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The end of the twentieth century, and of a millennium, may be an appropriate time at which to ask where Marxism went wrong. The century was that in which Marxism came and went as a world-shaping political and cultural force. Its tragic history is one of zealous hopes and desperate failures, of revolutions and mass suffering, of ideas institutionalized and institutions collapsing. The millennium reminds us that Marxism was the millennial creed of modernity. If a few still cling to its revolutionary hopes, their rivals and friends alike now find it virtually impossible to take such ideas seriously. Where once were Marxists, postmodernists now indict Marxism as an archetypically modern essentializ-ing metanarrative and totalizing discourse. Whatever Marxism might be at the end of the millennium, it is not what was once preached by Engels and Kautsky Lenin and Stalin, Trotsky and Mao. What remains of Eastern Marxism is merely conservative; what remains of Western Marxism is merely academic.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230518766_4

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