- Against Post-Modernism
A Marxist Critique Resource Type: Book Published: 1982 Callinocos argues that the relativism preached by post-modernists leaves us with no objective criteria by which to reject those who would falsify the past.
- Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia
Resource Type: Article Published: 2017 Criticizing Enlightenment thought has become fashionable across the political spectrum. For the past several decades, more and more academics have called reason into question. This is especially true among left-leaning, postmodern, and post-structuralist thinkers. This coincides with one of the Alt-Rights primary tactics: adopting leftist rhetoric as cover for its racialist, nativist, and often misogynistic agendas.
- All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
The Experience of Modernity Resource Type: Book Published: 1988 Berman examines the clash of classes, histories, and clutures in the modern world, and ponders our prospects for coming to terms with the relationship between a liberating social and philosophical idealism and a complex, bureaucratic materialism.
- An Annotated Bibliography of Nonsense
Resource Type: Article Published: 1998 Academic critics today not only question the impact of science upon society, but they also question the very idea of scientific rationality.
- An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto
Resource Type: Book Published: 2003 An extended argument about what the anti-capitalist movement should stand for.
- Anti-Science: Left and Right Together?
A Systematic Attack on Rationality Resource Type: Article Published: 2012 The suggestion that left and right thinking may be converging on matters scientific will, no doubt, be offensive to some on the left. After all, the right chooses myth over evolution, and oil profits over climate science.
- Away with the gatekeepers!
The bane of cultural appropriation Resource Type: Article Published: 2016 On the the controversies over 'cultural appropriation' and what they reveal about the degradation of contemporary campaigns for social justice.
- Bad Marxism
Capitalism and Cultural Studies Resource Type: Book Published: 2004 Cultural Studies commonly claims to be a radical discipline. This book thinks that's a bad assessment. After an introduction critiquing the so-called 'Marxism' of the academy, Hutnyk provides detailed critical analyses of the approaches and theorists of cultural studies.
- The beginning of the end for identity politics?
Resource Type: Article Published: 2017 While the millennial lefts preoccupation with identity has not disappeared, the moralistic fire has grown dimmer.
- Break Their Haughty Power
Resource Type: Website Articles on capitalism, socialism, and revolution, from a left-Marxist perspective.
- Chomsky on Post-Modernism
Resource Type: Article Published: 1995 What I find in the writings of the post-modernists is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish.
- The CIA Reads French Theory
On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left Resource Type: Article Published: 2017 A recently unclassifed CIA documents reveals that in the 1980s, the agency had its analysts devote substantial time and resources to studying trends in French theory, and specifically, the work that writers like Michel Foucault, Jacques, and Roland Barthes were doing in undermining the Marxist left. The CIA saw this trend as beneficial to the maintenance of American power, and capitalism generally, because it undermind the idea that there could or should be fundamental revolutionary change.
- The Common Good
Resource Type: Book Published: 1998 Interviews with Noam Chomsky on the U.S. and the world.
- Communication for and Against Democracy
Resource Type: Book Published: 1989 This anthology explores the circumstances in which communication serves at times as an instrument of repression and domination, and at others as a support for human emancipation.
- Connexions Library: Race, Racism, Ethnicity, Multiculturalism Focus
Resource Type: Website Published: 2009 Selected articles, books, websites and other resources on race, racism, ethnicity, multiculturalism, identity.
- Culture of Complaint
The Fraying of America Resource Type: Book Published: 1993 Propaganda-talk, euphemism, and evasion are so much a part of American usage today that they cross all party lines and ideological divides. The art of not answering the question, of cloaking unpleasant realities in abstraction or sugar, is so perfectly endemic that we expect nothing else.
- Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory
Resource Type: Book Published: 1988
- Deconstruction: Theory and Practice
Resource Type: Book Published: 1982
- Descent into Discourse
The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History Resource Type: Book Published: 1990 Critique of postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches in history.
- Dialogues on Cultural Studies
Interviews with Contemporary Critics Resource Type: Book Published: 2002 Thirty-three questions were asked (but not necessarily answered) of each participant, dealing with cultural studies, modernity, postmodernism, referentiality, ideology and history, post-colonialism, neo-orientalism, revolution and tragedy, intellectuals and universities, gender, Marxism, new communications technology.
- Down To Earth People
Beyond Class Reductionism and Postmodernism Resource Type: Book Published: 1999 Working class women and men offer their analysis of the world today and its multi-dimensional inequalities.
