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This "valorization” of "unrealizability” derives in large part from the Lyotardian "incredulity” toward narratives or metanarratives—especially what Butler refers to as "the apparent failure of Marxist teleologies” (1993b, 3). According to Butler, "Marxist versions of history” have lost "credibility” not because “this version of history has played itself out, has taken place, and is now over” but rather because "belief in the possibility of such a history ever taking place, regardless of its temporal placement in past, present, or future, is now in permanent crisis” (1993b, 3).

What is this "Marxist version of history” Butler considers implausible? It is the historical materialist understanding of the forces of history as "the history of class struggles” (Marx 1988, 55). It is important to remind ourselves that this is an understanding of history not as narrative, not as contingencies, not as the desires of individuals, but rather, as Marx writes, history is the process in which "the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production," which have turned "from forms of development of the productive forces... into their fetters” (1970, 21) This then, according to Marx, "begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure." For, it is in the "ideological forms” of the superstructure that "men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out” (1970, 21). The historical materialist explanation of history, in short, is a theory of social struggle and change—what Cornell dismisses as "messianic” history and Laclau as "eschatological” history (Butler, 1993b, 3). But historical materialism is not messianic, nor idealist, utopian belief, rather it is a concrete praxis: it is a critique of the existing relations of production and exploitation in order not just to interpret the world (the goal of ludic theorists), as Marx says in his famous "Thesis XI," but to "change it” (1976, 5). Laclau's attack on Marxism as "eschatological” is an alibi for positing history as aleatory: as the effect of haphazard forces of the market. If "eschatology” is the real question here, then it is "radical democracy” that is the outcome of an eschatological historiography.

It does not matter to Butler and other ludic theorists whether historical materialism effectively explains "historical reality," whether such history "has taken place” or will ever take place. Rather what counts is whether the "stories," the "(meta)narratives” are "believed”; whether they are "credible." According to Butler, "that narrative," constituting Marxist theories, "can no longer be told with the degree of plausibility that it once had.... To claim that belief in a certain version of history is no longer possible is simply to claim that the narrative that tells and enacts that history is no longer plausible” (1993b, 3-4, n. 1). Under the guise of "truth” ("believability"), Butler is, of course, reinscribing the pragmatic subject of the entrepreneurial bourgeois. "Believing” is subjective and, as such, privileges "consciousness." In other words, under the cover of "believing," Butler puts forth a social theory in which the consciousness of the subject makes (narrates) the world—a reassuring view of history for the ruling class. Butler is also positing history as a narrative, a story that one (consciousness) tells about the past. It is a "telling” that not only narrativizes the past but also activates and constructs the very belief that sustains it and lends it credibility. Butler, in a somewhat contradictory move, is also reducing history to ideology: to a series of representations that produces its own legitimacy. What counts is not the "truth” of the narrative or the validity of its explanation of the "real"—poststructuralists have largely bracketed both—but its ability to construct its own legitimacy in the telling.

The "poststructuralist position," according to Butler, posits "a future which is in principle unrealizable. The promise of history is one that is destined to be broken” (1993b, 4). In making such claims, ludic theories are mystifying history as an abstract, "eternal category," an eternal present whose "future... is in principle” (essentially) "unrealizable," and whose promises—of equality, emancipation, well-being—are "destined to be broken." Such a notion of history becomes little more than an alibi for the status quo. It attributes the historically specific failures of patriarchal-capitalism to an abstract, "essential” failure of history-in-itself, and in so doing, offers a subtle apologetics for free market anarchism. It suppresses the "real," objective contradictions and class conflicts in capitalism. This essentialization of capitalism is particularly evident when Butler declares that "In the unrealizability of history resides its promise," for any effort, according to Butler, to "realize” history "would foreclose contestation, difference, alterity” (1993b, 6). Such a logic reifies an "eternal” category of contestation and difference that is always already necessary.

What does this mean when we leave ludic mystification—what is this eternal category of "contestation, difference, alterity” that cannot be foreclosed or ended? It is, of course, the struggles over the exploitation of other people's labor; it is class contestation. This ludic legitimization of the "unrealizability of the end of history," of the end of contestation, and the impossibility of emancipation is nothing short of the legitimization of the unrealizability of the end of capitalism—an alibi for continuation of the existing relations of class exploitation and class privilege. Especially significant here is Cornell's position in which the "very difference, gap, incommensurability between the realizable and ideal," according to Butler, generates an "infinite striving” (1993b, 7). Cornell substitutes the ethical—as an "unrealizable," "infinite striving"—for a socially transformative politics. In so doing, this (former) socialist feminist not only abandons the socialist revolution to overthrow existing class privileges and relations of production but also argues against the revolution ever arriving for that would end the "infinite striving that failure somehow motivates” (Butler, 1993b, 7). This is the bourgeois hope that the revolutionary letter never arrives at its destination—that is, the place of its own class privilege.

