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@perfect-readers
"This is going to drive me into my own heart"
Why are communists against postmodernism?
in very crude terms: 'postmodernism' has historically been defined / defined itself by the rejection of claims to access 'objective' truths, narratives, and knowledge. in its strongest form, this stance precludes the defence of a materialist (including marxist) theory of history or society: if we cannot truly access an objective reality or know for sure that we are doing so, then clearly any discourse referring to 'real' material conditions or relations is rendered untenable, or at least heavily asterisked. in other words, a strict 'postmodernist' sees marxism as defending only a naïve realist position, à la feuerbach. the strict marxist, in turn, considers the postmodernist position to be a reactionary discourse that invokes the social construction of knowledge in order to defend (knowingly or not) ruling class interests by denying the possibility of understanding and therefore changing the material conditions of the world.
in practice, few people beyond a select few polemical academics have ever committed to the 'strong' versions of these claims. in particular, to read marxism as naïve in this manner is fundamentally a misunderstanding of marx's appropriation of hegel, which entailed not just 'turning him on his head' (that is, reversing the relationship between material world and ideal Spirit) but theorising dialectically. marx's claim was not that material reality could be known naïvely, or independently of our ideological schemata or modes of thought; nor was it that materiality (base) operated independently of, or solely in determination of, ideality (superstructure). and, though you may still hear some communists / marxists shitting on postmodernism, that term is mostly unfashionable these days anyway, and any serious communist analysis is itself predicated on quite a bit of social constructivist critique.
so although it's certainly true that communists are (rightfully) scornful of reactionary bourgeois postmodernist ideology that denies the basic premises of material / class analysis, in truth any decent communist these days is already making fruitful use of constructivist and post-structuralist critiques, and is also hostile to crude positivist / determinist ideology even when it brands itself as marxism. which is just to say that like a lot of philosophical debates, this one looks very different when we consider the substance of the arguments imputed to each 'side', and are attentive to when and how those arguments are actually deployed, rather than accepting at face value the sort of ideological coherence and consistency that is often implied by labels like "postmodernist" or debate parameters like "communist v. postmodernist".
one should also mention that post-modernists have an ideological opposition to abstracting from facts.
they are correct that abstraction of this sort makes statements less true (water never boils at 100 deg C) but also a refusal to abstract is a failure to commit ideologically.
(and of course hostility to abstraction is obviously incoherent, but that's a boring critique and misses the more interesting writers anyway.)
Ajith's "On Postisms" essay is a good and short intro to this perspective.
i think a little hostility to abstractions is a good thing for a marxist; i think we've gotten far too comfortable in a set of outmoded abstractions that aren't nearly as useful as they once were. ruthless criticism can't be reserved for our enemies; if we don't subject ourselves to it we risk our practical irrelevance extending to our theories as well.
also ajith's essay is really far more concerned with postcolonialism than postmodernism; it's very easy to conflate the two but i think that's a huge mistake. for one thing, people actually call themselves postcolonialists! you notice very quickly that "postmodernist" is an exonym; very few thinkers actually deliberately call themselves postmodernists. even the guy who invented the term (lyotard) described it as a zeitgeist/universal condition, not as a set of theoretical suppositions. perhaps the root of postcolonialism lies in some ur-postmodernism, as might the roots of french poststructuralism. certainly spivak drew on derrida extensively. then again, spivak spends a good chunk of her time writing about marx and his relevance to postcoloniality. is hauntology postcolonial? if not, is spivak a postcolonialist?
bluntly, most of the marxists who spend their days yelling about postmodernism are just social conservatives waving a red flag. the key is that, invariably, they talk about the "primacy of class" or the need to focus on the class struggle to the exclusion of other, "secondary" struggles like lgbt or black liberation. in doing so, they adopt a definition of "postmodernism" no different to jordan peterson's. obviously, this approach is useless. to quote ajith,
Let us first deal with the “non-class” argument. Caste, gender and ethnicity (or other social categories) each have their specific characteristics and dynamics. Class analysis does not mean denying this. This is not the meaning of the centrality of class struggle. 131 In fact, developing revolutionary class struggle and establishing it as the central task of all the oppressed demands that the communists must address these specificities in theory and practice. [...] Revolutionary class struggle, the struggle for communism, aims at, “…the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest,to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionising of all the ideas that result from these social relations.”132 Evidently, without addressing all the relations of oppression in a given society (such as caste, ethnic, gender, national, religious and so on) there can be no revolutionary class struggle.
in spite of this, however, groups like the cpgb-ml and whatever the larouchites are calling themselves use class struggle as an excuse to marginalize precisely these specific struggles that are so vital to the modern revolutionary movement. family, gender, and sexuality are not somehow "apart" from capitalism; they are some of the key components of its system of exploitation and oppression, just as they have been throughout history.
