A Critique of Mau: Mute Compulsion and Other Essays

The two first essays in A Critique of Mau: Mute Compulsion and Other Essays are critiques of Mau and Meiksins Wood for misreading Marx on the inevitability of the supersession of capitalism by socialism and eventually classless communist society. The third one discusses Hindess & Hirst: Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production as a link between Althusserian Structural Marxism on the one hand and Laclau & Mouffe's discourse analysis and Keith Jenkins' postmodernist rejection of history on the other. The fourth one summarises some main points made in the author's Structure, Agency and Theory, critique of which is countered in the fifth one. The sixth one defends some points made in his Experience and Historical Materialism, while the seventh and last one adds some further comments on the problem of reading Marx.

Ib Gram-Jensen is a Historian who graduated as an MA in history and social studies from the University of Copenhagen. He lives in Denmark.

Apart from A Critique of Mau: Mute Compulsion and Other Essays, his publications include Experience and Historical Materialism: Five Argumentative Essays (2020) and Structure, Agency and Theory: Contributions to Historical Materialism and The Analysis of Classes, State and Bourgeois Power in Advanced Capitalist Societies vol. I-III (2021).