i'm teaching a class on postmodern political theory. one thing that strikes me about the work of the 1970s and '80s: many of the thinkers are trying to hold on to marxism in some form, while developing theories in a situation where both the situation and the theories are completely incompatible with marxism. it takes baudrillard some time to emerge, for example. donna haraway's now-classic "cyborg manifesto" describes, pretty presciently, a total change in production and reproduction and gender, etc., then tries - incomprehensibly - to defend 'socialist feminism'. foucault debates chomsky and somehow - despite every thought he ever had - starts the marx-mime about class struggle, the proletarian, and so on. many other examples arise.
it reminds me of the desperation with which 17th and 18th century philosophers tried to assert that their systems were perfectly compatible with christianity, even though they so weren't. these thinkers at least had the excuse that institutional repression might follow their questioning. the pomos had no such excuse unless they were working in a marxist dictatorship. here's what i would say: have the courage to follow your ideas where they go; your work will be compromised if you have to bow and scrape before some orthodoxy, especially one as false and explicitly oppressive as marxism. marx would have denounced donna haraway as a government agent and her philosophy as bourgeois, providing no particular grounds for either. lenin or mao would have had her pushed up against a wall and shot, yelled 'next!' and executed frederic jameson.
these are thinkers of remarkable boldness and striking originality. that people like that feel the need to pay lip-service to someone else's skull-crushing orthodoxy is incomprehensible. it's still happening, beyond all human understanding: zizek, badiou, whatevs. just get the fuck over it already.
the dominance of marxism and marx-inflected material in the twentieth century's left prevented the development of a hundred alternatives, short-circuited all the possibilities except an unbelievably dreary statism. i think people just kept expressing their devotion even at the expense of everything they actually believed (oh, sartre would be an extreme example) because they needed to be part of a movement; they still wanted that vision of liberation, which would take solidarity, and marxism was the only place there could be a mass movement etc. that was the tragedy of the twentieth-century left, arising from voluntary self-subordination rendering smart people's thinking a total mess. but let me say this: anyone could have hopped off at any time - still could - and they were morally and intellectually obliged to.
