Western Marxism’s own retreats prepared poststructuralism’s ascendancy

Evidence

Needless to add, a number of tendencies within ‘Western Marxism’, especially as they developed in the 1960s, contributed considerably to the latter ascendancy of poststructuralism. If Marcuse finally came to abandon the category of class and to locate the revolutionary dynamic in the realms of the erotic and the aesthetic, Adorno’s extreme pessimism in Minima Moralia found its analogue in Sartre’s proposition, in Critique of Dialectical Reason, that the category of ‘scarcity’ makes it virtually inevitable that any ‘fused group’ which comes to power will undergo bureaucratic degeneration. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 170

Categorization

• QUESTION: Genealogy worth chasing: Ahmad traces poststructuralism’s rise partly to internal Western-Marxist abandonments of class (Marcuse’s erotic/aesthetic turn, Adorno’s pessimism, Sartre’s scarcity thesis) — lineage that bears on whether discourse-determinism is a foreign import or an internal development.
• XREF: connects to: Western Marxism failed as a total theory of liberation; Cutting-edge Marxism in this period grew by self-critique of its own orthodoxy

Broader Connections

• Western Marxism failed as a total theory of liberation #exemplifies (0.75)
• Cutting-edge Marxism in this period grew by self-critique of its own orthodoxy #contradicts (0.75)