REVIEW ARTICLE 89 lead to a rethinking both of the supposed unity of the working-class as political agent and the necessary (not inevitable mind) link between the working-class and socialism. This is the ground of poststructura-lism's most provocative contributions but has passed this text by entirely. But this is not entirely fortuitous. To take that path would most likely lead to the 'postmarxist' terrain that Laclau and Mouffe have argued for in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. (In fact the absence of a discussion of this work—given Callinicos' intentions—is simply astonishing and in a sense already ensures that the book is something of a non-starter.) Predictably, a properly marxist (in the sense defined at the beginning of this review) response, it falls back on two arguments. The first is back to economics and the dynamics of accumulation: this is not a post-industrial, post-fordist, or postmodern age, but a new regime of accumulation characterised as 'overconsumptionism'. This can explain the 'mood' of the 1980s since it involved a 'reorientation of consumption towards the new middle class. . .' (p. 164) (So it does have to do with the 'new middle class* after all!) And the second and most important, in fact the punch-line of the book, is that all this confusion over the basic truths of our world is due to the waning enthusiasm of middle-aged ex-revolutionaries, who, disappointed with the results of 1968, 'renounced marxism* and 'abandoned revolutionary socialism for social democracy' (p. 167) 'pledged to achieving partial reforms', (p. 168) CONCLUSION Callinicos concludes that 'the prosperity of the western new middle class combined with the political disillusionment of many of its most articulate members—provides the context to the proliferating talk of postmodernism.' For those whom postmodernism and poststructuralism has provided the context—if not the panacea—for a renewed discussion of feminism, gender, race, third world and anti-colonial issues and its place in an emancipatory politics today, this is simply absurd. The Subaltern Studies Group have used the writings of Foucault in particular to great effect, providing nuanced historical reinterpreta-tions sensitive to the historically contingent formation of ideologies and identities. There is no space to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this theoretical current, related in particular to the uneasy tension between a type of Lukacsian marxism and the deconstruction of such a philosophy of history. But it is sufficient to note that postmodernism is not confined to the European and North American contexts and that its reception in post-colonial contexts should not be marred by an (reversed) ethno-centric bias. I want to suggest that the implications of Against Postmodernism go beyond this single book: what it reveals is the inability of marxism to