Jameson argues Marxism and Chicago-school neoliberalism both dispense with autonomous political thought.

Evidence

In the most calculatedly shocking of his texts, he suggests a natural kinship between one of the most extreme versions of neo-liberalism — the universal modelling of human behaviour as utility-maximization by the Chicago economist Gary Becker — and socialism, in so far as both do away with the need for any political thought. ‘The traditional complaint about Marxism that it lacks any autonomous political reflection’, he writes, ‘tends to strike one as a strength rather than a weakness’. For Marxism is not a political philosophy, and while ‘there certainly is a Marxist practice of politics, Marxist political thinking, when it is not practical in that way, has exclusively to do with the economic organization of society and how people cooperate to organize production’. The neo-liberal belief that in capitalism only the market matters is thus a close cousin of the Marxist view that what counts for socialism is planning: neither have any time for political disquisitions in their own right. ‘We have much in common with the neo-liberals, in fact virtually everything — save the essentials!’. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 295

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the postmodernism-versus-late-capitalism debate, and the idea both ideologies reduce politics to economics.
• SEED: The provocation — Marxism and Beckerian neoliberalism as cousins — could anchor an essay on why ideology critiques flatten politics.