Beyond Left Populism and Far Right Nihilism: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Marxism

Abstract

In this article we intend to collect the main ideas of that Marxism critical of orthodoxy put into practice by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in the light of a critical evaluation of contemporary ultra-right movements, a gesture in which he marked a distance from populist theory supported by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. To the extent that Merleau-Ponty rethinks the terms and modalities under which Marxism thinks the plot of the historical, he opens a space for strategy, the ideological subjectivation of class, as well as he leads an attack on the idea that history aspires to an end. However, this does not imply the assumption of an ontological vision of politics, but rather, to the extent that the knowing subject and the historical object are in relative interdependence, a class position that looks towards history and the present as a space where it must take place in the conflict for power. Thus, from this position, it is possible to critically reinterpret the “cultural battle” that the extreme right puts into play, to defend the class interests of the proletariat.