Perhaps one of the most taken-for-granted features of contemporary social theory is the ritual and increasingly generic critique of Marxism in terms of its alleged failure to address forms of oppression other than that of "class." Marxism is considered to be theoretically bankrupt and intellectually passe, and class analysis is often savagely lampooned as a rusty weapon wielded clumsily by those mind-locked in the jejune factories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When Marxist class analysis has not been distorted or equated with some crude version of "economic determinism," it has been attacked for diverting attention away from the categories of "difference"--including "race." To overcome the presumed inadequacies of Marxism, an entire discursive apparatus, sometimes called "post-Marxism," has arisen to fill the void. Eager to take a wide detour around political economy, post-Marxists tend to assume that the principal political points of departure in the current "postmodern" world must necessarily be "cultural." As such, most, "but not all" post-Marxists have gravitated towards a politics of "difference" which is largely premised on uncovering relations of power that reside in the arrangement and deployment of subjectivity in cultural and ideological practices. Advocates of "difference" politics therefore posit their ideas as bold steps forward in advancing the interests of those historically marginalized by "dominant" social and cultural narratives. Enamored with the "cultural" and seemingly blind to the "economic," the rhetorical excesses of post-Marxists have also prevented them from considering the stark reality of contemporary class conditions under global capitalism. In this article the authors show, the radical displacement of class analysis in contemporary theoretical narratives and the concomitant decentering of capitalism, the anointing of "difference" as a primary explanatory construct, and the "culturalization" of politics, have had detrimental effects on "left" theory and practice. (Contains 10 notes.)