Western Marxist responses to economism

I argue that contemporary Western marxism is not monolithic, instead being composed of discernable and incommensurable paradigms. To that end, I examine different responses to what some perceive as the limiting economism of "traditional" political economy. Gerald Cohen, whose work I first examine, represents an effort to renovate, rationalise, and retain "traditional" historical materialism. As such it stands as a benchmark for the other studies. Equally of significance is his growing awareness that the traditional model could not address many significant features of our individual lives in communal settings.;Gramsci, some fifty years earlier, had also grappled with the problem of economism. His theory of politics came to stress the multi-dimensionality of political mobilization (hegemony) as a process involving political, economic, intellectual, cultural and, yes, moral leadership. He understood our very selves as the sites of political contestation, and the reformation of common sense as a premier political goal.;Althusser walked a fine line between retaining his membership in the French Communist Party and maintaining his intellectual freedom to refashion the orthodox tenets in a structuralist direction. His system encompasses a very modern view of science, alongside a traditional nineteenth century (Marxist) view. Both conceptions of science ground his use of ideology as a critical weapon to flail opponents, although he concurrently also uses ideology in a non-normative, descriptive sense.;Williams and Thompson, cultural materialists, speak of the logic of process, not of structures. Thompson, a social historian, is renowned for his studies of class. I argue that their concept of a moral economy has a greater continuing significance. Moral economy is analyzed as a series of linked concepts: agency, values, (class) struggle, founded on the bedrock of experience.;I conclude that these are very different, but still Western marxist paradigms; that one can see the emerging outline of a mixed conflict--consensus model of society; and that the problem of bias in paradigm construction is probably unavoidable, and might be welcomed as an index of intellectual freedom.