Ludic theory leaves us then with a version of history as abstract and idealist as Proudhon's Hegelianism. Marx's critique of Proudhon is just as appropriate today to make of ludic theorists: "incapable of following the real movement of history, [they] produce a phantasmagoria... it is not history but trite Hegelian trash, it is not profane history—a history of man—but sacred history—a history of ideas” (1975, 31). Cornell's notion of "messianic” history and Laclau's notion of "eschatological” history, both refer, according to Butler to "Marxist teleologies." But it is the ludic theorists, rather than historical materialists who construct a utopian, messianic, “sacred” history of an "eternal,' unending present of infinite striving over differences. This is an abstract, static notion of social development as multiple and diverse in its details but as unchanging and unchangeable in its fundamental structure. Ludic theorists valorize the permanence of class conflict—and thus their own class privilege—in their claims for the necessity of unending antagonism: the necessity, in short, for the permanence, and inevitability of capitalism. It is not the future—specifically a non-exploitative, socialist future—that is unrealizable; rather it is the end of capitalism that is, for these theorists, impossible and unthinkable, and, for many, even undesirable.

Butler is largely approbatory of this valorization of “unrealizability," particularly Laclau's argument, as she says, “that certain freedoms and possibilities are opened up by the failure of a conventional sense of emancipation” whose “foundations are exposed as contradictory and untenable” (1993b, 8). For Butler such a “postfoundationalist sense” of emancipation “will be citational: its use will be “provisional and revisable.... Indeed the writer of 'emancipation' will not know in advance for what purposes or in what direction the term will come to signify” (1993b, 8). In her claims to “redeploy emancipation” Butler seeks to “mark off the 'playful' [ludic] use of the category from the serious and foundationalist one” (1993b, 8). She substitutes, in other words, a “playful” citationality of emancipation as a sliding, unlocatable, reversible trope for the “serious foundationalist” meaning of emancipation as a struggle concept necessary to the praxis of ending the exploitation of people's labor. This amounts to a ludic emptying of emancipation of any concrete meaning as specific revolutionary possibility, instead it becomes an abstract floating, “impossibility." But emancipation—as the historically specific project of freeing people from the exploitation of the relations of production in capitalism—is neither “unrealizable” nor “impossible." It is important to recall Marx's observation here: “Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present” (1970, 21). It is the task of historical materialism to provide this “closer examination” that not only shows us the problem but also how “the material conditions for its solution are already present."

Butler, however, offers a Nietzschean-Foucauldian solution to the “valorization of unrealizability” which she argues is subject to the Nietzschean critique that, as she says, “ideals, defined as the unattainable and inapproximable, are a deformation of the will to power... which turns back upon itself, defeats itself, and valorizes and romanticizes that self-defeat as its own constitutive necessity” (1993b, 8). Butler does not contest the “unrealizability” of emancipation, with which she is largely in agreement, but rather its “romanticization” as a condition of possibility. She thus poses instead “the more Nietzschean query: 'how [sic.] is it that the unrealizability of the Good and/or Emancipation has produced a paralyzed or limited sense of political efficacy, and how, more generally, might the fabrication of more local ideals enhance the sense of politically practicable possibilities?" (1993b, 10-11). Butler's solution to the “paralyzed... political efficacy” of post-al politics, in short, is more of the same. In advocating “the fabrication of local ideals," she is merely rehearsing and elaborating on Lyotard's little narratives and Foucault's “eventalization." She offers her assertion of a “Foucauldian approach” as “the site for a certain unbridling of utopian faith post-Marx” (1993b, 11). Butler claims this is “a deviation from Hegel, a repetition forward” (1993b, 11). But this is just another re-turn to the same old bourgeois idealism, the same “old Hegelian junk," that historical materialists have been struggling against for more than a century. As Lenin has argued, “Thousands of shades of varieties of philosophical idealism are possible and it is always possible to create a thousand-and-first shade; and to the author of this thousand-and-first little system... what distinguishes it from the rest may appear to be momentous. From the standpoint of materialism, however, these distinctions are absolutely unessential” (1970, 275). Butler's “thousand-and-first shade” of difference from the idealism of Laclau or Cornell is indeed “unessential." What matters are the consequences of their post-al politics, and this is the same: to render the emancipation of women and other oppressed peoples' from the exploitation of capitalism impossible.

In contrast, Red Feminism is the theory and praxis of emancipation. It insists on the historical reality of the “knowable good”: the necessity of ending exploitation and meeting the basic human needs of all people. Red Feminism is the struggle for international socialism in order to transform the condition of women globally in late capitalism.