you then have a few communists like gabriel rockhill and losurdo who fixate not so much upon the french poststructuralists (although they come in for some flack) but on the frankfurt school and on post-ww2 western academic marxism. basically, according to these guys, it wasn't state repression and co-option that prevented revolutionaries from seizing power in western europe during the cold war. it was, instead, adorno and horkheimer. using their vast, mysterious, jewish influence they apparently corrupted generations of well-meaning marxists with their utopian anti-communism and dastardly theoretical evil. you often see ludicrous assertions that the whole thing was funded by the cia because horkheimer published one piece in a journal that nobody knew was cia-funded and because marcuse worked very briefly for the cia's predecessor, the oss. they ignored his work because he said they should persecute nazis. also. the founder of monthly review magazine which publishes many of these hit pieces worked for them too. fundamentally, this is just the old far-right ~cultural marxism~ conspiracy theory refracted onto the left. instead of trying to explain why young people are gay and smoke weed, it's trying to explain why they're not joining people's armies. the explanation proffered is, however, the same.
obviously, not all critiques of "postmodernism" are just far-right critiques with the serial numbers filed off, but i think that a critique of postmodernism as such is really the wrong place to start. i think we need to start with what the relevant thinkers actually say. don't talk about postmodernism; talk about derrida and foucault and spivak, and what they actually think and say.
the -- admittedly abortive -- presentation & critique of postmodernism that's developed in the Proletarian Feminist Research Group's polemic against the mechanistic, social chauvinist politics of the German Klassenstandpunkt Maoists is a relatively good example of the errors of both camps:
Let us adopt an attitude of philosophical rigorousness and seek truth from facts, which the Klassenstandpunkt authors fail to do. [nb: this is referring to the Klassenstandpunkt authors' lazy presentation of Butler's ideas] What do postmodernists mean when they say that “the role of women in society, gender itself, are all constructs”? The postmodernists argue that women’s role within society, and the social phenomena of gender in general, is constructed on the basis of discourse and discursive norms. According to Judith Butler, women’s role within a society is determined not primarily by economic and material conditions but by a set of norms which are entangled in diffuse structures of “power” and regulate human action. Because these norms operate at the level of discourse – that is, in the realm of the ideal rather than the material – Butler’s theory of gender cannot identify whose class interests are served by gender norms. Gender, for the postmodernists, is abstractly constructed as a self-generating process that exists purely within the linguistic realm. By placing gender on a plane of pure abstraction, postmodernism erodes our ability to connect the struggle for women’s liberation to the struggle against capitalist imperialism. This is the actual mistake of the postmodernists, not the idea that women’s roles in society (and gender itself) have changed throughout history, that they are, as a result, “constructed.” After all, Adrianzen explains that gender’s contingency and changing structure shows us that it is possible to overcome patriarchy in the first place. If the oppression of women is constituted by social processes within class society, then patriarchy can be overcome through the defeat of capitalism. Proletarian feminists must assert that gender is a changing social and historical process created by class society, such that to end patriarchy, we must end capitalism. If “construction” refers to the notion that something is contingent and shaped by fluctuating historical processes, this is not a threat to Marxism. In fact, such a view is inherent to the dialectical outlook, which understands that history is shaped by material processes in a system of complex social relations. Marxism does not assert that things have an unchanging internal essence; rather they exist within processes and systems of social relations. On the other hand, we reject the postmodernist idea that social phenomena are continuously constructed via discourse. Unfortunately, the Germans equate these two possible readings of “construction” and treat it with the utmost philosophical superficiality. This philosophical laziness thus leads the Klassenstandpunkt article to offer a particularly mystified view of women’s oppression. For them, struggle against patriarchy and oppression by patriarchy both exist at the level of superstructural norms and behavior alone. Consequently, the authors approach the question of women’s oppression with the same error as the postmodernists. Contingency as a concept is rejected altogether, and this rejection thus throws out the entirety of the materialist analysis advanced by Marxists like Adrianzen. The reader is thus left without any dialectical materialist theory of patriarchy in the first place.
PFRG, 'Against the Chauvinist Line.'
anyway… if anyone is looking to improve their reading & writing skills, i highly recommend this article by celine nguyen, which analyses the opening paragraphs of good essays to understand how and why they work. focuses on nonfiction but could apply generally i think
David Kurnick, "Jane Austen, Secret Celebrity and Mass Eroticisim" (2021)
Linda Gregg
richard siken’s new poem in the new yorker—at the link, you can hear him read it in full
[text id: "Piano Lesson" by Richard Siken January 8, 2024"
poem reads: "When I was ten, I had an imaginary friend. He lived on pork and beans and played the viola. People would look at us and hear sad music, turn away. That's pretty much how it was, what it was like, for most of 1977. A viola is slightly larger than a violin. It makes a deeper sound. The cello and the double-bass: larger and deeper still. All, like Pinocchio, have hollow wooden bodies, though Pinocchio has more strings and is hollow only metaphorically. Guitars have strings. Harps also. If a harp lay down and fell asleep and you bludgeoned its dreams with felted hammers, then you would have a piano. If you were wearing a tuxedo, you would have a grand piano. If you knocked a clock to the floor and left it there, on its back, staring at the ceiling, spinning slowly to its own sad music, then you would have a record player. Or a carrousel, if you had horses, or luggage. A table turns into a barricade, a vase into a broken vase. The lazy Susan becomes the place where the lazy Susan used to be. Pinocchio wants to be a real boy. The real boy wants to be a robot. The dream of becoming. By 1699, although there were no pianos, some composers were already anticipating their arrival. Sheet music from the time shows notes too high or low to play on the harpsichord. By 1837, with some refinement of the pedals, a player could sustain the notes even after their hands had moved away. By the time I was eleven, I stopped being sad and started to be afraid." /end id]
french novel by Richie Hofmann
Louise Glück
suddenly remembered this poem as i was making breakfast this morning & frantically googled “poem remembered to buy eggs?????????” & somehow managed to find it & it utterly knocked the wind out of me just as much as when i first read it
Oakland in Rain
by Aria Aber (Poets.org)
Years before ever seeing California, I wrote a story titled “Oakland in Rain.” Rain served as an easy metaphor for the unexpected in a place
known for abundance, and it provided a texture of melancholy. The nameless protagonist—an exiled drunk who was,
of course, a thinly veiled version of myself— had lost her mind and believed the weather communicated with her:
rain meant soberness, that she had been absolved of some sort of punishment. Plagued by her wild inner life, I imagined her wandering the city,
intent on getting lost in the Catholic cemeteries, where she took note of lemons in the wet grass (an offering?), the sky, a hawk on a tree.
