Marxism after communism

It is with apprehension but also conviction that I defend Marxism today1 - apprehension because we live in a period that is suspicious of visions of alternative futures, skeptical of grand historical narrative, dismissive of materialist explanations, rejecting of class analysis while tolerating capitalism's defects and pathologies as unavoidable and natural; conviction because we live in a period that ever more closely conforms to Marxist prognoses of a capitalist juggernaut, a period that cries out for a critical Marxist consciousness. While every plank in the Marxist framework is under siege, the critical intellect is in desperate need of Marxism's refusal to identify what could be with what is.