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JAMESON 35 FREDRIC JAMESON NOTES TOWARD A MARXIST CULTURAL POLITICS The essays which follow provide a selection of the kinds of Marxist literary analysis practiced today and for the most part, explicitly or implicitly, include a defense of their own versions of Marxist literary method. But obviously Marxism is a good deal more than a literary method, and even an association, like that of the Marxist Literary Group-organized less on the basis of some shared political program than on that of mutual professional concerns and of the problems of literary and cultural work-will want to place that work in the perspective of wider historical and political reflexions. It would no doubt be possible to devise a list of those basic positions which characterize Marxism (the social determination of consciousness? the role of social classes in shaping history? the analysis of capitalism in terms of surplus value and commodity production?); yet such an approach would seem to encourage a premature hardening of our various personal views, at a time when most of us feel that it is important to avoid the factionalism and the polemic divisiveness of which we would otherwise be only too capable. This principle itself in fact suggests that what we need at the present time is an on-going assessment of the concrete historical problems which face Marxist scholarship and Marxist cultural practice in the United States today, and the following pages are meant to be nothing more than a preliminary to such a discussion. Everyone seems agreed that something ended with the 1960s. With the end of the war, and with the end of the anti-war movement, a clear-cut political goal disappeared, with the resulting uncertainty and hesitations. In the realm of theory, the so-called New Left seemed defunct, and has not left behind it the outlines of a Marxism capable of transcending both Old and New Left sectarianism. On the college campuses, the brief heyday of streaking seemed to have signalled the end of mass student demonstrations as a potent political force. Still, it is important to resist the temptation of thinking about history in cyclical terms, and to refuse the powerful myth of an alternation of politicized and apolitical periods. Thus, something called the thirties certainly came to an end, not only perhaps with World War II, but rather as late as with McCarthyism and the Cold War at the end of the 1940s; and it was replaced by the "Great American Celebration" (C. Wright Mills) of the Eisenhower Era. To conclude from that development that there is a kind of fatal rhythm at work in the ebb and flow of political opportunity, and that the seventies are likely to be a period of retrenchment, seems to us the purest superstition. 36 MINNESOTA REVIEW For one thing, since the victory of other socialist revolutions such as those in Cuba, China, and Vietnam, and after the internal upheavals of the sixties, the kind of anti-communist terrorism which—combined with the Korean War—so easily succeeded in frightening radicals into silence during the fifties will have a much harder time of it. For another, the prosperity of the type of the Eisenhower Era (the intial historical development of consumerism on a mass-media scale) has not returned with the end of the Vietnamese War. On the contrary, those contradictions which in their political and countercultural forms shook the system during the sixties seem now to have taken on their ultimate and classic economic appearance, with mass unemployment, inflation and the crisis in primary materials (mostly supplied by the Third World). Under circumstances like these, Marxism—which was only one of a number of competing radical theories during the sixties—offers the only complete explanation of the things that are happening to us, and thus, the only sound guidelines for what in the present situation it is up to us to do. But it offers such explanations and programs of action not as ready-made, knee-jerk diagnoses , but only on condition we are prepared creatively to think through the current historical situation in the light of classical Marxist theory and practice . For example: as far as the witchhunts are concerned...

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