Art, Politics and Ideology

The Crisis in Marxism (1981) is a statement of Jack Lindsay’s mature position as a writer, critic and political activist. He begins the study by reiterating the basic principles underpinning his own work, then moves to an assessment of the work of those critics whom he identifies as most influential in late twentieth-century Western Marxism, from Georg Lukács to Louis Althusser. Lindsay agreed that the power of ideology to control people’s thinking and acting was a critical concern for Marxism but was not convinced by theorists and movements that focussed on systems and structures rather than people, as they failed to recognise both how ideology functions and how people work to resist it.