*During the Thatcher-Reagan-Bush era, just as critical intellectuals and left political activists had won a small place for the concepts of political economy and class analysis in academia, postmodernism and post-structuralism replaced Marxism as the favored mode of Anglo-American intellectual radicalism.
Strictly speaking, postmodernism and post-structuralism are not the same thing. What I mean by these terms is an array of literary and cultural theory rooted in a Nietzschean—as opposed to a Marxian—critique of bourgeois modernity. Postmodernists hold that reason—the leading principle of European post-Enlightenment modernity—is not universal, but merely masks relations of power. … Postmodernists reject the notion that the interests and outlook of the working class or any other group constitute the basis for liberation of all of people (my note: This goes against the heart of Marxism). They are suspicious of abstract categories like class, and deny the existence of unified subjects—individuals or classes—with historical agency.*
Further on:
They [postmodernists] often adopt a playful, ironic, self-contradictory style, reflecting their view that there is no correct analysis of anything, but only an infinite variety of “readings.”
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
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.
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.
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.