But no matter where she went, nothing was ever quiet enough. Despite my best efforts, the narrative was bleak;
it lacked tension and a convincing resolution. Now, why am I telling you all this? Well, one day I woke up
and it had been raining in the Oakland of my actual life. Outside my window, the cottonwood trees looked like the day before,
but drops of water covered the few dead leaves that hadn’t fallen all the way down and were caught between branches.
It felt foolish to consider my fate, the idea of premonition. Still, I put on my red coat and walked up the hill to the cemetery.
As if I had invented it, there were lemons in the grass, palm trees with browned leaves. Walking there, between the gravestones of strangers,
a runner passed me, and a family who had come to bring flowers, their faces animated, ruddy from the cold. And my life, I understood,
was just like their lives—marked by ordinary rituals, exercise, and theories about the body. Nothing was as opulent as I had imagined it
back then, but just as I had needed it—the meaning of it all cold and very still, like a marble pedestal engraved with an ancient, simple fact.
- Sharon Olds, Beyond Harm.
Afternoon, Max Ritvo
No joke, go read The Open Veins of Latin America before even trying to send me a political ask. Mandatory reading.
It's a cliché that every Latin American leftist has read it and quotes it, but that's because it's written in such a clear language with undeniable strenght on its facts. It presents the history of Latin America solidly just in the first few pages, and it only gets more engrossing the more it goes on. While it is now a bit outdated in the sense that it was first published in 1971, the historical, social and political issues presented are -in an unfortunate way- still current. It is a relatively short book, passionate and in a clear, poetic language.
Sometimes it's good to return to the basics, and this is THE basic book if you want to understand the effects of imperialism in Latin America, and our struggle for freedom and identity.
Instead of losing your time with half baked twitteroid takes, go read it. Here you go, for free, in Spanish, Portuguese and English:
http://www.divasofverse.com/2021/08/he-said-it-bummed-him-out-his-dick.html
Mars and Venus
by Kathleen Diane Nolan
so one night I was walking up Madison after the rain and this homeless man was sitting on the sidewalk sobbing so I got him soup and a sandwich and that didn’t seem like enough so I got a brownie too and when I told the cashier it’s for the guy outside she gave me a cup of coffee light and sweet I brought the food and the coffee to the guy and he said don’t think I’m going to thank you and I said I don’t care if you thank me and he said, bullshit, you do yes you do truth he asked if I was from Mars or Venus because I looked intergalactic baby and what do you do up there all day anyway he wanted to know and no way was I saying social work so I said I was a poet and he said he was a poet too he told me to sit and I did even though the pavement was wet and everything smelled like shit and sour milk then we watched the skyline crossing the stars for a long time and he said Venus this is not how things are supposed to be and I said yes I know and he said no you don’t you do not then he told me to remember three things always we are all transparent with no skin or bones diamonds come from ashes and hair of the dead hope is the thing with claws not feathers he told me to put all of this in a poem and not to walk near Madison and 38th Street ever again this is my corner he said
this is one of my favourite poems ever. it’s so sad yet hopeful. so strong yet short. it’s dusk… your daughter’s tall… it’s dusk! your daughter’s tall!
who wants a list of some of my best videos about video game economic crisis events theyre kind of my favorite subject of all time
habbo hotel is an anarcho-capitalist gambling and a scam-based economy run by children part 1
part 2 of the habbo hotel analysis centering on types of common financial crime orchestrated on habbo
gaia online’s gold-generating hyperinflation crisis
ffxiv’s housing crisis
the hypixel skyblock exotics 1 trillion coin bubble pop
the ‘cash-based’ mmo where the f2p players literally sell sweat harvested off monsters for pennies
a history of neopets controversies centering largely on the “unconverted” neopet bubble market
“the falador massacre”, an infamous runescape event in which a player was able to pvp kill in non-pvp areas, resulting in thousands of player items and gold being looted from corpses with no possibility of rollback
oh hell yes