This essay is a part of Negation's Organizational Culture Dossier. The rest of the collection can be found here.

There is much hooting and hollering about “postmodern” philosophy: how anticommunist it is, how it was invented to destroy dialectical and historical materialism, and how it has ruined generations of young radicals by poisoning their brains with identity politics. I’m not particularly interested in engaging with this notion, at least at length (it will be tangentially relevant to what is at stake in my own argument). Rather, I want to change the grounds of this discussion to a different, and much more useful index: the question of postmodernity as the cultural condition of late capitalism, and how it ought to make us think about organizing culture. Moving away from “postmodernism” and the reifying, obfuscating frameworks that its use in analysis entails towards the concept of postmodernity, in fact, allows us to better understand certain phenomena like “identity politics,” which is only one cultural phenomenon that is critical to understand in contemporary organizing today. Ultimately, political practices some decry as the children of postmodernism are in fact just the children of liberalism, albeit a liberalism of a highly commodified age. 

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The uselessness of a description like “postmodern” becomes clear when you see how it is most commonly used in ostensibly communist circles.[1] For example, let’s take a look at an analysis of postmodernism from a “communist” press called Fight Back! News (not to be confused with Fightback of the IMT; this press is associated with the Freedom Road Socialist Organization). I will be focusing mainly on this article as my core example, because it summarizes a lot of the shared critiques of postmodernism from a vulgar Marxist standpoint (which is unfortunately the dominant one in many explicitly Marxist organizations) today.

So what is postmodernism? According to this article, it is both “a cultural and artistic movement and a trend in theory based in subjective idealism. It emphasizes relativism and contingency while rejecting any theory that claims to be able to explain reality from an objective, rational and universal standpoint.”[2] Given its relativism and rejection of universality or aspirations to totality, postmodernism is therefore also anti-communist, and a bourgeois ideological weapon in the class war.

How did postmodernism emerge? A range of sources are given, some more plausible and helpful than others. Firstly, the CIA funded the development of novel anti-communist cultural and theoretical production[3] in order to seize on the crippling contradictions in the communist movement brought about by Khruschev’s revisionism. Secondly, Western Marxism emerged (of its own accord, with no precedents, it seems), and was too academic, too tainted with non-Marxist ideas, too focused on cultural production to be relevant to working-class movements:

Western Marxists worked to divorce Marxism from the practical struggles of the working class and retreated into the academic ivory tower. Furthermore, as the Western Marxist academic Perry Anderson notes in his book In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, they each attempted to merge Marxism with elements of non-Marxist (metaphysical and idealist) philosophy, such as with Martin Heidegger’s metaphysics or with Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories. The result was a muddle, and by the 1970s most of Western Marxism was engaged in self-obsessed navel-gazing or had become narrowly preoccupied with cultural criticism and aesthetics. No wonder this is the “Marxism” promoted in the universities of the imperialist countries.

Thirdly, revisionism and the gaps it left in organizing led to the emergence of the New Left, which of course was unable to meaningfully connect to the working class because it was too narrowly focused on the emergence of consumer society: 

In the late 1960s and early 70s, the sociologists Alain Touraine and Daniel Bell began to argue that we had entered a new “post-industrial” period of capitalism. Dazzled by consumerism, this misguided theory formed the theoretical foundation for the left’s retreat from the working class and the development of “post-Marxist” political theory. Practically, this period saw the rise of the “new left.” This left called itself “new” because, unlike the so-called “old” communist left, they were not oriented towards the working class. Indeed, as the revisionist communist parties failed to connect Marxism with the practical movements of the working class, the void was filled by groups like Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panther Party. Both of these groups made important and lasting contributions, but because neither was able to connect meaningfully with the broader multinational working class, both eventually succumbed to their errors.

