Cinquante nuances de rouge. Les marxismes face à la pluralisation du conflit social

Abstract

Marxism too often tends to be summarized as a theory of class struggle. The rise in importance, during the second half of the twentieth century, of « new social movements » (feminism, anti-racism, ecology, LGBT movement), centered on antagonisms other than class antagonisms, thus led it to be considered a largely obsolete framework for analyzing social conflicts. The class struggle is, however, in Marx's thought, only one element among others of a more general conception of history, historical materialism. According to this conception, all social reality must fundamentally be understood as produced, conflict being no exception. Any conflict therefore appears anchored in the material conditions of production and the symbolic modalities through which it is articulated. The forms of conflicts thus appear to be ultimately determined by the mode of production in which they are inserted, which does not allow to reduce them to conflicts about production. This article aims to examine how this fundamental idea is interpreted in three variants of Marxist thought (the philosophy of Althusser, the so-called current of value criticism and the work of Deleuze and Guattari) in order to propose perspectives to the emancipatory struggles of our time and to show that historical materialism is essential to this end.

Keywords

• marxism
• class struggle
• Althusser
• Deleuze
• Guattari