Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International

Context and Overview

Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (Spectres de Marx, 1993) is a work of political philosophy by Jacques Derrida, based on lectures delivered at a 1993 conference in New York titled “Whither Marxism?”. Written in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparent triumph of liberal capitalism, it responds directly to claims that Marxism had become obsolete and that history had effectively culminated in liberal democracy and the market economy.

The work is best known for coining the term hauntology (French: hantologie), a play on “ontology”, to describe how Marx and Marxism “haunt” the present: neither simply alive nor dead, but persisting as spectral presences that unsettle claims of historical closure. Derrida situates his analysis in dialogue with Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and with contemporary theorists such as Francis Fukuyama, whose “end of history” thesis had become emblematic of post–Cold War optimism about global capitalism.

Central Themes and Arguments

Specters and Hauntology

A central motif is the figure of the specter, drawn from the famous opening of the Communist Manifesto (“A specter is haunting Europe”). For Derrida, the specter is a figure that troubles strict oppositions between presence and absence, life and death, past and future. Specters are not fully present entities that can be mastered, nor simple remnants of a finished past. They are unsettling returns of what has not been resolved, repressed, or properly “mourned.”

From this, Derrida derives hauntology, a philosophical orientation that contests classical ontology (the study of “being as presence”). Hauntology insists that any present moment is inhabited by what is no longer (the past) and what is not yet (the future). The present is thus intrinsically non-self-identical, marked by absences, traces, and inheritances. In Specters of Marx, this means that even when Marxism is declared dead, its concerns—about exploitation, inequality, and violence—continue to haunt global capitalism.

Critique of the “End of History” and Liberal Triumphalism

Derrida engages extensively with arguments that the fall of Soviet-style communism confirmed the end of history and the universalization of liberal democracy and market capitalism. He treats such claims as a kind of triumphalist narrative that seeks to bury Marxism and declare its questions settled.

Against this, Derrida argues that the contemporary world remains marked by conditions that call for ongoing critique: pervasive poverty, economic exclusion, debt, new forms of colonialism, and structural violence. The idea that capitalism has resolved the contradictions identified by Marx is, for Derrida, itself a myth that represses these unresolved injustices. The persistence of these problems is one of the “specters” that refuses to be laid to rest.

The State of the Debt and the Work of Mourning

The subtitle’s reference to the “state of the debt” signals a double concern. First, Derrida points to material questions of economic debt, global inequality, and the power of financial institutions and international organizations. Second, he speaks of a symbolic or ethical debt owed to the victims of past injustices and to unrealized political possibilities associated with Marxist and socialist movements.

Closely connected is the theme of mourning. Derrida suggests that post–Cold War discourse tries to perform a premature, self-congratulatory “work of mourning” for Marxism: to bury it, declare it anachronistic, and move on. He proposes instead that the task is not to eradicate Marx’s specter but to engage in a more responsible form of mourning that recognizes what in Marx’s critique remains unfulfilled and still demanding. Proper mourning would neither idealize nor dismiss Marx; it would acknowledge both his texts’ limits and their enduring provocations.

A New International

Derrida’s reflections culminate in the call for a “New International” (Nouvelle Internationale). This is not a blueprint for a traditional political party or centralized organization, nor a revival of the historical Internationals of the workers’ movement. Rather, it denotes a loose, transnational constellation of individuals and groups committed to contesting new forms of domination, inequality, and exclusion.

This New International would be:

• Without a party: not structured as a conventional political organization.
• Without a shared program in the classical sense, but united by attention to injustice, exclusion, and violence.
• Transnational and heterogeneous, cutting across states, cultures, and established political identities.

The proposal functions less as a concrete institutional plan and more as an ethico-political exhortation: to remain open to new forms of solidarity and resistance appropriate to a globalized world in which traditional political categories have been destabilized.

Derrida’s Reading of Marx

Specters of Marx is not a comprehensive exposition or defense of Marxist theory. Instead, it offers a selective, deconstructive reading of Marx’s texts, emphasizing their internal tensions and aporias. Derrida notes, for example, that Marx himself occasionally uses spectral language while also attempting to exorcise metaphysics and mystification in political economy.

Derrida argues that Marx’s project of demystification cannot entirely eliminate spectrality; the very attempt to purify presence of ghosts is itself haunted by what it excludes. This reading has been seen by some as a way of reinscribing Marx within deconstruction, showing that Marx’s thought both enables and is susceptible to deconstructive analysis.

Reception and Influence

On publication, Specters of Marx elicited diverse responses across philosophy, political theory, and cultural studies. Among Derrida scholars and many within continental philosophy, it was regarded as a significant extension of deconstruction into questions of global capitalism, justice, and political organization. The concept of hauntology in particular has had a wide afterlife, influencing fields from literary studies to media theory and critical theory.

Some Marxist critics have been skeptical or hostile. They contend that Derrida’s focus on spectrality and mourning risks obscuring material economic analysis and class struggle. For such readers, Specters of Marx appears to aestheticize or metaphysicalize Marxism, replacing concrete political strategy with vague calls for responsibility and a New International whose contours remain undeveloped.

Others, however, have welcomed the book as a way to revitalize Marxist concerns in a changed historical landscape, emphasizing its insistence that the problems identified by Marx have not vanished with the fall of state socialism. Post-Marxist and poststructuralist thinkers have drawn on Derrida’s work to explore how questions of class intersect with issues of race, gender, colonialism, and globalization, often under the sign of haunting or spectrality.

Historically, Specters of Marx has come to be seen as a key post–Cold War intervention that resists easy narratives of ideological victory or defeat. Its influence is especially evident in the critical vocabulary of “haunting” used to describe lingering colonial legacies, systemic racism, and the afterlives of political projects. While assessments differ on its political efficacy, the work is widely recognized as a major contribution to late 20th‑century philosophy and a central text for understanding the evolving reception of Marx in contemporary thought.