This failure of the New Left and revisionist Marxist parties (which, of course, is simply just a “failure to connect to the multinational working class” and nothing more complex) somehow leads to the emergence of the postmodern thinkers, who displaced analyses and critiques of class struggle with analyses of language, power, and the constitution of identity and difference.[6] Allegedly, postmodernists see the motor of history not as class struggle, but as language, how we use it, and its role in the construction and maintenance of power. This focus on language leads, allegedly, to a sort of linguistic idealism, as well as a nihilism about our ability to change the world. How can we change the world when language is already in the way, oppressing us, and we cannot escape it? 

And so is the story of postmodernism: we end up with what is essentially a conspiracy theory with some truths, a lot of exaggerations, massive jumps and gaps in historical causality between movements, and many inaccuracies about the philosophical character of “postmodern thought.”

As mentioned earlier, I am not so concerned with refuting the philosophical or political accuracy of this narrative; it is vulgar enough that I do not think it deserves refutation, nor is it my goal to own vulgar Marxists with facts and logic. What I want to do is consider how the term “postmodernism” hinders communists in their ability to analyze and intervene in the class struggle. What does a term like “postmodernism” even do for communists, except prevent us from truly understanding what is at stake in the contemporary moment, both in the political culture of our own organizations and in political culture at large? 

Perhaps a firsthand example of the practical problems that come from this particular Marxist understanding of “postmodernism” can help us begin to answer this question. In 2021, during a monthly club meeting for a party I used to be a member of, we were discussing getting in touch with a local pro-Palestinan student organization that was holding a rally. We discussed the logistics and optics of working with this group, as we wanted to be as respectful as possible as a communist organization attending another group’s rally (the last thing we wanted to be, and the first thing we assumed they would rightfully think of us as, were opportunists. Blame the IMT). Most of us were in agreement that it would be good to show up and only bring our group’s flags if we were able to okay it with the organizers beforehand. During this discussion, one member of our club, a longstanding union man and party member, grumpily recounted that our club previously had tried to get in touch with this group a couple of years back and were blown off in some vague way. This member blamed this blow-off on the group’s focus on and capture by “postmodern identity politics,” grumbling how their focus/attention on issues of gender expression and sexuality distracted from real, substantive action and coalition-building. 

This was, of course, a little fucked-up, and our club organizer briefly chastised him before getting us back on course (I got the sense he was as bewildered as I was upon hearing those comments). The issue didn't come up again – at least in that meeting – and we did end up going to the rally, flags and all. But the fact that this was even brought up at all – that a socialist was essentially spouting reactionary drivel on the level of a Jordan Peterson (I hate to bring him up, but that is the most apt comparison I have) – is deeply troubling. Such beliefs and analyses actively harm the ability of organizations to understand their role in the organizational ecology and make effective alliances and moves towards true liberation. Further, these beliefs push people away from even beginning to dip their toes into your cause – you’re certainly not going to endear anyone to organize with you or share in your vision for liberation if you derisively call a bunch of other organizations focused on racial justice in your area “postmodernist identitarians,” for instance, even if their approaches to racial justice are indeed myopically individualistic (but then why wouldn’t you just say that instead?). Communists need to avoid such analyses not because they are morally offensive, but because they are actively wrong. They actively mystify both the conditions of our time (and the very real issues they introduce in organizing) and the origins of these conditions.

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Let's make this clear: postmodernism is not a coherent philosophical movement, and as such, there is no such thing as a “postmodern” politics. What Marxist critics of postmodernism are truly critiquing, at heart, is a liberal politics under the conditions of postmodernity

Postmodernity, of course, is not the same thing as postmodernism. Postmodernity, as theorized by Fredric Jameson, is a periodization, a term which describes our current cultural and political moment and its dominant trends, and not any particular school of thought or art. Jameson follows Ernest Mandel’s arguments from Late Capitalism, arguing that postwar technological developments in the mass manufacturing of electronic and nuclear-powered devices facilitated a rapid and global expansion of capitalism, and in turn, the purest form of capitalism to date. This expansion, Jameson says, “eliminates the enclaves of precapitalist organization [capitalism] had hitherto tolerated and exploited in a tributary way,”[7] expanding not just further into nature, but also into the subject through the rise of the mass media and advertising industries. Culturally, postmodernity marks the moment where culture, which used to have a higher degree of semi-autonomy from the market, is now deeply enmeshed into the market as a commodity: “the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.”[8] In turn, “‘culture’ has become a product in its own right… postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process.”[9]

