Abstract
The Crisis in Marxism (1981) is a statement of Jack Lindsay’s mature position as a writer, critic and political activist. He begins the study by reiterating the basic principles underpinning his own work, then moves to an assessment of the work of those critics whom he identifies as most influential in late twentieth-century Western Marxism, from Georg Lukács to Louis Althusser. Lindsay agreed that the power of ideology to control people’s thinking and acting was a critical concern for Marxism but was not convinced by theorists and movements that focussed on systems and structures rather than people, as they failed to recognise both how ideology functions and how people work to resist it.
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Notes
- 1.
Norman Geras, ‘Althusser’s Marxism: An Assessment’ in Western Marxism: A Critical Reader, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 232–72, misidentified by Lindsay as the following paper, André Glucksmann, ‘A Ventriloquist Structuralism’, pp. 273–314.
- 2.
Lindsay again refers to anthropological studies that depict early cultures (he uses an Australian example of a living culture with ancient history) as ‘primitive’ forerunners to more complex systems, ‘arriving finally at the class-state’ (p. 150). This characterisation of Australian and other First Nations cultures is an artefact of the progress narrative that Lindsay otherwise rejects. It shows a failure to understand in practice the connections between people and land that he constitutes theoretically as the unified state to which classed societies aspire to return.
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Cranny-Francis, A. (2024). Art, Politics and Ideology. In: Jack Lindsay. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39646-5_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39646-5_13
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