Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left by Ian Parker

Author:Ian Parker [Parker, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78535-643-8
Publisher: John Hunt (NBN)
Published: 2017-12-08T05:00:00+00:00

Postmodernism

Postmodernism attempted to grapple with cultural and political changes in capitalism and with resistance. There is one thing that most Marxists seem to agree on when they are identifying their worst most dangerous ideological helpmeets of capitalism. Different competing Marxist traditions agree that ‘postmodernism’ is a plague which must be wiped out of the revolutionary left. But this keyword, a scare-word for many on the left, has also over the last thirty years or so actually drawn more activists into revolutionary politics than it has lured them away. It is time to reappraise the dangers postmodernism holds and look again at how it has also re-energised the new anti-capitalist movements.

Way back in the early 1990s, soon after postmodernism first appeared on the scene, socialist feminist activists wrote thoughtful and lengthy accounts of how dangerous it could be as a collection, they said, of ‘theories of difference’. Postmodernism, which at this time was closely connected with ‘Eurocommunist’ arguments, was, critics pointed out, shifting attention from class struggle to a muddle of different competing accounts of subjectivity which effectively drew feminist activists away from a unitary socialist rebellion against capitalism into the swamp of ‘post-feminism’. There was some truth in this diagnosis. In contrast, more recent harsher wilder attacks on postmodernism combine a number of different enemies to world revolution that include the German tradition of ‘critical theory’ and postmodernism from France, and that together function as an evil and shadowy conspiracy of what they call the ‘pseudo-left’. Meanwhile, separatist radical feminists – those who believe that patriarchy can only be overthrown by gathering women together in political action away from the world of men, and well away from left organisations – have also named ‘pomo’ as a deadly threat. When feminists or queer theorists start playing with postmodern ideas, the argument goes, they must be disabused and their theoretical errors pointed out to them pretty sharply. Away with all your postmodern superstitions which smuggle into politics the relativistic idea that there is no progress, that all ideas are already equal could we but see it, and so that there is no revolutionary theory now that can take us forward.

But from its first glimmerings there has always been one uncomfortable aspect of postmodernism that has bothered the old left and made their complaints about it seem just a little bit, well, reactionary and even colonial. Postmodernism has been attractive precisely to those who are not at the centre, those who have had the most to lose from what postmodernist theory calls the old modern ‘grand narratives’ of history and scientific knowledge. It has not actually been so much that postmodernism cuts against the left and feminism, but that a new feminist anti-capitalist left at the margins, including in the old colonies, have seen in it a way of dismantling the ‘truths’ that hold capitalism and patriarchy in place. Capitalism pretends, and now all the more so, to be the only game in town, but postmodernism shows us that there are many more games to play against it.

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