Post-Modernism Explained in Terms of Means of Production?

[RedMaterialist]

Post modernism, post-structuralism, post-Marxism, deconstruction, etc...can any of this be explained in terms of historical materialism, in other words is there a connection between monopoly, late stage capitalism and post-modern theory?

[Rafiq]

It could be argued that the emergence of post modernism coincided with both a turning point in the class struggle as well as the new political, and arguably social organization of capital following the second world war.

[D-A-C]

Post modernism, post-structuralism, post-Marxism, deconstruction, etc...can any of this be explained in terms of historical materialism, in other words is there a connection between monopoly, late stage capitalism and post-modern theory?

You can and most certainly should IMO. It's actually a focal point in my PhD :) so I certainly believe it to be the case.

Basically, my take on it would obviously be derived from Althusserian Marxist theory, and relies on the distinction between science and ideology.

Essentially, starting around 1950's there has been a shift in the First World from large scale mass production of standardized goods, towards a smaller scale specialized production of goods. Italy tends to cited as a country where this trend first began.

So, with the rise of more unique goods and services so rose the idea of the consumer industry, advertising and the idea of targeting 'niche markets' and goods tailored to 'individuals' ... the famous Fight Club line, "What kind of kitchen set defines me as a person?".

Well, isn't it convenient that just as this as happening, an intellectual trend began with Foucault and others (an ideology of post industrial capitalism really) that focuses on a multitude of distinct categories of person, black, white, male, female, straight, homosexual, rich, poor, disabled, non-disabled etc, etc and talks about how these groups can seemingly engage is localized power games and often turn the tables of their social oppressors in specific situations.

Long story short, a shift did indeed begin in the means of production that led to an ideology (post-modern discourses) arising to reflect it and mask its new exploitative mechanisms. However, such an argument reeks of economic determinism and so you have to balance it by also arguing that this shift also coincided with a societal rebalancing of the dominant institutions within First World social formations so that schools/media become more dominant and the family, factory and church, have started to lose their traditional power.

I am reciting this off the top of my head, but if your interested I can maybe look at some of my notes and give a more detailed account, there is a whole bunch of other things to discuss around that topic.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I don't really think specific economic changes or changes in production are the reason these ideas developed and became more common. Basically I think Pomo represents an ideological shift among academics and intellectuals. There are material political and social reasons for the dominance of these sorts of ideas, but I think the larger "historical materialist" epochal change really comes in to play with modernist ideas with post-modern ideas just being a different phase of the same thing.

They both come out of the dominance of bourgeois society, both modern ideas and post-structural or other ideas are an attempt to understand profit based societies. They ask the same questions but one developed in a period of class war and Pomo has developed in a world where class struggle has declined.

Specific philosophers had been CPers and Maoists and were disillusioned by the USSR, specific political formations, or simply the absence of rising class struggle. But more generally these ideas flourished because WWII saved western capitalism and Stalinism and it's not like there's no truth, or history, it's just that there's no viable counter-truth to the lies of inequal class societies that seems apparent.

[RedMaterialist]

but I think the larger "historical materialist" epochal change really comes in to play with modernist ideas with post-modern ideas just being a different phase of the same thing.

So, post-modernism is a development out of the modernism associated with capitalism? What is it about capitalism which contributed to this development?

The phrase "economic determinism" is now used in a negative sense. But isn't that basically what historical materialism is? That society, culture, philosophy, etc develop out of class struggle 'determined' by economic, material and productive conditions?

[RedMaterialist]

Essentially, starting around 1950's there has been a shift in the First World from large scale mass production of standardized goods, towards a smaller scale specialized production of goods. Italy tends to cited as a country where this trend first began.

So, with the rise of more unique goods and services so rose the idea of the consumer industry, advertising and the idea of targeting 'niche markets' and goods tailored to 'individuals' ... the famous Fight Club line, "What kind of kitchen set defines me as a person?".

Well, isn't it convenient that just as this as happening, an intellectual trend began with Foucault and others (an ideology of post industrial capitalism really) that focuses on a multitude of distinct categories of person, black, white, male, female, straight, homosexual, rich, poor, disabled, non-disabled etc, etc and talks about how these groups can seemingly engage is localized power games and often turn the tables of their social oppressors in specific situations.

I can see how western capitalism shifted its focus from mass commodity production to the management of mass consumption, primarily though advertising. Capital can produce billions of things, but it couldn't sell those things without convincing people to buy them.

So, the individual consumer was created, along with an individual identity. As you say, "My kitchen (car, clothes, breakfast cereal) defines me as a person." But, of course, these things don't define anyone as a person, that is the illusion. On the other hand maybe that illusion focuses the individual's attention onto his or her real identity as a person: sex, gender, race, class, etc. Thus the development of the various identities of post-modernism.

Do you have any links to this issue?

[Dodo]

You can and most certainly should IMO. It's actually a focal point in my PhD :) so I certainly believe it to be the case.

Basically, my take on it would obviously be derived from Althusserian Marxist theory, and relies on the distinction between science and ideology.

Essentially, starting around 1950's there has been a shift in the First World from large scale mass production of standardized goods, towards a smaller scale specialized production of goods. Italy tends to cited as a country where this trend first began.

So, with the rise of more unique goods and services so rose the idea of the consumer industry, advertising and the idea of targeting 'niche markets' and goods tailored to 'individuals' ... the famous Fight Club line, "What kind of kitchen set defines me as a person?".

