By Lisa Macdonald
Those of us active in radical politics are encountering postmodernism everywhere we turn. But whether it is postindustrialism or post-Fordism in economics, post-structuralism in philosophy or post-feminism in women's collectives, in the last analysis it all boils down to basically the same thing: middle-class liberalism with all its attendant features of naivety, irrationalism and idealism. Despite its left veneer, it ultimately leads to reactionary conclusions.
These characteristics of postmodernism make it a weapon in the arsenal of right-wing ideologues both in the short term — there is no doubt, for example, that postmodernism is actually demobilising student-based movements today — and also in the longer term as part of the capitalist class's offensive against socialism.
Marxism, we are told, is outmoded. Historical materialists who criticise postmodernism are accused of being reductionists, instrumental rationalists, constructionists, biological determinists.
This is an attempt to baffle with bullshit. When you get beyond the language to the "text" — and postmodernism is just that, a style of discussion — postmodernism is revealed as little more than a rehashing of some very old and discredited ideas, dressed up in new garb.
I want to begin by briefly explaining modernism, of which postmodernism is either a critique or a continuation depending on which postmodernist you read.
Modernism
Modernism is premised on the view that human beings have begun to seize control of history; that is, that humankind has, in the process of our development, begun to develop the economic, scientific, technological and political forms to know, understand and shape our world. From this it follows that humanity can collectively create a better future.
Modernism has its roots in the 17th century European Enlightenment, a period marked by important advances in the natural sciences, by developments in industry and the beginnings of capitalism in Europe. Just as we could discover, understand and apply the laws governing the natural world and thereby change it, modernism holds that so too humans can discover, understand and apply the laws governing the social sphere and history.
The project of using the principles of science and reason to uncover laws of development so as to construct a better world is therefore sometimes referred to as enlightenment politics.
The heyday of modernism came in the post-World War II period in the advanced capitalist countries. This period, from the end of the war to the early 1970s, was a period of explosive development of mass production, mass consumption and mass culture. Capitalism was in the midst of a long boom and, while the Third World was devastated, in the First World rapid growth in all spheres of production led to an unprecedented confidence in human rationality and progress.
These conditions of capitalist boom consolidated the equal sign between the modernist world view and bourgeois ideology and culture in all its forms.
This is an important point, because by the mid to late 1960s, this golden age was coming to an end. Capitalism went into a long-term structural crisis accompanied by a rise in popular dissent.
In the process of distancing themselves from the system in decline, many young intellectuals also began to reject modernism, or aspects of it, seen to be the root cause of many of the ills of capitalism. Anarchism, for example, found a new lease of life in this period.
The development of the social movements during the 1960s and '70s — the women's liberation movement, the gay movement, the black rights and civil rights movements — also contributed to laying the foundations for the emergence of postmodernism in politics. These movements posed much more sharply for the left questions about the causes and solutions of specific types of oppression in capitalist society. What did the traditional class analysis of socialists have to offer? Could Marxism explain and provide a strategy for the liberation of these oppressed groups?
Stalinism
The socialist movement, seriously weakened and distorted by Stalinism, was not at the time able to meet this challenge. The crude economism which characterised Stalinism and which infected almost all of the Communist parties in the First World blinded the majority of active socialists to the real challenge of the new mass movements, which were often dismissed and disparaged as anti-worker.
Genuine Marxism, which provides a historical and materialist explanation of and strategy for overcoming all specific forms of oppression and, in that sense, which is authentically pluralist, didn't have much of a chance in this general framework at the time.
More recently, the collapse of the USSR and the regimes in Eastern Europe has further demoralised large Â鶹´«Ã½ of the left in the First World. Born and bred in the Stalinist era and having no tools to understand, explain and critique this phenomenon, many have chucked out the entire modernist framework of progress and rationality. (Many of the intellectuals who now call themselves "left" postmodernists were previously members of the Communist parties in Europe).
In correctly rejecting the capitalist system's claim to be the pinnacle of human and social development, and in correctly rejecting Stalinism's claim to be a progressive and liberating system, the postmodernists have falsely rejected the scientific method upon which both the capitalist and Marxist world views are built.
The socialist project has failed, they say. It is not possible for humanity collectively to construct a better future. In the words of post-Marxists such as Laclau and Mouffe, we must abandon "classism" if we are to really understand and seek change in this world.
Poststructuralism
The philosophical basis for postmodernism as a political current was provided by poststructuralism. In a nutshell, the poststructuralist outlook rejects the modernist view that there are social and historical forces and relationships arising out of general laws that govern nature and history and which orient and constrain the specific phenomena that we experience directly. Poststructuralists disagree with Marx and others who have said that we make our history not purely by choice, but under given and inherited circumstances.
Instead, they argue, every set of relations in society is as important as every other. There are no key, identifiable, unifying forces — such as the way capital and commodity production unify society according to the Marxist model — and therefore we know the world only by its superficial or surface effects. All events in nature and human society are simply unconnected, equally significant, random occurrences.
In any case, say the poststructuralists, even if such laws did exist, we can't know the world of society and nature in any objective sense because human thinking is absolutely sealed off from the external world by language — the inescapable but imprecise and subjective framework of thought. "Reality" then is constructed through language games, and there are an infinite number of possible language games in human society. So, say the poststructuralists and many postmodernists, everything is a "text". Even those postmodernists who do acknowledge an objective reality beyond the text are still trapped by the view that we can't know anything lasting or important about that reality.
