Though Cowards Flinch

There is nothing more irritating to me than the bringing to bear upon Marxism of the postmodern impulse. This self-same impulse luxuriates in imprecise language, glories in fatuous commentary and savours a sentimentalism which conceals the lack of solid, reasoned foundation.

In many respects and in many authors this most tiresome impulse reminds me of the quote below, which illuminates the hypocrisy of Liberalism.

“For Liberalism, after all, implies rather more than a political creed or an economic philosophy; it is a profoundly conscience-stricken state of mind. It is the final expression of everything which is respectable, God-fearing and frightened. The poor, it says, are always with us and something must certainly be done for them: not too much, that would never do; but something.”

- George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, p179

One of the great ironies, of course, is that the emergence of postmodernism can be wholly explained away by materialist analysis. It emerged into the vacuum of the late 1970′s, a vacuum created as the distance between the rhetoric of the Labour leadership and the effects of Labour policies widened. With the defeat of the remaining major movements that defined themselves according to class, that emergence was complete.

An even greater irony, as Terry Eagleton has pointed out, which borders on the almost tragic, is that this purportedly avante-garde thought is utterly dependent upon continuing material prosperity and the very modernity that it claims to negate. I look forward to the day when the ghosts of Michel Foucault and Haydn White and so forth are finally exorcised from the writings of the would-bes.

In such an era as this the relevance of Marx has never been greater. Marx envisioned the globalisation of capital long before any of the social-democratic commentators of any time period. Despite the incorrect predictions made in many of Marx’ political tracts, the Marxist analysis of society has provided powerful critique of all the stages of capitalism, successively updated by new generations of Marxian theorists.

Though the poetry of the above linked article might wax full mightily to dismiss, with its puffed out breast, Marxism as a mere ‘tool to define, not a cause to align,’ yet this misses the centrifugal relationship of theory to practise. If a theory can be used to critique, to define, then necessarily conclusions proceed from those definitions and from that critique. Those conclusions may be diverse – as diverse in fact as the many schools of Marxism, from Althusser to Zizek.

Yet such hollow poetry proves itself ignorant of the acknowledgment that out of any body of work, there are constraining features of the text that limit the possible permutations. A true disciple of postmodernism, the idea of the individual as the supreme arbiter, not just master interpreter but re-author, pervades the commentary linked.

Bourgeois individualism is weakly played as the new collectivism and this is justified by a demonstration of ignorance regarding how people can act together and have a collective consciousness, greater than the sum total of its parts, as the individual consciousness is greater than the sum total of the parts of the body.

The greatest tragedy in all this is that such writers as these are well meaning. For all their weak liberalism, which has grown old and threadbare, these people, as individuals, persist in demanding the betterment of humanity. Where the climax of the tragedy arrives is when they, out of a middling ignorance of collective consciousness, pit themselves against that betterment whilst still espousing it.

Liberalism is the powerful Emperor parading through the streets clad in the clothes of postmodernism. The relevance of Marxism, that genesis of real minority history and that nexus of all grievances against capitalism, is that one day it will whisper to the workers of the world, “The Emperor has no clothes on” and the spell will be broken forever.