Abstract

Socialist movements are faced with two complementary experiences that constitute “the crisis of Marxism”: an unanticipated stability of post-war capitalism and a changed function of the proletariat. Not the capitalist system, but the proletariat — or at least a certain image of it — is disintegrating. “The system” has proven far more durable than its critics had assumed. Today, even if the system cannot develop any further, that does not necessarily imply a transcendence of capitalism. The status quo can be considered permanent. Is welfare state capitalism inescapable? This poverty of alternatives brought about by the severing of the objective connection of crisis and liberation appears even more critical if the subjective dimension of social change is taken into account.