Postmodernity thus describes the cultural conditions of our moment of late capitalism: the increasing tendency of the commodification of not just cultural goods, but the even-more important sphere that Raymond Williams identified as the true site of culture: everyday life. In postmodernity (to varying degrees depending on your location in the global capitalist system), we are further alienated not just in our relations in the workplace, but in our relations outside the workplace. With the mass proliferation of image culture, we labor not just as laborers, but as sign and image consumers, as willing participants and architects of alienated social relations enabled and entrenched by the proliferation of social media industries and technologies.[10] We feel real, concrete meaning in our lifestyle choices at the level of the image, and this deepened alienation results in what Jameson calls a “depthlessness” to experience, a decay in our ability to historicize (i.e. place ourselves in relation to the historical and social totality, to the past as well as the future), and the emergence (and consecration) of affective “intensities” in theoretical, social, and cultural production that are ultimately shallow but are read, and strived for, as deeply meaningful in a world that lacks the narrative meaning granted by History.[11] It is in reaction to this depthlessness, this sense of a lack of History, that developments in politics and thought respond and attempt to make sense of. 

It may appear that you could argue, from this standpoint, that there could be a “postmodern” politics that emerges in reaction to the dynamics of postmodernity. But I would argue it would be more apt to figure this in terms of an interaction between already-existing politics and the effects postmodernism has on them; after all, while there may be distinct cultural dynamics to postmodernity, these are essentially just existing dynamics that have emerged out of modernity as a result of further capitalist expansion. We would not talk about “modernist” politics per se, but perhaps liberal politics in modernity. As such, it makes much more sense to describe what is called “postmodern politics” a liberal politics in postmodernity; that is, not a purely coherent politics, but one where liberalism has unevenly responded to its self-undermining via its own sharpening contradictions in the onset of late capitalism. For example, while a lot of ostensibly progressive liberals understand and take on a certain skepticism of liberalism’s universality (and maybe some even take on wholesale the idea of the social construction of identity) – especially in the realm of the law – they still cling to a logic of liberal inclusion; that is, a faith in the liberal state to guarantee rights for all, so long as we lobby hard enough for them. They cling to an obnoxious, toothless moralism regarding the political beliefs of individuals, and this moralism has been and continues to be transcoded into consumptive practices, wherein which one establishes their “political image” and “lifestyle” through the organization of sign-commodities on digital platforms and in the “real world.” It further presents itself in a relishing of affective intensity, where one can feel outraged or smugly superior in their moral-political position and further activate these affects through personal attacks and spite – attacks that really do nothing in terms of furthering any cause. Of course, adopting certain kinds of “postmodern philosophy” feels “radical” to liberals, in the sense that they feel they are adequately aware of and responding to liberalism’s contradictions – but at the level of practice, there simply is no horizon for them beyond peaceful protest and the ballot box. 

I must say that this phenomenon does not just apply to outwardly “progressive,” “liberal” institutions. This liberalism in practice is also something that hampers ostensibly communist organizing at the interpersonal level.[12] While not exactly touching on liberalism under postmodernity, Mao was correct in “Combat Liberalism” to identify certain toxic “liberal” tendencies within communist organizations. Below are a few of the “types of liberalism” (more accurately, liberal tendencies) that we can still see as operative within progressive and communist organizing spaces, at least in North America, today:  

To indulge in irresponsible criticism in private instead of actively putting forward one's suggestions to the organization. To say nothing to people to their faces but to gossip behind their backs, or to say nothing at a meeting but to gossip afterwards. To show no regard at all for the principles of collective life but to follow one's own inclination. This is a second type…
Not to obey orders but to give pride of place to one's own opinions. To demand special consideration from the organization but to reject its discipline. This is a fourth type…
To indulge in personal attacks, pick quarrels, vent personal spite or seek revenge instead of entering into an argument and struggling against incorrect views for the sake of unity or progress or getting the work done properly. This is a fifth type.

