Post-Marxism has been defined as the attempt to insist on the continuing value of Marxist thought while incorporating post-structuralist criticisms of holism. In this essay, I use a perspective developed through studying the contours of power in actually existing socialist and post-socialist regimes to critically examine three influential works in post-Marxism. While finding much of value in these books’ development of non-totalizing forms of social theory, I argue that they also reproduce some of the theoretical logics that plagued the worst moments of socialist governance. In particular, I take issue with their implicit assumptions about the performance of political identities in academic writing and the relationship of empirical research to social theory.
