The ideal immanent within the real: On Peter Hudis’ Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism

Self-emancipation and humanism — rejected by some Marxists as unnecessary in the development of historical materialist theory — are in fact embedded at the core of any meaningful historical materialism. This comes out clearly in Peter Hudis’s Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism. The principal aim of the book is to unearth the “prefigurative” — the vision of a new post-capitalist world — from the writings of a Marx usually seen as agnostic on the question. The search for this prefigurative Marx leads directly to the issue of how to reconcile the objective with the subjective, the objectively determined laws of motion in the economy with the emergence of a mass revolutionary subject. In tackling this, Hudis opens up areas of inquiry central to the development of counter-hegemonic theory and practice in the 21st century.