This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of Maoists/Marxists/whoever who quote “Combat Liberalism” while still ultimately being moralizing liberals; it’s pretty easy to do this when you quote a short pamphlet that does not explicitly flesh out liberalism’s content. But to read “Combat Liberalism” with the context of postmodernity in mind is to remind us, as communists, that we are not so easily “beyond” liberalism in many instances, even if we can identify it in other organizations and their practices and conveniently, smugly label them “postmodern.” As Jameson states:

…for political groups which seek actively to intervene in history and to modify its otherwise passive momentum (whether with a view toward channeling it into a socialist transformation of society or diverting it into the regressive reestablishment of some simpler fantasy past), there cannot but be much that is deplorable and reprehensible in a cultural form of image addiction which, by transforming the past into visual mirages, stereotypes, or texts, effectively abolishes any practical sense of the future and of the collective project, thereby abandoning the thinking of future change to fantasies of sheer catastrophe and inexplicable cataclysm, from visions of “terrorism” on the social level to those of cancer on the personal. Yet if postmodernism is a historical phenomenon, then the attempt to conceptualize it in terms of moral or moralizing judgments must finally be identified as a category mistake. All of which becomes more obvious when we interrogate the position of the cultural critic and moralist; the latter, along with all the rest of us, is now so deeply immersed in postmodernist space, so deeply suffused and infected by its new cultural categories, that the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other, becomes unavailable.

Moralizing will not get us anywhere, not when postmodernity is so all-encompassing that we cannot stand in a position outside of it; “ideological judgment on Postmodernism today necessarily implies, one would think, a judgment on ourselves as well as on the artifacts in question.”[15] We must both be self-reflexive (and not just in a perfunctory way) and sufficiently critical of our conditions, and that means being sufficiently dialectical in our understanding of our culture today. 

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In light of this, I want to examine one other account of postmodernism that exemplifies the strange, symptomatic status of the term “postmodernism” in Marxist discourse, which comes from the now-defunct kites. As part of their argument for the need of a vanguard party, the Organization of Revolutionary Communists (OCR)[16], one of the main groups behind kites, provides a diagnosis of the organizing and cultural issues of the 2010s left, with one of those key issues being postmodernism. Similar to our brief overview of Marxist-Leninist accounts of postmodernism, the OCR argues that postmodernism is so prevalent and therefore such a problem for communists (allegedly) because it dominates liberal academia and non-profits.[17] For the OCR, 

postmodernism is a broad term for a philosophy and politics whose defining features include a rejection of any universalist project of liberation (especially communism), a heavy dose of relativism, an emphasis on “discursive practices” over material transformation, personal moral choices elevated above collective struggle, an emphasis on lifestyle and cultural changes, and the obnoxious use of ever more idiotic terminology. The main effect of postmodernism has been to transform people’s political commitments to being about themselves rather than the world — hence the explosion of increasingly narrow and petty-bourgeois forms of identity politics and the application of therapy concepts to “radical” politics. There are valuable insights to learn from postmodernists, including in their critiques of Marxism, but in the philosophical domain, postmodernism constitutes the main enemy of revolutionary communism in North America today.

The diagnoses of these cultural issues on the left, particularly the skepticism of universalist liberation projects and overwhelming emphasis on moral choices and lifestyle changes, are apt. I would agree – with some strong caveats – that “postmodernism,” in some philosophical variants (namely some watered-down brands of post-structuralism) and how it gets deployed by liberal grad students, who have finally been exposed to a critique of the status quo that isn’t in the style of John Oliver, poses a threat to revolutionary communism, but only to the extent that what we really mean here is that liberalism under postmodernity is the main enemy of revolutionary communism. 

