One of the goals of Rethinking Marxism from the very beginning has been to recover the vocabulary of the Marxian tradition. Our view was that many Marxian concepts and ways of producing specifically Marxian knowledges about the world had been repressed, neglected, or transformed beyond recognition.
Now, fortunately, we’d like to believe, at least in some small measure thanks to our own efforts over the course of the past thirty plus years, that situation has begun to change, as the crises of capitalism have generated renewed interest in the rich vocabulary of the Marxian tradition.
We hope to be able to push forward that work of retrieving and rethinking a particularly Marxian vocabulary in the section of the journal, Keywords, which was inaugurated in 2013 by an introduction by David F. Ruccio and Maliha Safri.
Inspired by Raymond Williams’s 1985 landmark effort of the same name, Keywords has so far featured the following entries:
- Vol 25.1 “Economic Crises” (Bruce Norton)
- Vol 25.2 “Marxism” (Stephen Resnick & Richard Wolff)
- Vol 25.4 “Culture” (Lawrence Grossberg)
- Vol 26.1 “General Strike” (Gayatri Spivak)
- Vol 33.1 “Degrowth” (Bengi Akbulut)
- Vol. 34.1 “Praxis” (Joel Wainwright)
We have contributions on “Democratic Socialism”, “Needs” and other concepts forthcoming.
Contesting meanings and rearticulating concepts comprise an ongoing project that is never more important than in periods of crisis such as we are living through today. For Marxism to live up to its renewed promise, both its own keywords and those that govern economic and social life in the world at large, need to be continually scrutinized, their implications identified, and new meanings generated. We hope this section will contribute to that ambitious goal.