‘Marx’ as a quasi-synonym of ‘justice.’”^4 Derrida was, it seemed,
still avoiding history.
Derrida, in Specters of Marx,jettisons virtually all of the
specific characteristics of Marxism, in order to save Marx. As
Richard Wolin points out, he ignores Marx’s neo-Hegelian
(that is, metaphysical) insistence that the proletariat is the rep-
resentative class of modern times. He fails to attend to the en-
tanglement of state ownership and bureaucracy that charac-
terized Marxist regimes. The practical realism of Marx, his
constantly emphasized planning for the revolution, is sup-
pressed by Derrida, who prefers to see in Marxism a vague
messianic promise of an unexplained future, “the democracy
to come.”
Derrida’s democratic Marxist future carries the promise
of magical transformation; he hopes for deliverance from the
society of the spectacle and related cyber-maladies, as well as
the imperialist world order and mindless consumerism.^5 The
liberation suggested here remains merely mysterious rather
than, as in Marx’s own writings, practical in orientation (that
is, dependent on revolutionary action). Derrida’s intent is to
save Marx, not to subvert him. But his blindness to Marx’s
concerns with class struggle and revolution makes Marx seem
less, rather than more, insightful.
In Specters of Marx,Derrida tries out a fashionable mode
of inquiry, familiar from neo-Marxist journals like Social Text
andOctoberand indebted to the theorists Jean Baudrillard and
Paul Virilio. There is a touch of frenzy in the style. Consider
this rhapsodic passage, taken virtually at random from Specters
of Marx:“Entire regiments of ghosts have returned, armies
from every age, camouflaged by the archaic symptoms of the
paramilitary and the postmodern excess of arms (information
Politics, Marx, Judaism 229