Once again, we see a repeat of a similar issue we saw with vulgar Marxist accounts of postmodernism. The OCR has it backwards: “postmodernism” has not made people’s political commitments more about themselves; liberalism already did that, and has continued to do so over its hundreds of years of existence alongside capitalism, morphing and adapting as capitalism itself morphs, adapts, and grows. What we are seeing, as we have already discussed, is instead an intensification of already-existing cultural dynamics that capitalism, through the universalisation of the commodity form, has already been pushing for hundreds of years. Ironically, this is something the OCR points to in their diagnosis after complaining about postmodernism:

From pervasive self-promotion on social media to the Tinderification of social relations, commodity relations, literal and conceptual, have seeped more deeply and grotesquely into US culture over the last two decades. For example, it is now commonplace to call the normal expectations of friendship "emotional labor,” and ghosting –  dropping out of communication with no explanation – has become socially acceptable behavior, even among close friends and political comrades. Amplified by social media, the increasing commodification of all social relations has further removed people in the US from any sense of collective obligation to one another. While many individuals abhor these cultural trends and try their best not to partake in them, there has yet to emerge a coherent counterculture rebelling against commodified social relations and the capitalist institutions that prop them up. Worse yet, the Left that developed in the 2010s generally embraces these heightened commodified social relations.

And with this paragraph, the OCR hits the nail on the head. This is the key cultural issue of organizing in our time: not “philosophical postmodernism,” but the cultural logic of late capitalism. Worn-out, myopic vanguardists, Occupy-fetishists, grad school liberals: they all uncritically embrace these commodified social relations, take them for granted, and thus cannot put up an effective countercultural front against them. It speaks to the need for organizations to facilitate cognitive mapping[20] not just at the level of political practice (i.e. “how do I situate myself, and how does our organization situate itself, in an organizing ecology and in history”), but at the level of cultural practice. The OCR even notes the need for the development of a “proletarian media empire” for such a purpose.[21]

But one question remains: if the OCR is able to identify this cultural condition, why do they still insist on the use of the reified concept of “postmodernism,” particularly in a fashion that ultimately remains divorced from their cultural diagnoses? I argue that it is a symptom of the culture of postmodernity, a remnant of liberalism, of an easy, but too-easy, shorthand approach to the issue at hand. The affective pull of liberal moralizing is easy to fall into, for a couple of reasons. 

Firstly, dialectical thinking is both difficult and heavily discouraged in postmodernity. Dialectical thinking requires an aspiration at the level of analysis to totality, which is already greatly hampered through the simultaneous erosion of our historicising capacities and the rapid growth in complexity of the capitalist totality itself. Such a task, while not impossible, requires immense dedication. Jameson notes that “the lapse from this austere dialectical imperative into the more comfortable stance of the taking of moral positions is inveterate and all too human: still, the  urgency of the subject demands that we make at least some effort to think the cultural evolution  of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.”[22]

Secondly, as we have touched on, postmodernity facilitates and thrives upon the proliferation of flat but palpable affective intensities; the OCR’s deployment of “postmodern” in a polemical mode slots nicely into the general political discourse of their piece, which we might call a simulacrum of the polemical Marxist-Leninist style. I call it a simulacrum, as it is divorced from its typical historical context – delivered in speeches at political meetings in very different cultural conditions – and at times almost reads like a pastiche of Marxist-Leninist writings, in turn flattening its emotional intensity. This is not to say that the OCR’s analysis is entirely “old school and incorrect,” far from it. It is rather to say that there are clearly elements of the OCR’s analysis in tension with each other, as any organization's writings would be under these conditions, between a dialectical analysis of postmodernity and a moralizing critique of postmodernism. This is seen at the level of style, particularly when the Marxist-Leninist pastiche rears its ugly head during the most polemical moments of the essay – this is the moment where we can see the postmodern impulse to do the simple, moralizing critique in a well-trodden, historical style that indicates to others one’s allegiance to Marxism-Leninism (at least at the aesthetic level). It would be unfair and incorrect, however, to say the OCR’s analysis is predicated, for example, on an unfounded nostalgia for “old-school” class politics. As Jameson says, 

What is sometimes characterized as a nostalgia for class politics of some older type is generally more likely to be simply a “nostalgia” for politics tout court: given the way in which periods of intense politization and subsequent periods of depolitization and withdrawal are modeled on the great economic rhythms of the boom and bust of the business cycle, to describe this feeling as “nostalgia” is about as adequate as to  characterize the body's hunger, before dinner, as a “nostalgia for food.”

