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No original: "In the political and academic debates of earlier decades, Marxism had always been treated in the final analysis as a historical model powered by the engine of proletarian interest and action. But for just this reason, as the blue collar proletariat diminished in numbers and relevance throughout advanced societies, Marxism appeared vulnerable to the implausibility of its premises. What happens, after all, when the proletariat ceases to function as an engine of history? At the hands of practitioners of cultural and social studies in the 1970s the machine could still be made to work: you merely replaced “workers” with “women”; or students, or peasants, or blacks, or— eventually—gays, or indeed whichever group had sound reason to be dissatisfied with the present disposition of power and authority (pt) |
