What’s left of post-Marxism? In particular, the concepts and categories developed by the Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau during the 1970s, and later with Chantal Mouffe and others in the 1980s and 1990s. This question is not readily answerable, or at least appears in the negative, for the second decade of the 21st century has seen the welcome reconstruction of materialism, economic contexts, production, totality, and dialectics as vital explanatory tools in coming to think critically about the present conjecture. Long gone then, or at least seriously weakened, are the approaches of language, discourse, heterogeneity and symbol. This status is, in part, attributable to the explosion of new political contexts which possess a radical distinctiveness that has not yet settled into predetermined critical patterns. Indeed, what remains particularly significant about these contexts, ranging from recent terrorist insurgencies, conflict in Africa and the Middle East, climate change, ecological crisis, austerity measures, and new anti-capitalist protests, is how strongly they exhibit the exhaustion of a specific strain of discourse centred on language, symbol, difference and deconstruction, while calling for the development of new critical materialisms as prerequisites for any plausible account of 21st century culture (see Coole and Frost, 2010: 1– 46). As Siân Adiseshiah and Rupert Hildyard (2013) have argued, new critical endeavours that confront the waning radicalism of the old theoretical approaches must be attentive to power, agency and political critique, but without reprising the discursive or textual paradigms that sustained the work of previous scholarly efforts.

We should hesitate to dispose with post-Marxism in its entirety, however. To paraphrase Fredric Jameson on this issue, the variability of specifically Marxist political ideologies means that post-Marxism appears cyclically, offering a regeneration of older, more traditional Marxist models. For Jameson, it is precisely these very features – the abandonment of revolution, the derision of the Hegelian inspired dialectic, the embrace of mass social democracy – ‘that first appeared in the post-Marxism of our own era when more sophisticated versions of that diagnosis and its prescription alike began to reappear in vaster and greater numbers’ (Jameson, 2009: 374). For Jameson and many others, this reappearance was most powerfully marked by Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and socialist strategy (1985).