- Endarkenment: Postmodernism, Identity Politics, and the Attack on Free Speech
Resource Type: Article Published: 2017 Many today find the idea of free speech appallingan awful fact to those who believe in freedom, quaint as it sounds. Left-liberals agitate to prevent disagreeable expression. Their masked street allies physically attack those who engage in it.
- Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science
Resource Type: Book Published: 1998 The authors criticize postmodernism in academia for its misuses of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing. Fashionable Nonsense examines two related topics: (1) The incompetent and pretentious usage of scientific concepts by a small group of influential philosophers and intellectuals; (2) the problems of cognitive relativism, the idea that "modern science is nothing more than a 'myth', a 'narration' or a 'social construction' among many others". The stated goal of the book is not to attack "philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general...[but] to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism," and in particular to "deconstruct" the notion that some books and writers are difficult because they deal with profound and difficult ideas. "If the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing." The book includes long extracts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard who are considered by some to be leading academics of Continental philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis or social sciences. Sokal and Bricmont set out to show how those intellectuals have used concepts from the physical sciences and mathematics incorrectly. The extracts are intentionally rather long to avoid accusations of taking sentences out of context. Published in French as Impostures Intellectuelles and in the United Kingdom as Intellectual Impostures.
- Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance
Resource Type: Article Published: 1995 A discussion of feminist theory, particularly the usefulness of postmodernism as a theoretical concept. From the book "Feminist Contentions. A Philosophical Exchange."
- For Lust of Knowing
The Orientalists and their enemies Resource Type: Book Published: 2006 A rebuttal of Edward Said which examines who the Orientalists were, how historically they advanced their disciplines, and what their achievements have been. Irwin calls Said's book "a work of malignant charlatanry."
- Foucault and Neoliberalism
Resource Type: Book Published: 2015 Michel Foucault has a reputation, especially in the academic world, as a radical. This collection of essays explores another, less acknowledged, side of Foucault's thinking: his embrace of some key elements of neoliberalism.
- Grand narratives
Resource Type: Article Published: 2011 Those who reject 'grand narratives' have simply bought into the hoariest grand narrative of all, the one which says that capitalism is all-powerful and eternal.
- Greece: postmodernism in power
Resource Type: Article Published: 2015 Yanis Varoufakis, the Finance Minister in Greeces Syriza government, shows where postmodernist attacks on Marx lead politically. This self-declared "erratic Marxist" states forthrightly that the task of today's Left is to save capitalism from itself, which requires "forging alliances with reactionary forces."
- Harter's Precept: Review of The Social Misconstruction of Reality: Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community
Resource Type: Article Published: 1997 Hamilton gives three major examples of erroneous theses that gained the status of fact in social science despite the absence of evidentiary support: (1) Max Weber's thesis that the Protestant Ethic spurred the advance of capitalism; (2) the widely accepted thesis that Hitler's main electoral support came from the lower middle classes (the despised petit bourgeoisie of Marxism); and (3) Michel Foucault's thesis that the modern prison evolved not as a more humane alternative to the cruel physical punishments of earlier centuries, but as part of a wide-ranging scheme by sinister forces to enforce a pervasive social conformity.
- Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science
Resource Type: Book Published: 1994 Describes attacks on science, and on concepts of truth and rationality, in areas of the humanities.
- How French 'Intellectuals' Ruined the West: Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained
Resource Type: Article Published: 2017 Postmodernism presents a threat not only to liberal democracy but to modernity itself.
- Humanism Betrayed
Ideology, and Culture in the Contemporary University Resource Type: Book Published: 2001 This book offers a defence of liberal humanism as a philosophy of higher education, particularly in the humanities, against the illiberal trends, political and intellectual, that are currently dominating the university.
- Humanism Betrayed - Table of Contents and Introduction
Resource Type: Article Published: 2001 A defence of liberal humanism as a philosophy of higher education, particularly in the humanities, against the illiberal trends, political and intellectual, that are currently dominating the university.
- The Illusions of Postmodernism
Resource Type: Book Published: 1996 Eagleton explores the origins and emergence of postmodernism, revealing its ambivalences and contradictions. His primary concern is less with the more intricate formulations of postmodern philosophy than with the culture or milieu of postmodernism as a whole. Above all, he speaks to a particular kind of student, or consumer, of popular "brands" of postmodern thought.
- In the Tracks of Historical Materialism
Resource Type: Book Published: 1984
- Intellectual Charlatans & Academic Witch-Hunters
Resource Type: Article Published: 2012 Butlers work has always divided critics. While some view her as a courageous and innovative thinker, others view her as an intellectual charlatan.