Well, isn't it convenient that just as this as happening, an intellectual trend began with Foucault and others (an ideology of post industrial capitalism really) that focuses on a multitude of distinct categories of person, black, white, male, female, straight, homosexual, rich, poor, disabled, non-disabled etc, etc and talks about how these groups can seemingly engage is localized power games and often turn the tables of their social oppressors in specific situations.

Long story short, a shift did indeed begin in the means of production that led to an ideology (post-modern discourses) arising to reflect it and mask its new exploitative mechanisms. However, such an argument reeks of economic determinism and so you have to balance it by also arguing that this shift also coincided with a societal rebalancing of the dominant institutions within First World social formations so that schools/media become more dominant and the family, factory and church, have started to lose their traditional power.

I am reciting this off the top of my head, but if your interested I can maybe look at some of my notes and give a more detailed account, there is a whole bunch of other things to discuss around that topic.

if tl-dr, in terms of means of production

fordism>>>post-fordism

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

I think it's wildly reductionist and a mistake to refer to "post-modernism" as though it's a single unitary set of ideas. I trust one wouldn't make such sweeping judgements about modernism and declare, "Well, Marx and Bertrand Russel - all the same really!"

There are two things missing so far from this discussion, in particular, I think. The first is that it's actually Marx who really sets the stage for critical theory and much of what is dismissed as "post-modernism". Discipline and Punish, for example, is arguably a more thoroughly historically materialist (not to mention useful!) text than much of what has passed for "Marxism" in the last 50 years.

The second is that one gives academics too much credit by asserting that these ideas emerge only out of the academy: Foucalt pouched liberally from prison struggles, and struggles of patients against "health". Baudrillard's starting point was basically a shitty depoliticized hack-job on Debord. The reframing of class as co-constitutive with race, gender, etc. emerges out of W.O.C. feminism and American Maoism. That we can find sanitized academic versions of these things warrants dismissing them no more than shitty sanitized academic Marxism warrants dismissing class struggle.

"Ideas result from deeds, not the latter from the former . . ."

[Hit The North]

The second is that one gives academics too much credit by asserting that these ideas emerge only out of the academy:

Actually, it discredits them as it implies an ivory-tower separation from real life.


Foucalt pouched liberally from prison struggles, and struggles of patients against "health". But also his work empowers such struggles by making the discourses of institutions intelligible to those who resist. Which is the job of good social theory. It should draw on real struggle and attempt to provide theoretical insight which can make the struggle more transparent. This is what Marx and Engels did, after all.

What's at stake for communists in regard to assessing post-whateverism is, firstly, how these theories penetrate bourgeoisie ideology or how far they work to further mystify it. Second, their attitude to the centrality of class struggle as the agent of resistance and change.

Postmodernist social theory does, in general, decenter the proletariat from the historical process, leaving it as an outmoded social category in the brave new world of post-whatever.

But as communists we have to be convinced that class struggle remains the solution to the riddle of how we achieve a free humanity, so we are, consequently, naturally hostile to contrary narratives.

However, it is true that some of these writers make interesting and, sometimes, important observations about changes in the base and superstructure of contemporary capitalism (even if much of this work operates at the level of mis-recognition).

'Our' job is to make sense of these ideas in the context of our communist perspective - as Marx did with Ricardo, Engels with Darwin, or Lenin with Hobson.

....

[Jimmie Higgins]

So, post-modernism is a development out of the modernism associated with capitalism? What is it about capitalism which contributed to this development?

AI see it, these ideas (mod and Pomo), in broad strokes, attempt to understand a world in which capital dominates: where God is dead, where people are not brought together specifically by local community, blood-ties, caste, a single master, etc, but by commodity relationships.

In the early 20th century the question of what modern society might look like and how people would conceive of themselves in this society were much more open because in much of Europe the reminents of feudal customs were rapidly falling.

Imo, what distinguishes post-modernism is that it arose in a period where bourgeois democracy more or less settled these questions and official challenges were constrained within "official communism". Particular schools or thinkers either accept or challenge this, but they are more or less stuck in this context.


The phrase "economic determinism" is now used in a negative sense. But isn't that basically what historical materialism is? That society, culture, philosophy, etc develop out of class struggle 'determined' by economic, material and productive conditions?i don't think historical materialism has anything to do with any determinism. I do think a materialist look at modernism and postmodernism are possible, but like I said, I think the common denominator is the rise of a dominant bourgeoise culture and society. Futurism is a perfect expression of the contradictions of a rapidly industrializing society. A skepticism of official truths also expresses a situation of bourgeois and state-capitalist dominance and a lack of class alternatives.

There are arguments that specific changes to economic organization have produced a new era and that postmodernism reflects this, but I think this misses the Forrest for the trees. There have been lots of changes and developments for sure, there are lots of different schools of thought, but the larger questions and relationships are still the same.

[Speaks for the people]

It could be argued that the emergence of post modernism coincided with both a turning point in the class struggle as well as the new political, and arguably social organization of capital following the second world war.

Is it that new? I see an older parallel. If we examine the modern corporation functioning as a new and emergent aristocracy, similarly built on inter-generational (through corporate immortality) wealth, accumulated private ownership and enclosure of the public spaces, and explicit corporate privileges found through the ability to remove liability while also using the fiction of person-hood, then I think we are seeing something like a new "feudalism 2.0" openly emerging from it too.

The Magna-Carta of these new corporate baronials is the investor-trade dispute free trade agreements. These are meant to liberate them from the power of the sovereigns, the state, and those they see as serfs, much like the original one was intended, though I do not see an accidental upside from this one at all.