Missing in action

‘Marxist scholarship, already on the defensive for political reasons inside university economics faculties, often retreated into scholastic debates over texts or into abstruse mathematical calculations as remote from the real world as those of their mainstream colleagues.’ So wrote Chris Harman in Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx (Bookmarks Publications, 2009). It was not just in economics that the radicals retreated; it happened in all the social sciences and humanities. And not just because of political timidity; they had been outflanked. Knowledge production had changed in ways that disadvantaged radicals.