I have recently been interested in organizing more (outside of animal rights and anti-racism) and was looking to join a communist org. Unfortunately the choice for these kind of movements is incredibly limited where I live. I found a trot org that is linked to IMT near me and was willing to give them a chance as choice is limited.
After reading their manifesto, I think I won’t bother... Here’s a translation of some paragraphs.
Our position is very simple: in every struggle, we always take the side of the oppressed against the oppressors. But this general position is not precise enough. We must add that our position is essentially negative. This means that we are opposed to all forms of oppression and discrimination - whether they target women, people of color, homosexuals, transgender people or any other minority.
However, we firmly and categorically reject “identity” politics which, under the pretext of defending the rights of this or that group, play a reactionary role, dividing the working class, weakening its unity and providing invaluable aid to the ruling class.
The labor movement has been contaminated by a whole series of ideas that were alien to it. Postmodernism, identity politics, “political correctness” and other oddities have been smuggled in from the universities by the “left” petty bourgeoisie, who act as a conveyor belt for reactionary ideas alien to the working class.
Stemming from “postmodernism”, identity politics have confused the brains of many students. But these ideas have also been introduced into the workers' movement, where they are used as weapons by the bureaucracy to combat the most resolute militants.
They have a whole FAQ section dedicated to how inclusive writing is wrong because it divides the working class ffs.
This is something Jordan Peterson would write if he decided to LARP as a leftist instead of a Tradcath.
Peterson and many communist org have approximately the same relation to and misunderstanding of postmodernism lmao
I always associated post modernism with a rejection of large scale historical/ideological narratives (barring ofc the unspoken capitalist one). Tbh I don't know a lot about it, but is that not the case?
Yes, but it's more than that. Excuse my rant below because I have a soft spot for this lol.
The "postmodernists" developed these ideas through a critique of capitalism, liberalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, etc. The rejection of grand narratives in theory was importantly an attack on these systems we oppose. Liberalism is the dominant grand narrative about the world which was/is used for uncountable crimes and continued existence, even as that narrative itself lost the plot long ago. This is why a lot of the "postmodern" authors were also readers of Marx. Marxists should question grand narratives about the world and people within it, even if that means we have to be critical of our own narratives.
The problem some communist orgs seem to have is a conflation of the "postmodernists" (by who they mean poststructuralists, etc.) and postmodernism as a defining logic within late capitalism. This is the same problem Peterson has. He literally doesn't even know what the words mean or who believes what, and neither do certain communist orgs. Like sure, be critical of the post structuralists, clearly their ideas were easily recuperated into the academy etc, but actually engage with it at least. I find orgs which use that term in such a hand waving way are just using it as a smoke screen to say they don't like gender studies and intersectionalism (both having their own relation to this trajectory in theory, and good criticism from a Marxist perspective), but generally not for good reasons. Which this org is clearly saying, but others less intentionally so.
The other important part is the relation to history. Postmodernism (read: global capital/spectacle/etc) treats history like its a grab bag of aesthetics to mishmash and sell again as a "new" commodity. In this sense everything loses its historical significance, its just aesthetics. It becomes a play, a simulation, kitsch, or a pastiche. But this also changes the way people inevitably see themselves within history, or whether they possess the capacity for effecting historical change at all. When everything appears to lose its historical character, the possibility for political change also seems impossible. In other terms, it's the superstructure reinforcing the base (global capitalism).
This peculiar relation to history is a problem for political organizing. Some left organizing may feel like it falls flat because of this postmodern grinder we find ourselves in. Where red aesthetics have already been eaten and spit back out by capital. Like it's hard for me to read the above excerpt and not just read it as an anachronistic larp. I've seen even good communist orgs put out some absolutely silly communiques written in a language that chatgpt could spit out if you asked it for "communist declarative article". (chat gpt is a good example of an invention which is deeply tied to both postmodernism in how it chews up language and without context spits it back out, and to the legacy of eugenics--the modernist triumph of statistics controlled by racists aka the ruling class.)
Jameson's book Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is a great place to start. Just the first chapter is honestly enough.
Thank you for the info this is a very nice write up
Yeah...