Political Marxism
Political Marxism is a strand of Marxist theory that places history at the centre of its analysis.
PM was developed as a reaction against ahistorical models of Marxist analysis in the debate on the origins of capitalism. The PM critique brought social agency and class conflict to the center of Marxism. In this context, Robert Brenner and Ellen Wood founded PM as a distinct approach to rehistoricise and repoliticise the Marxist project. It was a movement away from structuralist and timeless accounts towards historical specificity as contested process and lived praxis. This research programme has since expanded across the social sciences to include the fields of history, political theory, political economy, sociology, international relations and international political economy.
The term Political Marxism itself was coined during the Brenner Debate of the late 1970s as a criticism of the work of Brenner by the French Marxist historian Guy Bois. Bois distinguished Brenner's 'political Marxism' from 'economic Marxism'. As such, the label 'Political Marxism' has not always been accepted by the scholars to whom it has been applied.
Researchers linked with PM today include Benno Teschke, Hannes Lacher and George Comninel.
