysis of status and domination, crystallized in the notion of ”contradictory class locations.” Spurred by the work of Nicos Poulantzas, Bob Jessop and others synthesized a neo-Marxist analysis of the capitalist state, questioning any univocal correspondence between the form of the state and its economic function, and seeking to delve into the class relations and class fractions that traverse the state itself. In the field of political economy, the neo-Marxist label has also been applied to the French Regulation School -with its emphasis on the social and governmental ”modes of regulation” that contingently govern the reproduction of ”regimes of accumulation” – as well as to more orthodox Marxists seeking to analyze the transformations of ”late capitalism” (Ernest Mandel).

Despite the absence of any single, coherent program or statement of its departures from classical Marxism, neo-Marxism is best periodized and comprehended as an intellectual sensibility which tried to amalgamate a fidelity to certain guiding ideas of classical Marxism (economic exploitation, class struggle, the horizon of social emancipation) with an attention to the transformed conditions under which capitalist social relations were being reproduced in the post-war period. This entailed attending to the specificity and relative autonomy of the contemporary capitalist state, as well as to the political and economic consequences of militarism, imperialism. and the rise of the corporation as a social force. Many neo-Marxist authors felt compelled to inject non-Marxist ideas (from the likes of Keynes or Weber) into Marxism to cope with unprecedented transformations within capitalist society – whence the eclecticism that critics have often accused in their work. Politically, neo-Marxist ideas on power, the state and political subjectivities beyond the traditional working class fed into the development of the New Left in the 60s and 70s.

Bibliography:

Baran, P. A. & Sweezy, P. M. (1966) Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order. Penguin, London.
Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. Routledge, London.
Wright, E. O. (1990) The Debate on Classes. Verso, London.