Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference 'Whither Marxism?' hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida's analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this sixth group of contributions, Jean Tible sketches how spectrality and phantasmagoria continue to animate recent inheritances of both Derrida's and Marx's texts so as to inspire novel thought-struggles; Dirce Eleonora Nigro Solis considers Derrida's engagement with the question 'Whither Marxism?' as a politico-philosophical model of deviation that provokes the displacement of Marxian axioms and a renovation of Marxist and deconstructive thinking for the period of neoliberalism; finally, Michael Shapiro traces a different detour in Derrida's thought and shows that Derrida's deviant reading of Freud's construction of repression opens up the past and the archive to non-official constructions of collective history.

Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this sixth group of contributions, Jean Tible sketches how spectrality and phantasmagoria continue to animate recent inheritances of both Derrida’s and Marx’s texts so as to inspire novel thought-struggles; ...

Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism is emblematic in a number of ways of the treatment of Western Marxism, at least in the Anglophone literature. Like the contributions of Jay and Jacoby; for Anderson, Western Marxism came to an end in the 1960s. While such a periodization can be said to register the move away from Marx by those who appropriated the legacy of Western Marxism -- such as the second generation of Frankfurt School critical theory – or those whose rejected its ‘meta-narratives’ for a set of more suspect meta-narratives – i.e. the postmodern condition -- it also ignores subsequent subterranean developments in Marxist thought. Nevertheless, Anderson’s parenthetical comparison of Theodor W. Adorno and Louis Althusser can be seen to shed some light on several striking points of similarity shared by two New Readings of Marx devised by Adorno’s and Althusser’s students, which have been effectively ignored by wider Anglophone (and Francophone?) scholarship. In the following, I substantiate these points of similarity. I also attempt to undermine the grounds of incompatibility between these New Readings. Finally, I point towards some ways in which both of these New Readings have been used to productively supplement each other in recent German Marxian theory. I do this by focusing on how Adorno and Althusser’s respective criticisms of the form of Marxist Humanism that was hegemonic in the 1960s are reflected in two New Readings of Marx developed by their students: Jacques Rancière and Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt. I show that both of these New Readings were centered on Capital-centric interpretations of Marx that were opposed to the Marxist Humanist interpretation of Capital by way of the 1844 Manuscripts. In so doing, I pay particular attention to the topic of Marx’s theory of value as it pertains to issues of Marx’s method and its relation to his social theory qua the theory of fetishism. This allows me to show how both New Readings criticised the Humanist interpretation of Marx and its conception of Marx’s theory of fetishism as an instance of the theory of alienation on both a methodological and socio-theoretical level. It also lets me show that these New Readings respective interpretations of fetishism -- as pertaining to the methodological and social theoretical aspects of the theory of value Marx promulgated in Capital -- which endeavoured to present the genesis of autonomous and inverted social forms of domination -- mark methodological and socio-theoretical advancements over previous types of Western Marxism. However, since these advances do not form complete and unproblematic theories in their own right, I also make the case that drawing on both of these New Readings might prove productive. In order to do this, I first move to question what many in these subterranean traditions within the Anglophone and Francophone world have seen as the basis of the irreconcilability between these schools by arguing that Rancière’s anti-humanism and Backhaus and Reichelt’s negative humanism are of a different register and thus do not render their respective interpretations of Marx’s methodology and social theory incompatible. I then provide an example of how aspects of both of these New Readings can be seen have been used productively in an interpretative overview of one of most important recent works in German Marxian theory, Michael Heinrich’s The Science of Value, pointing to the possibility of how they might be used in Anglo and Franco Marxian theory. It is my hope that this broad discussion will generate interest in these New Readings and advance the sort of work that draws on both of them in the Anglophone and Francophone world.

Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference 'Whither Marxism?' hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida's analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this fourth group of contributions, Thomas Clément Mercier shows how Der-rida's book, besides questioning reception and influence, yet remains to be read, especially in light of ongoing archival research on Derrida's engagements with Marx's writings in seminars from the 1970s; and Paulo Chamon offers a critical assessment of Derrida's promise of a 'New International' by considering how the book spooks itself in such a way as to raise serious questions in regard to sovereignty and subjectivity.

Marxist political economy is alive and well, and not just because of the habitual turn to Marx in response to any crisis of capitalism. Both through Capital and through the continuing evolution of Marxism, Marxist political economy offers valuable insights that can illuminate the modalities of social and economic reproduction and the relationships between (different aspects of) the economic and the non-economic. Marxism's presence has been felt through its own internal debates and debates with other approaches to political economy, and even through its influence on those reacting against Marxism. The key to the continuing relevance and analytical strengths of Marxist political economy lies in its capacity to provide a framework of analysis for unifying disparate insights into and critiques of the contradictions of capitalism across the social sciences. The instrument for forging that unity is Marx's theory of value, the potential of which is examined and illustrated with reference to the Sraffian critique and two key concepts in Marxian political economy: the value of labour power and financialisation. They are explored in the light of the processes of commodification, commodity form and commodity calculation. ARTICLE HISTORY

Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this group of contributions, Aggie Hirst and Tom Houseman, Paulo Cesar Duque-Estrada, Jenny Edkins and Cristiano Mendes reflect on the legacies of Marx and Derrida: on whether Derrida emphasized the wrong Ma...