Communists are watching both liberals and socialists cling to flotsam and jetsam produced by the death-knells of liberalism, and we stand, starved of real politics, as politicization waxes and wanes, as liberals and socialists continue to desperately cling to this flotsam and jetsam as they circle the center of the whirlpool that is late capitalism. We are desperately looking to find and build anything out of the floating debris that will somehow allow us to escape the pull of the maelstrom – of course the first impulse is to grab whatever we think will work better, better than those others who foolishly continue to sit atop their useless wreckage and paddle with broken boards, sometimes calmly and sometimes in a crazed panic, to no avail. The question becomes whether we can fully analyze the conditions of the whirlpool, how we, others, and objects/materials move within it, and build something else out that way, or whether we give in to the given (whether communist or socialist) and stay committed to building watercrafts that might weather an eddy, but not a maelstrom. 

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To conclude, I want to briefly discuss what it looks like to take on liberalism as the grounding frame for analyzing contemporary politics from a communist perspective. A short and compelling read in this regard is Asad Haider’s Mistaken Identity, which pinpoints organizing failures not in some kind of postmodern brain virus, but a persistent liberalism that takes up and defangs originally radical analytics (such as the Combahee River Collective’s original formations on “identity politics”) in order to secure and maintain the position of a liberal multicultural elite. Haider details the very real and poisonous effects that this individualism has had not just on contemporary politics, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, but also on organizing efforts around tuition hikes at UC Santa Cruz in 2014, where he was a student at the time. His main critique is of “identity politics, which he defines as follows:

In its contemporary ideological form, rather than its initial form as a theorization of a revolutionary political practice, identity politics is an individualist method. It is based on the individual’s demand for recognition, and it takes that individual’s identity as its starting point. It takes this identity for granted and suppresses the fact that all identities are socially constructed. And because all of us necessarily have an identity that is different from everyone else’s, it undermines the possibility of collective self-organization. The framework of identity reduces politics to who you are as an individual and to gaining recognition as an individual, rather than your membership in a collectivity and the collective struggle against an oppressive social structure. As a result, identity politics paradoxically ends up reinforcing the very norms it set out to criticize.

We can note the similarities between a liberal politics under postmodernity, which I have outlined, and Haider’s account of this methodological individualism, though I would note one small difference: I insist that some progressives do see identity as socially constructed while still ultimately starting from (and remaining at) the individual standpoint (which muddies the waters a little bit here, I think). Such thinking is emblematic of a sort of symptomatic limit in liberals’ thinking and practice; they have "tricked themselves" into thinking they are radicals, and when faced with a critique of their individualist myopia (one that say emphasizes totality or a need to shift to a theorization of collective power), they reject it in a knee-jerk manner. 

Regardless, I find Haider’s account here to be much more compelling than Marxist-Leninist writing on “postmodernism,” mostly because his account speaks to a structural tendency that does not veer into the realm of conspiracy theory. Namely, Haider’s account situates today’s liberal methodical individualism within a context of organizing defeat that doesn't simply blame organizational failures on revisionism; he is much more willing to be honest about these failures and the role they had in shifting how people theorized and how people organized, while at the same time recognizing the negative impacts of these shifts on the effectiveness of politics today. 

However, the key thing that Haider’s narrative lacks is a more explicit focus on the periodization and dynamics of global capitalism that led to the liberalism he so aptly criticizes. To be fair, Haider’s analysis is a) outlined in a relatively short book, and b) moreso turns on the creation and integration of a multicultural elite into the U.S. ruling that came out of racial liberation struggles.[25] But ultimately, liberalism, for Haider, appears to be the same old liberalism we are used to: one that claims to be universal but can never be in practice, even while organizing in terms of universal politics is rejected by those who would believe in it. 