- Logics of Disintegration
Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory Resource Type: Book Published: 1987 Essays summarizing and critiquing post-structuralism. According to Dews, for all its posture of radicality, post-structuralist thought is itself bound to certain vulnerable assumptions. Dews argues that the fatal philosophical fault of post-structuralism is its failure to preserve the proper dialectical distinction between the subject and the object.
- Marxism and the Dialectics of Ecology
Resource Type: Article Published: 2016 The recovery of the ecological-materialist foundations of Karl Marxs thought, as embodied in his theory of metabolic rift, is redefining both Marxism and ecology in our time, reintegrating the critique of capital with critical natural science. Marx's materialist conception of history is inextricably connected to the materialist conception of nature, encompassing not only the critique of political economy, but also the critical appropriation of the natural-scientific revolutions occurring in his day.
- Multiculturalism or World Culture?
On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown Resource Type: Article Published: 2000 Post-modernists are profoundly bored by any questions of economics and technology which cannot be connected to cultural differences. The implicit agenda of the multiculturalists is to present the values associated with intensive capitalist accumulation as "white male", so "non-white" peoples such as Japanese or Koreans who currently embody those values with a greater fervour than most "whites" are ignored.
- The Nazis and Deconstruction: Jean-Pierre Faye's Demolition of Derrida
Resource Type: Article Published: 1993 A review of Jean-Pierre Faye's book 'La raison narrative', which traces the Nazi origins of deconstructionist and post-modernist concepts and terminology. Faye shows, for example, that the concept of 'deconstruction' was introduced in a Nazi journal edited by M.H. Goering, and he shows how theorists who based themselves on Heidegger's writings, such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Lacoue-Labarthe, whitewashed Heidegger's Nazism, treating it as a mere 'detail'.
- News & Letters: Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2006 - 2007
Resource Type: Article Published: 2006 We aim to help fill the void on the question of "what happens after" by creatively rethinking and restating his concept of "revolution in permanence" for today.
- Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism
Resource Type: Book Published: 1992 An explanation of the foundation of recent post-modern theory which also criticises the misogynist and patriarchal work of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard.
- On Describing the Other
Resource Type: Article Published: 2012 My criticism is not primarily about Judith Butlers style; it is principally about the substance of her arguments and, more broadly, of poststructuralist arguments. I am not opposed to difficult writing. There are many philosophers with whom it repays to work through the difficulties, the obscurities and the obtuseness; Hegel, for instance, even Heidegger in parts. Butler, in my eyes at least, is not such a philosopher.
- Ontological "Difference" and the Neo-Liberal War on the Social
Deconstruction and Deindustrialization Resource Type: Article Published: 2001 We have today legions of people with a smattering of knowledge turning out reams of books filled with buzz words that could be (and have been) produced by a computer program, and could be (and are) picked up in peer-group shop talk in a few months at the nearest humanities program or academic conference. Everyone these people don't like is trapped in a "gaze"; everyone "constitutes" their "identity" by "discourse"; to the fuddy-duddy "master narratives" that talk about such indelicate subjects as world accumulation these people counterpose "pastiche" and "bricolage", the very idea of being in any way systematic smacking of "totalitarianism"; it is blithely assumed that everyone except heterosexual white males now and for all time have been "subversives" (one wonders why we are still living under capitalism); a crippling relativism makes it somehow "imperial" to criticize public beheadings in Saudi Arabia or cliterodectomy practiced on five-year old girls in the Sudan.
- The Origins of Post-Modernity
Resource Type: Book Perry Anderson's book outlines the cultural changes that have accompanied the victory of global capitalism.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - June 18, 2016
Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) Published: 2016 This issue of Other Voices features a wide range of issues. The topic of the week is homophobia, the hate that led to 49 deaths in Orlando last week, but which is present in greater or lesser form in every part of the world. We are always concerned, not only with what is wrong with the world, but what to do about it. This issue carries an excerpt from Umair Mohammed's book 'Confronting Injustice: Social Activism in the Age of Individualism' in which he warns against the pitfalls of individualist and consumer-oriented approaches and argues in favour of collective action to build an effective movement. Derrick Jensen considers some of the arguments in favour of pacifism and finds them wanting. He agrees that creative approaches to social change can oftentimes make violence unnecessary, but that sometimes violence is a necessary response to violence. Another article looks at the decline of liberation theology, targeted as a threat by both the Vatican and secular power structures. Kenan Malik considers the issue of "cultural appropriation" and asks why so many on theso-called left are more interested in criticizing Justin Bieber's hairstyle than in fighting capitalism.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - September 10, 2016
Back to School Resource Type: Article Published: 2016 Education - about the world, and about social change in particular - is a key element in the work that Connexions does. In this issue of Other Voices, we explore a few aspects of the ways in which education and educational institutions are changing. We also look at ways in which education is used to bring about change.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - March 18, 2017
Public Transit Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) Published: 2017 Public transit - good affordable public transit - is key to a liveable city. Around the world, there are movements of transit riders fighting for better public transit. A key perspective guiding many of these struggles is the idea that transit should be free, that is, paid for not by fares, but out of general revenues. This is how roads are normally funded: their construction and maintenance are paid for by taxes, rarely by user fees. Free public transit by itself would not be enough, however. We also need good transit, transit that runs frequently and goes where people want to go.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - April 1, 2017
April 1 issue Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) Published: 2017 Other Voices always strives to present you with alternative views on important topics. This issue offers some really alternative perspectives and even some "alternative facts." As always, read critically - and enjoy.