In this framework, the question of objective truth, of knowledge of an objective reality, regardless of individuals' different perceptions or understanding of it, recedes completely. For example, Marxist theory maintains that an objective truth about capitalism is that it rests on the exploitation of the working class. A poststructuralist, however, would say that "exploitation" is but one of a multiplicity of language games or texts with no more validity than the language game of bourgeois economics in which the idea of one class of people systematically benefiting at the expense of another does not exist.
In this way, the exploitation of workers, or women, or people of colour, is reduced to a matter of discourse. "It depends on your point of view", they say. Human society and history exhibit no dependable regularities from which we can judge, predict or direct human development.
In the poststructuralist view, the brutality and destructiveness of the world around us can never be dislodged by deeper forces at work because there are none, or if there are, we can't know what they are. Rationality, the scientific endeavour and the notion of historical progress are a fraud, they say, and therefore the project of fundamental social change, directed by the majority of humanity, is an impossible, even inconceivable, task. Even to envisage this is to make an "essentialist" error.
Difference theory
That's the starting point of the politics of postmodernism as we come across it in our activism. First, if you reject any notion of scientific inquiry and knowledge, any understanding of the world in terms of general laws and fundamental forces, you end up at a politics of difference and ultimately of individualism.
According to difference theory, because those who have spoken in the name of science, progress, etc in capitalist society, that is, the bourgeoisie, have silenced and exploited marginal or less powerful groups, the search for commonality must be rejected. Rather, differences are emphasised. In radical politics, this leads to a sort of rainbow movement being envisaged in which everyone is an individual first and foremost, is assumed to perceive things differently from everyone else, does their own thing, believes in their own thing and (supposedly) respects everyone else's individuality as well.
Not only is this paradigm utter nonsense to the extent that it ignores the fact that an objective reality exists, it is also fundamentally flawed as a strategy for change because it ignores the need for unity of oppressed groups in the face of the most powerful ruling class in history.
In its attempt to straddle between acknowledging the need for change and greater freedom for all individuals, but refusing to acknowledge the structures in our society which limit human freedom, it also ends up romanticising the movements, never coming to grips with (in fact negating) the democratic principle of majority rule.
If individuals and groups in a movement seeking change are all autonomous and hold equally "valid" opinions about the causes and actions required, what happens when they disagree? How are differences among the oppressed resolved in the face of a united and powerful oppressor? Do we try to get beyond differences to find commonality and struggle together? Or do we, in raising differences to the level of sacred cows, deny our common cause and the need for unity?
Liberalism
Most importantly, difference theory reveals the essentially liberal foundations of postmodernism. The view that "we are all individuals" and do our own thing makes sense as a strategy only if you believe that it is possible to eradicate oppression on a piecemeal basis, sector by sector, or one by one, without the need for alliances, for the maximum possible degree of common struggle. Every significant step forward for humanity in terms of greater freedom has been won by large numbers of people banding together in struggle against common oppressors.
It is but a short step from the liberal individualism of difference theory to the laissez faire perspectives of Thatcherism — "each to their own", "individual initiative" and the "rights of the individual".
While the pro-individual, anti-collectivist perspective of postmodernism was fuelled by the experiences and lessons of Stalinist totalitarianism, and while the proponents of difference politics can be excused for reacting against the lack of democracy in many of the progressive movements over the past few decades, this position is ultimately regressive in that it leads to an all-encompassing anti-masses perspective.
Big trade unions, big mobilisations, big issues, broad alliances — all are attacked in theory and practice by postmodernism. The liberal adage "small is good" becomes a major blockage to the process of achieving genuine individual freedom for all people, a condition which is possible only once the current social structure is eradicated.
Postmodernist politics is conservative, even reactionary. First, it is anti-progress in so far as historical development is perceived as the result of chance, of a series of random events unconnected by any general laws or forces. The idea of progress as an advance, the idea of evolution, loses all its meaning in such a framework. Consequently the possibility of encouraging that progress or directing it is ruled out.
Secondly, in abandoning the scientific method, postmodernism does not enrich our theoretical understanding or our practical activity directed towards creating a more just social order. Rather, it robs us of knowledge and thereby disempowers us as a force for progressive change.
Thirdly, in its capitulation to the capitalist ideological offensive against any notion of collectivism, postmodernism divides and fragments the movements and imbues them with a pessimistic and demobilising outlook.
In sum, postmodernism abandons the project of achieving fundamental social change for a sort of radical liberalism. To the extent that it is liberalism, that is, non-materialist and utopian, postmodernism is little different from the various other intellectual and cultural retreats from the struggle against capitalism which have accompanied the loss of confidence of middle class liberals in their ability to provide a rational, scientific explanation of society.
In this respect, postmodernism is dangerous for the working-class movement and for all progressive movements. Every serious movement for social justice sooner or later comes up against the barrier of power and private profit. Which way that movement develops — whether it continues to challenge this power and moves forward, or capitulates to it — is crucial. Liberalism has historically always opted to capitulate.
[This is the abridged text of a talk presented to the International Â鶹´«Ã½ Conference in Sydney, April 1-4.]