Today’s Extremist “Radical” Professors vs the Old “Red Intellectuals”
The following is how it looks to me from a distance. Since many readers are fairly recent college graduates, I’d be interested in other views. I’ve been thinking of posing a question about “Anti-rationalism on Campus”. I suspect there is a small cadre who may say more extreme sounding things than have been said in the past, but they are incoherent, and reports of Universities as left wing robot factories are highly exagerated.
>Today’s “left wing” intellectuals are blatherers. Postmodernism is anti-Enlightenment and views Marxism as an unfortunate result of the Enlightenment the same as capitalism. Noam Chomsky calls himself an anarchist. They tend to be anti-everything when it comes to actually doing something.
>There is no international Communist movement, and there’s been virtually none since Brezhnev, though the USSR ran around trying to buy a lot of countries, and certainly made a lot of trouble. If you want a clear picture of the era of “Red Intellectuals”, read Witness by Whittaker Chambers, and then I suggest Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America by Ted Morgan (despite the subtitle, McCarthyism is less than half of what the book covers). Chambers was the star witness for Nixon’s “pumpkin papers” trial. Both cover a lot of just how deep the international Communist movement got into America, and Chambers writes beautifully and helps you to see why that was. He also speaks for the many who became deeply disillusioned by the Hitler-Stalin pact. I used to think that was odd because in my view it was a very natural reaction to Chamberlain’s Munich, but the Communists really did put up a very good show of defining and opposing the Fascists (I say “a good show” for a reason but it’s too complicated to say more), and for as long as that was true, a lot of people put a halo on them for that, then many of them because naively heartbroken.
I downvoted this because I cannot figure out what the OP’s point is.
It feels unfinished. Like you were starting to say something, then got distracted in the middle of the history of US communists and hit publish. It sounds like there might eventually be an interesting point, here, but right now it sounds like page 1 of a 5 page essay.
I’ll take that as constructive criticism. Lately my time is very fragmented and scarce but I’ve been frustrated by a strong desire to express certain insights that I think/hope I have.
As above, the exact point you’re intending—or indeed the question to which you initially allude to—is not intelligible to the reader. More importantly, what assertions you do make are terribly crude: no one thinks that capitalism is reducible to the Enlightenment; contrary your your allusion, Chomsky is a moral naturalist tracing his normativity to the higher liberalism of the Enlightenment, and epistemologically is basically a positivist; contemporary rejection of the correspondence theory of truth is not local to post-modernism, but spans Frankfurt School Critical Theory, post-analytic Anglophone philosophy, most of the philosophy of science, contextualist historiography, and much much else. There is a tendency to conflate particularly obscure (usually French) continental thinkers with all thought which isn’t positivist and/or treats language as problematic, which you here appear culpable of.
Did he ever get around to that question?
Could you name people that argue that position explicitly?
Here is an article that addresses the issue pretty directly: http://www.merip.org/mer/mer187/marxism-postmodernism
It starts off with
Further on:
It is complicated by the fact that Marxism tends to be bent into pretzels all sorts of ways in order to make it agree with the fashions of the time, be they Freudianism, postmodernism, or the “New (largely Anarchic) Left” of the 60s/70s
It might be arguable that the kernel of truth in postmodernism can be approached via Ainslie (see http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/10/18/the-government-within/)
Here is another bit from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism
While [Michel] Foucault himself was deeply involved in a number of progressive political causes and maintained close personal ties with members of the far-Left, he was also controversial with Leftist thinkers of his day, including those associated with various strains of Marxism, proponents of Left libertarianism (e.g. Noam Chomsky) and Humanism (e.g. Jürgen Habermas), for his rejection of what he deemed to be Enlightenment concepts of freedom, liberation, self-determination and human nature. Instead, Foucault focused on the ways in which such constructs can foster cultural hegemony, violence and exclusion.
Habermas has been strenuously engaged with postmodernists like Foucault in defense of the value of Enlightenment rationality).
Postmodernism/Poststructuralism is a complex and confusing stew that I’ve bumped into in the course of study of history and later history of ideas and epistemology, especially social epistemology. There are two very separate groups who call themselves “social epistemologists”. One leans towards postmodernism, headed by Thomas Fuller, which has an online forum at social-epistemology.com. One of the complaints against it is that it is “veriphobic” by Alvin Goldman, the main standard-bearer of the other branch of Soc. Epist. (Knowledge in a Social World, 7ff). This is something akin to saying it is highly relativistic and opposed to any standard of “objective truth”, and the postmodernists have tended to treat all religions gingerly and have found favor among some theologists, and they (esp Thos. Fuller and Feyerabend—a sort of precursor to this school of epistemological thought) have engaged in apologetics for creationism.
Many articles in Fuller’s social-epistemology.com forum have mentioned “enlightenment”
http://social-epistemology.com/?s=enlightenment
For more on the different approaches to Social Epistemology, see http://social-epistemology.com/2013/07/22/two-kinds-of-social-epistemology-finn-collin/ (one of the best articles by far to have appeared in that forum).
You haven’t really answered ChristianKI’s question, he just wanted names of people who explicitly “view Marxism as an unfortunate result of the Enlightenment the same as capitalism.” rather than a link to a long article from someone claiming that some people did something kinda like that maybe.