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The purpose of this chapter is to examine a set of realist protocols¹ which have, I will argue, established the terms of legitimate affiliation to Marx's thought and politics. Put schematically these protocols are (1) the ultimate recuperability of class struggle within the global-technological transformations of capitalism, (2) the redetermination of proletarian solidarity through the strategic interventions of Marxist theory, (3) the invocation of history as both the loss and the recovery of the revolutionary dialectics of class and (4) the referral of political agency to the structural antagonisms which determine power relationships within the mode of production. These protocols operate within a particularly influential strand of Marxist thought, that is, the kind of radical modernism which is espoused in the work of Aijaz Ahmad, Perry Anderson, Alex Callinicos, Terry Eagleton and Tom Lewis, to name only a few. Obviously constraints of space mean that I cannot undertake a comprehensive survey of the work of each of these authors. What I can do however is to register the effects of a particular encounter between Marxism and deconstruction, that is, of Michael Sprinker's solicitation of responses to the publication of Derrida's Spectres of Marx. The collection of essays, published in 1999 under the title Ghostly Demarcations, includes contributions by Ahmad² and Lewis³ which, I will argue, exemplify the Marxist conventions I have sketched above.