- Postcolonial Thought's Blind Alley
Resource Type: Article Published: 2014 Throughout the 20th century, the anchor for anti-colonial movements was, at least for the left, a belief that oppression was wrong wherever it was practised, because it was an affront to basic human needs for dignity, liberty, wellbeing. But now, in the name of anti-Eurocentrism, postcolonial theory has resurrected the cultural essentialism that progressives rightly viewed as the ideological justification for imperial domination. What better excuse to deny peoples their rights than to impugn the idea of rights, and universal interests, as culturally biased? No revival of an international and democratic left is possible unless we clear away these ideas, affirming the universalism of our common humanity, and of the threat to it from a universalising capitalism.
- Postmodern Disrobed
Review of Intellectual Impostures Resource Type: Article Published: 1998 An admirable job of exposing the daffy absurdity of postmodernism intellectuals.
- The Postmodern Left and the success of neoliberalism
Resource Type: Article Published: 2016 The international Left promotes its own image rather than engaging in the bitter reality of resistance against neoliberalism. It does not need to believe in postmodernism because it is postmodernism.
- The postmodern left and the success of neoliberalism
Resource Type: Article Published: 2016 The rise of neoliberalism across the globe for decades, and its continued resilience since the 2007-2008 financial crisis in particular, forces us to ask why there has not been a more successful resistance against it.
- Postmodernism and the Left
Resource Type: Article Published: 1997 Barabara Epstein provides an overview of the approach and subculture of postmodernism and how they relate to, or conflict with, leftwing ideas.
- Postmodernism Generator
Resource Type: Website Published: 2000 A computer program written by Andrew. C. Bulhak using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text. Each time you click on the page, it generates a brand-new postmodernist essay, completely meaningless, but superficially plausible, just like 'real' postmodernist essays.
- Postmodernism: Paralysed by postmodernism
Resource Type: Article Published: 2008 A great deal of "theory" in the humanities and social sciences -- and not just postmodern theory -- involves the creating of a kind of conceptual landscape filled with curious kinds of abstract objects -- "language", "power", "justice", "state", "culture", "government", "the polity", "the economy" and a host of others, which are viewed "theoretically" from somewhere way "outside" or "above" them. But it is just this way of looking at things -- from "on high" -- that makes it so difficult to see how people in the landscape are able to create and re-create the world in which they live, and are not simply trapped or formed by it. In fashionable postmodernist treatments of identity or subjectivity, language, as the ultimately hollow and imprisoning object, is put together with the notion that anybody who uses words must be committed to the standard definition of those words, to produce the conclusion that "language" determines the meaning of "identity" words such as man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, natural, normal -- and thus "constructs" (as it is said) human identity or subjectivity itself.
- Postmodernism, the Academic Left, and the Crisis of Capitalism
Resource Type: Article Published: 2013 Over the past fifty years, postmodern theory an umbrella term generally used to refer to such diverse theoretical movements and paradigms as post-structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and others has generally dominated most fields in the humanities and some in the social sciences. But the economic meltdown in 2008 and the subsequent chronic crisis in capitalism have dealt a fatal theoretical blow to the varied and nearly ineffable assemblage of perspectives that are often grouped under the rubric of postmodernism. postmodernism was indeed tragedy. It was tragedy for the massive amounts of cultural capital that it wasted; it was tragedy for the defrauding of intellectual integrity that it represented; it was tragedy for the abandonment of reality that it recommended. Further, like the financial fiasco, it was criminal.
- The Professor of Parody
Resource Type: Article Published: 2000 It is difficult to come to grips with Judith Butlers ideas because it is difficult to figure out what they are.
