/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

"post-modernism" is still concerned about epistemology and isn't inherently anti-epistemological i.e. "post-modernism" hasn't shifted ontology from cognition to activity… "post-modernists" are to busy interpreting the world instead of changing it

>>609433

Both Foucault and Stirner weren't explicitly anti-capitalist, they critiqued the institutions and power relations of their day but left it there. Anti-capitalism can be a conclusion of their philosophical work, but it's not the only conclusion. Cut Marx up however you like but he's still red inside. Cue milkposting for the egoists, while Foucault dithered about in academia, enjoying his celebrity status in french intellectual circles, arguing that critique itself was a mode of resistance. Unlike with Marx, whose turncoats were forced to fundamentally abandoned his conceptions, Foucault's followers took his insights into the heart of neoliberalism in at least one instance via Francois Ewald (see pdf attached). This is what can happen when you're ambiguous about your views, critiquing and analyzing relations of power without dedicating yourself to their overthrow, or at the very least their reform.

I'm going to be cruel here and argue Zizek may well end up the new Foucault: influential enough to inspire generations of cottage industry academics to do their own "readings" of his works, and attempt to twist it into something useful (indeed this is already underway). At least he is openly anti-capitalist, which limits how his thought can be used. A lot of the prominent Marxist intellectuals, eg. Badiou, seem to have given up on any kind of political struggle, and now, like Foucault, content themselves with critique as praxis. Varoufakis might be a soc-dem in a Marxist suit but at least he's getting his hands dirty.

>I guess but that doesn't explain the intense reaction people have.

Post-modernists want nothing to do what Foucault called totalitarian grand theories, like Marxism. They're obsessed with subjectivity, relativism, micro-politics of particular groups – which in turn inspired IDPOL and thus intersectional theory – and completely misunderstand Marxist's use of class not as the end-point, i.e. a reductionist theory that boils everything down to relations of production and so on, but the starting point of an analysis in which those things – mode, forces, and relations of production – provide a basis for its grand analysis of bourgeois society. More to the point, they're not strictly anti-capitalists. They may have some interesting arguments in regards to their critiques of power in society, but fundamentally they have no idea of how to change it beyond reforming bourgeois government policy, and they have absolutely no idea of how to achieve a society where (hypothetically) power relations are managed in common, not monopolized by a largely unaccountable elite.

>>609502

Forgot the pdf, of course.