Autonomy and Antagonism in Rosa Luxemburg and Gramsci

Abstract

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, a propagated conviction was that Karl Marx’s social theory and practice had reached exhaustion, not only because of its possible intrinsic weakness, but as a result of a series of crimes that emerged from the structures of Stalinism. Furthermore, the technical scientific revolution, productive restructuring, and ultimately, the neoliberal globalization of the market and culture would be eliminating the actual material substrate of Marxist theory: the industrial working class.