- 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.
- Break Their Haughty Power
Resource Type: Website
Articles on capitalism, socialism, and revolution, from a left-Marxist perspective.
- Can We Criticize Foucault?
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2014
Since his death in 1984, Michel Foucault's work has become a touchstone for the academic left worldwide. But in a provocative new book published in Belgium last month, a team of scholars led by sociologist Daniel Zamora raises probing questions about Foucault's relationship with the neoliberal revolution that was just getting started in his last years.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- On Describing the Other
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2012
My criticism is not primarily about Judith Butler’s 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.
- 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.
- 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, 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.
|
AlterLinks
© 2021.
|