it's easy to make fun of marxists for being like "we have a special way of understanding society called Thinking About Things That Are Real" but to be fair if you ask the average person what their ideas about society are based on they will start listing some of the Least Real things to ever not exist
anyway, I know this post is mostly aimed at people who think history is secretly a 6,000-year-long metaphysical turf war orchestrated by The Jews™, or who read every political event as a religious morality play with different costumes, but academia absolutely has its own version of this impulse.
the respectable academic variant, especially in the post-Cold War West, was the enormous cloud of intellectual febreze called post-structuralism. a lot of post-structural approaches, postcolonialism, liberal feminism, green studies, discourse-oriented theory generally, became institutionally dominant during the late neoliberal turn of the 1980s and 1990s, precisely when capitalism itself was reorganising into more decentralised, flexible forms of accumulation. suddenly theory is less about totalising structures and political economy, and more about fragmented subjectivities, localised identities, fluid meanings, discourse, hybridity, micro-narratives. which is not to say these frameworks are useless or wrong in their entirety, because many produced genuinely valuable critiques, but it is hard not to notice how neatly their intellectual grammar mirrored the restructuring of capitalism itself. academia became increasingly comfortable with critiques that could be endlessly discussed, deconstructed, and circulated without necessarily threatening the underlying organisation of production or power. the sharper material edges get softened into language that institutions can metabolise safely. and honestly, this is probably the fate of almost every new theory that enters academia; eventually it stops being insurgent and becomes part of the furniture because everyone still needs salaries, grants, tenure, conference invitations, etc.
