Open Marxism

Abstract

Open Marxism is a strand of Marxism that argues that Marx’s critique of political economy should be understood in the first place as the subversive critique of the economic categories of bourgeois society, its philosophical concepts, moral values, and political institutions. Contrary to structural Marxism, which conceptualizes social forms as a kind of false appearance overlaid upon material reality, OM conceptualizes them as specific manifestations of how labour is mediated in and against capital at a particular time. Central to OM analyses is the state, which is the political form of capitalist social relations. Class struggle is intrinsic in the analysis of the state, not external to it, as often posited—the last iterations of OM point to critical affirmations as prefigurative struggles for alternative forms of social reproduction. OM’s advocacy of insubordination and emancipation rests upon labour struggles moving ’in, against, and beyond’ the social forms of domination on which capitalism is based.