There is something odd about the assumption that the collapse of Communism represents a terminal crisis for Marxism. One might think, among other things, that in a period of capitalist triumphalism there is more scope than ever for the pursuit of Marxism's principal project, the critique of capitalism.

Yet the critique of capitalism is out of fashion. Capitalist triumphalism on the right is mirrored on the left by a sharp contraction of socialist aspirations. Left intellectuals, if not embracing capitalism as the best of all possible worlds, hope for little more than a space in its interstices and look forward to only the most local and particular resistances. At the very moment when a critical understanding of the capitalist system is most urgently needed, large sections of the intellectual left, instead of developing, enriching and refining the required conceptual instruments, show every sign of discarding them altogether. ‘Post-Marxism’ has given way to the cult of postmodernism, with its principles of contingency, fragmentation and heterogeneity, its hostility to any notion of totality, system, structure, process and ‘grand narratives’. But if this hostility extends to the very idea of capitalism as a social system, this does not prevent these intellectual currents from treating ‘the market’ as if it were a universal and inevitable law of nature while paradoxically closing off critical access to this totalizing power by denying its systemic unity and insisting on the impossibility of ‘totalizing’ knowledges. Post-modern fragmentation and contingency here join a strange alliance with the ultimate ‘grand narrative’ the ‘end of History’.