Spectres of Post-Marxism? Reassessing Key Post-Marxist Texts: A Reply to Stuart Sim

This reply to the chapter ‘Spectres of post-Marxism? Reassessing key post-Marxist texts’ focuses on two key moments that emerge from Stuart Sim’s argument: the identification of the complexity of the signifier ‘post-Marxism’; and post-Marxism’s engagement with relativism via postmodernity and poststructuralism. In developing this argument Sim offers a close reading of what are considered to be four key post-Marxist texts by Baudrillard, Lyotard, Laclau and Mouffe, and Derrida and concludes that the conceptual thread that runs through all of them is relativism . However, in this response it will be argued that while relativism might indeed tie these texts together, it is problematic to then move to an argument that suggests post- Marxism demands a leaving behind of Marxism or anti-Marxism. The key to understanding this problematic is evident in the relationship between modernity and postmodernity through the application of concepts such as, limit and antagonism.