How familiar does one have to be with Marx and Engels’s opponents in The Holy Family or The German Ideology? I’ve only read excerpts in anthologies and not the full texts.

Some notes on Ahmad:

Rockhill favorably cites Ahmad in his introduction to Losurdo’s Western Marxism, so some of this may be covered in their works, as well. Ahmad is mostly focused on literary theory, and the ways many Western theorists clump all of “Third World” literature together, while also only treating examples of it written or translated into English, but he also discusses the general intellectual climate in Europe and the U.S. between 1968 and the fall of the U.S.S.R.

Although there are positive aspects of Theory that are “worth retaining,” the “dominant strands within this ‘theory’. as it has unfolded after the movements of the 1960s were essentially over, have been mobilized to domesticate, in institutional ways, the very forms of political dissent which their movements had sought to foreground.” (p. 1)

In the absence of a mass movement, theory turned away from political economy and the class struggle, while retaining some of the weaknesses of the movements that radicalized their participants. In France, the radical period coincided with the Algerian and Indochina Wars, but that period (1945-1965) was also the time of “the installation of a new-style, Fordist regime of capital accumulation, thanks largely to French acceptance of the Marshall Plan” (p. 59) In the U.S., the antiwar movement’s “predominant sentiment was that of anti-colonialism, and the bulk of the mobilization, including the main organizers (the role of the Church and pacifist groups is usually understated in accounts from the Left) represented the political traditions of decent liberalism thrown into agony by the scale of savagery and the number of American deaths” (p. 40).

The result (of this among other things – as you can tell my my page numbers I’m bouncing around a bit)

was that the radicalism that arose in the United States in 1968 or thereabouts did not, except in some small pockets, believe in the desirability of socialism in its own country or in any realistic possibility of a revolutionary movement in the West, while its counterparts in the Parisian intelligentsia seemed to believe more in Surrealism than in socialism and quickly settled into poststructuralisms and New Philosophies which were directly hostile to Marxism and to the idea of any historical role for the working class. The overwhelming majority of the Left in the metropolitan countries actually believed – whether it said so in as many words or not – that the combination of the Fordist regimes of accumulation and the welfarist compact for industrial labour, which had underwritten the anti-communist consensus in the advanced capitalist countries, was the best possible choice for their own countries, and what they needed to do now was to refine the democratic premisses of liberal-capitalist regimes on their own terms. . . . [S]ocialism, in other words, was poor man’s capitalism. (p. 27)

Another major issue was that of academic professionalism and professionalization. The generation that came of age after the '60s in the U.S. had no major homegrown theorists as their forebears. The previous generation of Communists were activists who were purged from the universities in the McCarthy Era and didn’t leave behind much written output. Meanwhile, once Nixon started pulling troops out of Vietnam, the movement was dead. “It is a measure of how much the American Left has needed to suppress the memory of Vietnam in the process of normalizing itself into a professionally responsible stratum that it organized no movement of any proportions either to demand from its state that it undertake reparations or to mobilize resources from the citizenry to help rebuild what their rulers and armies had destroyed so utterly” (p. 28).

Coupled with the turn from political economy to culture, this was a fatal error. “When this material devastation brought in its train the inevitable disorientations in the social and political domains, those who believe in the moral grandeur of revolutions but not in the brute reality of the material conditions in which people actually build their own lives and their revolutions were thoroughly disillusioned” (p. 29).

The new leftist academics, then, produced “a very academic kind of Marxism; and given the absence of a preceding Marxist cultural tradition, this new Marxism was frequently and fashionably combined with all sorts of other things, in all kinds of eclectic and even esoteric ways” (p. 62).

But they didn’t really critique themselves.

A difficult but also pressing question for theory, one would have thought, would consist of the proper specification of the dialectic between objective determination and individual agency in the theorist’s own production. This would be an especially pressing issue – not so much in the form of censorship as of self-censorship and spontaneous refashioning – as the radical theorist takes up the role of a professional academic in the metropolitan university, with no accountable relation between classes and class-fractions outside the culture industry. The characteristic feature of contemporary radicalism is that it rarely addresses the question of its own determination by the conditions of its production and the class location of its agents. In the rare case where the issue of one’s own location – hence of the social determination of one’s own practice – is addressed at all, even fleetingly, the stance is characteristically that of a very poststructuralist kind of ironic self-referentiality and self-pleasuring. (p. 6)

Marcuse’s turn toward the erotic, Adorno’s pessimism, Althusser’s all-too-broad account of ideological state apparatuses, etc., contributed to the (non- or anti-Marxist) development of poststructuralism, with its Foucauldian “discourses” and conversations (p. 38-39). And what of conversation?

The notable achievement of the ‘children of ‘68’ is that they did not even intend to give rise to a political formation that might organize any fundamental solidarity with the two million workers who are currently unemployed in France. Debates about culture and literature on the Left no longer presume a labour movement as the ground on which they arise; ‘theory’ is now seen . . . as a ‘conversation’ among academic professionals. (p. 2)

…

In some American dilutions of this theory of the dispersal and fracturing of historical subjects, the idea of ‘inquiry’, which presumes the possibility of finding some believable truth, was to be replaced with the idea of ‘conversation’ which is by its nature inconclusive. . . This theory-as conversation has a remarkably strong levelling effect. One is now free to cite Marxists and anti-Marxists, feminists and anti-feminists, deconstructionists, phenomenologists, or whatever other theorist comes to mind, to validate successive positions within an argument, so long as one has a long list of citations, bibliographies, etc., in the well-behaved academic manner. (p. 70)

The result is a theory with a “distinctly consumptionist slant” (p. 71).

Anyway, there’s a whole lot more to the book, especially on literature, post-colonialism, and anti-imperialism. The chapters where he critiques Fredric Jameson and Edward Said are really great, too.