First, on the critique postmodernists and post-structuralists make of left and radical politics:
One of the most moving narratives of modern history is the story of how men and women languishing under various forms of oppression came to acquire, often at great personal cost, the sort of technical knowledge necessary for them to understand their own condition more deeply, and so acquire some of the theoretical armoury essential to change it. It is an insult to inform these men and women that, in the economic metaphor for intellectual life in the USA, they are simply "buying into" the conceptual closures of their masters, or colluding with phallocentrism (p.5)On the blindness postmodernism has toward capital and capitalism:
It is as though almost every other form of oppressive system - state, media, patriarchy, racism, neo-colonialism - can be readily debated, but not the one which so often sets the long term agenda for all these matters, or is at the very least implicated with them to their roots (p.23)Of course, if you follow Jean-Francois Lyotard in ruling out systematic social theory one cannot even begin to get to grips with the eternally shifting and conflictual social system that is capitalism.
Lastly, on why (effective) radical politics necessarily resists postmodernism:
Radical politics is necessarily hierarchical in outlook, needing some way of calculating the most effective distribution of its limited energies over a range of issues. It assumes, as does any rational subject, that some issues are more important than others, that some places are preferable starting-points to other places, that some struggles are central to a particular form of life and some are not (p.95).It's no accident the most enthusiastic proponents of postmodernism I've encountered tend to confine their radical politics to the seminar room. It's not for nothing the German social theorist Jurgen Habermas (by no means a radical firebrand himself) has denounced postmodernism as a strand of conservatism.
When I was in the CPGB in the late 80s (I'd been attracted to mainstream communism by the radicalism and charisma of Konstantin Chernenko) I was in the Islington branch, and not surprisingly we got an intro to pomo at a branch meeting.
ReplyDeleteI said that if class was just another identity, which should not be 'privileged' over any other, why should I base my politics on my identity as a member of the working class, rather than, say, as a man, or British, or as a white person?
I don't remember getting much in the way of a convincing reply.
Islington! I can imagine it being a hotbed of New Times revisionism and the like.
ReplyDeleteBtw, your new novel's looking good.
"I said that if class was just another identity, which should not be 'privileged' over any other, why should I base my politics on my identity as a member of the working class, rather than, say, as a man, or British, or as a white person?"
ReplyDeleteYou’d have thought Marxism would be the perfect discipline to answer that question!
But to help you on your first tentative steps in finding an answer think of the differences between the Tories, Labour, the CPGB, the BNP and the white supremacist Aryan brotherhood.
Thanks!
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, Islington was. Martin Jacques, Bea Campbell, Jonathan Rutherford ... we had them all. But I have to say on a personal level I had a lot of respect for them, as well as for the other members of the branch.
A story for another day, perhaps.
Chris, you seem to have completely missed the point of my rhetorical question - which was, precisely, that the pomos were discarding Marxism, the obvious theoretical basis for a non-arbitrary answer. I'd been a Marxist (as I understood it, anyway) for over ten years at the time when I asked it. 'First tentative steps', my arse!
ReplyDelete"Chris, you seem to have completely missed the point of my rhetorical question"
ReplyDeleteKen,I don't think I did actually. I was answering your original question, from which you got no convincing reply.
But anyway your question is illogical, if you base your politics on being working class you are ultimately privileging it above other 'identities'. So therein lies your answer. Now you can sleep soundly.