I find the widely cited concept of a "postmodern Marxist left" intellectually incoherent, mostly a right-wing canard flung by ppl who have read no Marx or pomo. Foucault & Fredric Jameson would surely agree. If you are a postmodern Marxist, please contact me.
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I agree with this in principle - and yet I've spent a good part of my career as a freelance editor for Verso, a publisher in which the two coexist in quite a comradely fashion, often within the same text. Not saying I don't find that baffling, but it's a fact-on-the-ground.
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(Though I need to read your piece, obvs.)
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I think the key is that they're ideologically incompatible in principle, but suspended together in an emulsion produced by the necessity of solidarity on the part of groups that regard themselves as edgy and marginalised?
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I don't think there is any solidarity between them. Much mutual loathing. But postmodernists do pay some lip-service to anti-capitalism and Marxists have been known to bring some intersectionality in there. Politically divided as radical left and identitarian left.
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Well, all I can say is that I was at an event when the Sokal/Bricmont book first came out, sitting next to a decidedly Marxist (SWP, as it happens) Verso firebrand whose loathing for the speakers, and in defence of Derrida, was forcibly expressed.
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Did you find out how he reconciled that with Marxism? Particularly Derrida's Spectres of Marxism?
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Oh, no. But there is a level on which it's all about tactics - the good old Gramscian "war of position" - which means that intellectual consistency can take a back seat in a pinch.
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Gramsci’s version of ‘my enemy’s enemy’ ;). Also, the Sokal Hoax was enormously embarrassing for the intellectual left qua intellectual left, even for those who loathed Derrida. No-one likes to be planted with a custard pie in public, it looks ridiculous.
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Not to mention the hypocrisy of figures like Jordan Peterson, who rages against "Marxist" pomo and yet is immersed in radical subjectivity. When asked whether myths are true or whether God exists he equivocates with, "It depends on what you mean by 'real' or by 'true'."
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The all-wise Jordan Peterson and his adoring fans have done much to popularise the notion of "postmodernist cultural Marxists" in our midst. Is there any public figure or activist who identifies as such, I wonder?

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