A combination of postmodernity as periodization (and its corresponding/driving concepts like the cognitive map) and an analysis of liberalism is what is needed in order to truly get to the heart of cultural problems within organization, and better help organizations see themselves as units (and individuals see themselves as composing elements in said units) intervening in the class struggle. Confused, reified concepts like “postmodernism” only serve to set us back. As communists, we need to be good “postmodernists” if we are to ever actually build projects of liberation; that, in turn, means giving postmodernity, the cultural logic of late capitalism, the reverence and rigor it deserves. 

Notes

  1. We should be far past giving a shit what conservatives think of postmodernism. As such, we’re not even going to entertain conservative notions of postmodernism in this piece.
  2. J. Sykes, “On the origins and development of postmodernism,” Fight Back! News, September 15, 2023.
  3. It should be noted that the author just assumes that postmodernism (in art and thought) received CIA funding without pointing to direct funding of postmodern theorists or artists. In this analysis, because we have already determined postmodernism to be anti-communist at the theoretical level, it is assumed that it must have been propped up by the CIA: “The CIA funded everything from cultural magazines to museums and symphonies, all in order to drive people away from Marxism. Because ideology exerts pressure on the material base of society, this “cultural cold war” helped to fertilize the soil in which the imperialists sowed the seeds of counterrevolution, which they approached more directly by funding and directing counterrevolutionary groups and organizing coups.” This isn’t to say that there isn’t evidence of U.S. funding of “postmodernist thought;” individuals like Gabriel Rockhill has at least backed up similar claims with evidence (for example, see “Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism,” Monthly Review, December 2023). However, it’s one thing to say the U.S. capitalized on theory that made critiques of Marxism (theory, it’s important to recall, that was being produced in reaction to the deadened, reified, reactionary politics of official communist parties at the time, such as the PCF) and entirely another to say that this thought is anti-communist to the core. I do not have the time or space to address this in full; suffice it to say that this form of argumentation is essentially just conspiracy, and not an actual substantive examination of the commodification of “postmodern theory.”
  4. Skyes, “On the origins…”
  5. Ibid.
  6. Conveniently, this oppositional dyad between class struggle and identity/difference allows one to justify chauvinistic attacks on thinkers of feminism, race, gender, sexuality, and so on, but in a “communist” way. It becomes much too easy to pretend that there simply isn’t any work on feminism/race/gender/sexuality that employs a historical materialist viewpoint (i.e. incorporates class struggle into its analysis), and in turn reject any political thought or organizing on these grounds. Furthermore, there is plenty of excellent writing in feminist thought, philosophy of race, and queer theory that doesn’t incorporate class analysis at all, and it is still critical to read it; just because it is not “Marxist” or “communist” does not mean it offers no value.
  7. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, 1991, p. 36.
  8. Ibid, p. 4-5.
  9. Ibid, p. 3.
  10. For more on this phenomenon, see my essay “A Marxist Mission to Rescue Jean Baudrillard,” Negation Magazine, March 2021.
  11. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 9. It should be noted that others have attempted to contest Jameson’s periodization, claiming that we no longer live in postmodernity, but instead something even further beyond, such as “post-postmodernism” or “metamodernism.” These accounts, more often than not, either forget the economic dimensions of Jameson’s argument and/or too readily introduce a new periodization that fails to really be meaningful in any way. One recent contribution to this discussion comes from Anna Kornbluh, who against “post-postmodernism/metamodernism” and postmodernity posits that the dominant cultural style of our time is “immediacy:” the eschewment of any form of mediation, including postmodern heterogeneity and irony, due to increasing circulatory pressures in the global economy and the looming threat of a myriad of overwhelming planetary crises (see Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, Verso, 2024, p. 12-13, as well as “A Waxing of Affect: An Interview with Anna Kornbluh,” Negation Magazine, February 2024). While Kornbluh I think makes a compelling case for immediacy being a useful analytic for describing particular contemporary emergences of dynamics found in postmodernity, I do not agree with her that postmodernity and immediacy are truly distinct; immediacy is to me just a further intensification of the dynamics of postmodernity, a more pure postmodernity, just as late capitalism is simply a more pure form of capitalism.
