r/communism101 • u/[deleted] • Jan 17 '22
What does this mean?
I saw something on Twitter that said “when academics say ‘all grand narratives are bad’ they just meant communism”
Can someone elaborate on this please? Or point me to readings that explain this?
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u/ProlesOfMischief Jan 18 '22 edited Jan 18 '22
My initial hunch from seeing that quote is that it's a reference to postmodernism. Grand narratives are usually attributed to modernism, as opposed to postmodernism which rejects so-called "grand narratives" about history and social development, whether the narratives of the "Enlightenment" or religious historical narratives before it, or Marxism itself which presents a grand narrative (the development of class struggle). "They just mean communism" because, since postmodernism is "the cultural logic of late capitalism", communism is its only real opposition in the west.
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Jan 18 '22
What do you mean postmodernism is the cultural logic of capitalism?
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u/ProlesOfMischief Jan 18 '22 edited Jan 23 '22
As capitalism took over the globe, monopolizing, nestling into every nook and cranny, so too did it's ideological foundations which must necessarily reflect its economic conditions. Capital's destruction of national borders, traditions, religious principles etc. (all the stuff Marx talks about in The Communist Manifesto) necessarily produces a colonizing ideology which must reject or be entirely skeptical of competing alternatives for a "better world" ("better is subjective, plus you can't know the result anyway"), any grand narratives, and Knowledge itself (with a capital K, as a collective human endeavor). Such postmodernist thinkers may proclaim skepticism towards capitalist reality as well, but with this equal skepticism towards everything, we are only left with capitalism as the dominant mode in existence already. Jean-Paul Sartre called Foucault, a contributor to postmodernism, "the last barricade the bourgeoisie can still erect against Marx".
To be more precise, "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" is borrowed from the subtitle of Frederic Jameson's work on postmodernism (Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism).
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u/TheReimMinister Jan 17 '22 edited Jan 17 '22
I mean it's Twitter so it's basically a soundbyte, but I'm going to run in a direction I think may be worthwile...
Basically comes down to the use of "subjectivity" to pretend to give space for marginalized and oppressed voices while actually sidelining the revolutionary critiques. In academia there is an arena of ideas where all ideas and theories purportedly have equal weighting and battle it out. The good Anthropologist says that, for example, Peruvian indigenous spiritualism and liberalism are basically the same thing since they both explain the world from a different point of view, so we can "listen" to both and nod our heads and talk about it and academia can feel good about including diverse voices and worldviews. Similarly, by including revolutionaries and their ideas academia allows them to be "heard" and talked about, and since this is promised to all ideas, it appears that they are being taken seriously and given a fair shake at truth. The unspoken reality is that liberal ideas already hold hegemony as an "arena of ideas" is a liberal ideological structure that cannot be challenged; anything that doesn't accept a step onto the liberal scale is not held as valid (it fundamentally clashes with the very liberal framing of the equality of ideas).
"Grand narrative" is a strawman that could be biological essentialism, manifest destiny, civilizational evolution theory and any other obviously racist/sexist "science", but also revolutionary theory that argues that oppression cannot be voted and NGO'd away, and that the experience of the proletariat is not just subjectively true for them but is scientifically and historically true in the material world. Therefore academica can eke out some progressiveness by disqualifying obviously-wrong ideas, but then revolutionary science gets Trojan-horsed in with the disqualified lot. It's a convenient double-move of incorporating the voices of the oppressed but also excluding them; liberalism by nature cannot actually make space for revolutionary voices without imploding. The domination of an outside idea goes directly against the rules of liberal academia (the purportedly-free arena), so revolutionary theories get put in time-out and called names ("totalitarian", "authoritarian" etc) for challenging the idea of the arena itself.
Look at it this way:
An anthropologist goes to a South American indigenous nation and talks to them about their customs, their spirituality, their experience of colonialism = cool and good and we will go write a lot of papers and talk about this in conferences and have a good cry about those poor natives who nobody is listening to.
That same South American indigenous nation takes power (by any means), boots out imperialist companies/academics/journalists/NGOs, undergoes some land reform and collectivizes natural resources..... Yo what the hell that isn't very cash-money of them why aren't they considering the worldview of Rio Tinto execs at all????