"Postmodern neomarxist" just means "anybody in academia who doesn't agree with Jordan Peterson". It doesn't matter if that person is a libertarian poststructuralist, a liberal third wave feminist, a neocon Kantian, an armchair ultra, an intersectional or an orthodox Marxist, a Hegelian grifter rodent or anything else you can imagine to the left of Kermit the Fraud. He has neither the training nor the willingness to distinguish between these, and the combination of arrogance and lazyness that has made him resort to just bullshitting his way through everything throughout his entire career has led him to just make up a weasel word that he can throw at all of them equally.
Postmodern neomarxist is just a more pretentious way to say woke. And i am dead certain that JBP doesn't get that, he is so self-absorbed that he has seriously invented this world-spanning academic movement that exists solely to exclude brave free thinkers like him from the pronoun-poisoned ivory tower. "Foucault, Zizek, Chomsky, Butler, Davis and Feinberg all have the same ideology because all of them have at least some ideas that directly contradict my precious editorials and my very eloquent and not at all unhinged tweets" is just what a grown man who dresses like a Batman villain would come up with.
The only way Peterson's "postmodern neomarxist" boogeyman ever made sense to me is if he means people like Baudrillard/Foucault/Althusser/critical theorists who had Marxist roots but then either denounced Marxism or transitioned into postmodernism/liberal activism.
But I've also seen his Zizek debate. His understanding of Marxism is literally misunderstanding page one of the Communist Manifesto, a book I first read at like age 12-13 and remember comprehending. There is no way in hell he read something as dense as Althusser's work and the closest he's come to Baudrillard is watching The Matrix. It's just a rhetorical version of one of those rorschach blobs that always looks like a penis.
OK this is helpful actually. I can't wait for the day he slides off the earth.
Neomarxist on its own has been used by others outside of him, but even then it's as vague as tankie. I've seen it applied to Zizek for nominally being a Marxist while having a bunch of pro-European and conservative takes, generically to Eco-Marxists like John Bellamy Foster because they're rediscovering part of Marx, and by reactionaries because it's scarier than Marxist if big words scare you.
But I've also seen his Zizek debate.
I don't remember much of what Zizek said in it, only that he bullied Peterson relentlessly and humiliated him in a room full of his cultists. It was inspirational as a dirtbag leftist.
Zizek sucks but he in that debate Peterson came out with nothing but the same conservative guff that people have been saying for a hundred years, and all Zizek had to do was say "cooperation is good actually" in order to win.
You know how "neonazi" actually means something, like, specifically people who have never been members of the German Nazi Party but identify with the fascist tenets of it and venerate its aesthetics? Well, Jorpy knows "neonazi" is bad, but he's not mad at nazis, he's mad at communists. Using his big smooth brain, he stripped the "neo-" off "neonazi" and then taped it onto "marxist". Voila! Neomarxists must be as bad as neonazis!
Jordan Peterson didn’t invent the term neo-Marxism, he simply didn’t understand what it means and applied it to the wrong context.
I took a course in Critical Theory long before Peterson was even a thing, and neo-Marxism was definitely used in the texts, typically refering to Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer et al. (Frankfurt School) in the 1960s who were disillusioned with Marxism-Leninism (they believed what happened to the USSR was bad) and believed that a new form of philosophy combining the post-structuralist/post-modernist tradition (though with some reservations about post-modernist thoughts) was the way forward for the emancipation project of human societies.
Neo-Marxism refers to leaving behind Marxism and forming a “new” school of thought, not unlike how neo-classical economics leaves behind the entire classical economics tradition (Smith, Ricardo, Marx) and calling themselves the “new classicals” who are replacing the older school of thought.
Neo-Marxism typically refers to the Critical Theory/Frankfurt School academic theorists (Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer etc.) in the 1960s who became disappointed and disillusioned with Marxism-Leninism and its ability to resolve the contradictions of capitalism (the USSR was “bad”), so they leaned more heavily into the post-modernist/post-structural schools and played a role in the counter-culture revolution in the US in the 1960s.
Essentially, the neo- in neo-Marxism refers to them leaving behind the traditional Marxist-Leninist thinking and developing into its own strand of philosophies, not unlike how neo-classical economics was the complete opposite of classical economics in the tradition of Smith, Ricardo and Marx. They called themselves the neo-classicals because they are the ones replacing the classical economics as the new school of thought.
Interesting. I get the sense anyone who uses the term neomarxis casually doesn't have this understanding.
Yes, Jordan Peterson doesn’t understand anything about it and think it’s some spooky Marxist academics who wanted to secretly bring communism to America, when the neo-Marxists were precisely the people who loathed Marxism-Leninism and were critical of the Soviet Union.
Doesn’t actually mean anything. The point of adding “neo” is to give his hog audience the impression that the current movement is somehow more aggressive and forceful than previous ones, and so they have to increase the forcefulness on their end to be able to resist
Marxism but with more woke stuff and more government doing stuff
They added it to the patch updates
This is a kind of serious question if I'm honest. Is it some kind of Jordan Peterson invention? I don't get it.
the same thing as "politically correct"/"sjw"/"woke"
it's an actual thing in academia like how critical race theory is real too, but in the same way it had its name snapped off and stapled onto a spooky monster mask and abused to make chuds afraid of liberals
I think Peterson meant neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie. The guy is a cryptofascist. Requisite Sartre quote. Cultural Marxism is just a rebranding of Judeo-Bolshevism.
marxism 2: electric boogaloo
marx got resurrected, so we got some brand new marxism