  12. For a succinct account of this, see Tarig Robinson, “Your Politics Are Not Real,Negation Magazine, November 2020.
  13. Mao Tse-tung, “Combat Liberalism,” September 7, 1937, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm.
  14. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 46.
  15. Ibid, p. 62.
  16. This analysis of the OCR’s stance on postmodernism is adapted from my July 2023 Negation newsletter entry “Postmodernism or Liberalism? Critiquing Organizational Culture.”
  17. This is an extremely questionable claim on a couple of fronts. The first can be expressed through a simple rhetorical question: have you ever heard the average STEM student from “liberal academia” talk about “discursive practices”? The second relates to causality: how exactly do we trace the dissemination of “postmodern ideas” from undergraduate classrooms to the written policy and practices of NGOs and other institutions; institutions who are not not explicitly quoting Michel Foucault or Gilles Deleuze or Jacques Lacan or [insert fashionable “postmodern” academic here] in their materials? We can claim all we like that we’ve managed to directly trace some of the key ideas of the so-called postmodernists, in whatever watered-down form we decided counts, to college campus movements and NGOs, but this does not explain the much more complex dynamics at play; namely, the interaction between these “postmodern ideas” and the already-existing ideologies (i.e. liberalism) that students and others bring with them before entering a classroom. This is also not to mention the historical emergence of these ideologies and the dynamics that have set them into motion, which is the whole point of Jameson’s own analysis of postmodernity. This issue related to causality is also an issue I have with J. Moufawad-Paul’s assertion that “there is a set of politics connected to postmodern theory which produces a general practice amongst would-be anticapitalists: so called “anti-oppression” politics, identity theory, contemporary strains of anarchism” (“More on the Problem of “Postmodernism”: the necessary boundaries of an historical materialist critique,” MLM Mayhem!, 2012). Connected, sure, but in what way, and to what extent?
  18. Organization of Revolutionary Communists (OCR), “The CP, the Sixties, the RCP, and the Crying Need for a Communist Vanguard Party Today: Summing up a century of communist leadership, organization, strategy, and practice in the United States so that we can rise to the challenges before us,” kites no. 8, 2023.
  19. Ibid.
  20. For a discussion of Fredric Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping in the context of organizing, see my article “Totality and the Vanguard-Function: The Need for Verticality,” Spectre of the Party, Negation Magazine, 2022, pp. 75-102. Also available online at: https://www.negationmag.com/articles/totality-vanguard-function.
  21. “The principal vehicle for developing the emerging vanguard’s broad influence will be the creation of a proletarian media empire with wide reach among the popular classes. Such a proletarian media empire will also serve to give cohesion to the subjective forces of revolution, training them in the communist world outlook through concrete analysis of the latest events and controversies in society, and providing a means by which comrades in places without strong Party organization can connect with and plug into the work of the vanguard (the latter by contributing content to the proletarian media empire). We will have to develop this proletarian media empire piece by piece, but it should be a goal towards which we are actively working. Ultimately, our proletarian media empire must rival those of the liberal bourgeoisie (MSNBC, CNN, etc.) and the fascistic bourgeoisie (FOX News), both of which have spent several decades cohering, ideologically and politically, tens of millions of people around the world outlooks they promote” (OCR, “The CP, the Sixties…”).
  22. Ibid. p. 46.
  23. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 331.
  24. Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity, 1st Edition, Verso, 2018, pp. 23-24.
  25. Another relatively concise and engaging discussion of this phenomenon (and one that links this U.S. context to our global context) is Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. Táíwò essentially argues that the “common ground” of our political structures, in their asymmetric distributions of power and narrow “rule-sets,” incentivize the adoption and defanging of radical knowledge and movements for the ends of “elites.”