- Rationality/Science
Resource Type: Article Published: 1995 Chomsky writes: "It strikes me as remarkable that the left today should seek to deprive oppressed people not only of the joys of understanding and insight, but also of tools of emancipation, informing us that the "project of the Enlightenment" is dead, that we must abandon the "illusions" of science and rationality--a message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to monopolize these instruments for their own use."
- The return of the "grand narrative"
Resource Type: Article Published: 2016 Throughout the world, a rising tide of social struggle is upending the proclamations by anti-Marxist intellectuals that the "grand narratives" of working-class struggle and socialist revolution have been superseded.
- Revenge of the Pomo
Resource Type: Article Published: 2013 The repression (either physically or ideologically via social amnesia) of utopians by the Palmer Raids, McCarthyism, and now (certain varieties of) Post-Modernism has led us to a situation in which some search for authenticity in the wrong places. The gap between virtuous and misplaced authenticity is a symptom of repression, the loss of some deeper truths about solutions be they cooperatives, political mobilization, or honest journalism.
- Said, Edward, Critical Notes on
Resource Type: Article Published: 2005 Edward Said was admired by the anti-imperialist left for his courageous defence of Palestinian rights. However, Irfan Habib argues that unfortunately Said's scholarly work, notably his major work 'Orientalism,' was confused and sloppy to be point of being unethical.
- Edward Said's shadowy legacy
Tricky with argument, weak in languages, careless of facts: but, thirty years on, Said still dominates debate Resource Type: Article Published: 2008 So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) to be true. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies.
- The Socialist Register 1990
Volume 26: The Retreat of the Intellectuals Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) Published: 1990 Essays on the retreat away from socialism and Marxism by Left or formerly Left intellectuals.
- Socialist Register 1993
Volume 29: Real Problems False Solutions Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) Published: 1993
- Socialist Register 1995
Volume 31: Why Not Capitalism? Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) Published: 1995
- Socialist Register 1997
Volume 33: Ruthless Criticism of All that Exists Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) Published: 1997
- Socialist Register 2003
Volume 39: Fighting Identities Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) Published: 2003
- Strange Fruit
Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate Resource Type: Book Published: 2008 Malik makes the case that most anti-racists accept the belief, also held by racialists and outright racists, that differences between groups are of great importance. While racialists attribute the differences to biology, anti-racists attribute them to deep-rooted cultural traditions which are typically seen as inherent in the group. Malik argues that these positions are actually quite similar, and makes the case that racism and racial inequality are best combatted by focusing not on our differences but on what unites us. Malik also strongly criticizes the cultural relativism of many anti-racists, and their increasing tendency to reject science as some kind of western imperialist conspiracy to oppress the rest of the world.
- Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
Resource Type: Article Published: 1996 Alan Sokal submitted this parody of postmodernism, poststructuralist theory, deconstruction, and political moralism to the journal Social Text. The editors failed to spot the hoax and published it as a serious article. The hoax caused a fierce debate between the postmodernists and those who consider postmodernism reactionary nonsense.
- The Trouble with Theory
The Educational Costs of Postmodernism Resource Type: Book Published: 2008 Postmodern theory has engaged the hearts and heads of the brightest students because of its apparent political and social radicalism. Yet Kitching writes: "At the heart of postmodernism is very poor, deeply confused, and misbegotten philosophy. As a result even the very best students who fall under its sway produce radically incoherent ideas about language, meaning, truth, and reality."
- Vanguard of Retrogression
"Postmodern" Fictions as Ideology in the Era of Fictitious Capital Resource Type: Book Published: 2001 When one probes the terms of the debate, what is truly amazing is that the ostensibly anti-Eurocentric multiculturalists are, without knowing it, purveying a remarkably Eurocentric version of what the Western tradition really is. The ultimate theoretical sources of today's multiculturalism are two very white and very dead European males, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.
- Where Do Postmodernists Come From?
Resource Type: Article Published: 1995 Eagleton argues that left intellectuals have adopted postmodernism out of a sense of having been badly defeated, a belief that the left as a political tendency has little future. Culturalism, he argues, involves an extreme subjectivism combined with a deep pessimism, a sense that it isn't worth the effort to learn about the world, to analyze social systems, for instance, because they can't be changed anyway.
- Why Does It Matter If Heidegger Was Anti-Semitic?
Resource Type: Article Published: 2014 The publication of the philosopher Martin Heideggers Schwarzen Hefte (Black Notebooks), written between 1931 and the early nineteen-seventies, is likely to cause an uproar.
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