The Philosophy of Despair: Postmodernism Explained

Spectre Of Communism · 2025-12-16

Core Argument

The central thesis is that postmodernism is not merely an obscure academic fashion but a coherently reactionary philosophical system that functions as an ideology of despair and political paralysis. The episode argues that postmodernism's core claim — incredulity towards meta-narratives — is in practice a rejection of theory, science, rational thought, and the very possibility of objective truth. This is not harmless intellectual play. The argument is that postmodernism, through its offshoots in identity politics, queer theory, and postcolonialism, actively undermines the class struggle by substituting subjective experience for objective analysis, fragmenting the working class into competing identity groups, and channelling radical energy into safe, individualistic gestures that leave capitalist power untouched.

The speakers claim a direct lineage from postmodernist philosophy to the practical politics of the reformist left: the rejection of unified class struggle, the elevation of personal identity over collective interest, and the substitution of linguistic change for material transformation. The episode's polemical edge is sharpest when it argues that these ideas serve the ruling class by making people "fight for their servitude as if they were fighting for their own deliverance."

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws on classical Marxist philosophy, particularly the Hegelian-Marxist tradition of dialectics. The key theoretical move is to locate postmodernism within the history of philosophy as a form of subjective idealism — the elevation of the individual subject's perspective above objective material reality. This places the critique within a well-established Marxist tradition of philosophical materialism, stretching from Marx's early critiques of the Young Hegelians through Engels's Anti-Dühring to Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

The episode explicitly contrasts postmodernism with the Marxist understanding of the relationship between the particular and the universal. The speakers argue that postmodernism's fixation on pure difference — the claim that everything is unique and cannot be categorised — is philosophically incoherent: pure difference is indistinguishable from pure nothingness. Marxism, by contrast, grasps both identity and difference, recognising recurring patterns and lawful development within an infinitely varied world.

The evolutionary account of the development of consciousness — from single-celled organisms through nerve nets to the human prefrontal cortex — is a materialist refutation of postmodernism's mystification of the mind. The mind is presented not as a barrier between humans and reality but as a regulatory function that enables adaptation and mastery over nature. This is a direct application of Engels's dialectics of nature and the Marxist theory of knowledge as reflection.

The episode also draws on Spinoza's analysis of ideology — the mechanism by which people are mobilised to fight for their own servitude — to explain how postmodernism functions as a ruling-class ideology despite its radical pretensions.

Conjunctural Relevance

The argument is grounded in the current conjuncture in several specific ways:

Politically, the episode identifies identity politics as the practical expression of postmodernism within the labour movement and the broader left. The speakers argue that this has concrete, damaging effects on struggles today. The example of the Palestine solidarity movement in Canada is particularly pointed: the Palestine Youth Movement opposed a nationwide student strike on the grounds that non-Palestinians were "taking up space," and instead advocated dialogue with the Liberal Party — a Zionist bourgeois party. This is presented as a case study in how identity politics paralyses militant action and channels struggle into safe, reformist channels.

Ideologically, the episode notes the strange convergence between postmodernism and right-wing culture war rhetoric. Figures like Jordan Peterson attack "postmodern Marxism" as a single enemy, but the speakers argue this is a category error: Marxism and postmodernism are fundamentally opposed. The right's conflation of the two is itself a political weapon, but the episode's main concern is the damage postmodernism does within the left itself.

Geopolitically, the episode connects the struggle in Palestine to the class struggle in the imperialist heartlands. The argument is that Palestinian liberation cannot be achieved through national struggle alone but requires a unified class struggle against the Western ruling classes that sustain Israeli imperialism. Identity politics, by insisting on the primacy of Palestinian voices and rejecting non-Palestinian solidarity, objectively serves the status quo.

Intellectually, the episode addresses the experience of young people entering university and encountering postmodernist texts that make them feel stupid. The speakers explicitly aim to demystify this language and provide a Marxist alternative that offers genuine understanding and therefore genuine hope.

Where the Argument Continues

This episode is part of a broader corpus within the RCI's output. The argument about the importance of theory and the relationship between the particular and the general is developed in the previous season's episode on "The Importance of Theory" (referenced in the discussion of the philosophy of identity). The critique of reformism and the strategy of the united front — which is the positive alternative to identity politics — is developed across multiple episodes of Against the Stream.

The episode deliberately leaves open the question of how to build the positive alternative. It establishes that Marxism offers a philosophy of hope and mastery, but does not here develop the strategic implications for building revolutionary organisation. That argument continues in episodes dealing with the united front, the question of party-building, and the analysis of the current period of capitalist crisis.

The critique of postmodernism as a philosophy of despair connects to the broader Marxist tradition of critiquing irrationalism, from Lukács's Destruction of Reason to more recent analyses of post-structuralism. The episode's materialist account of consciousness and knowledge points towards Engels's Dialectics of Nature and Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as texts that develop this thread further.

Connections

• Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise — the analysis of ideology and how people fight for their own servitude
• Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit — the dialectic of master and slave, the relationship between freedom and knowledge
• Marx and Engels, The German Ideology — the critique of idealist philosophy and the materialist conception of history
• Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism — the defence of objective truth and the reflection theory of knowledge
• Engels, Dialectics of Nature — the materialist account of the development of consciousness
• Lukács, The Destruction of Reason — the Marxist critique of irrationalism in German philosophy
• Against the Stream episodes on the united front and the critique of reformism
• Spectre of Communism episode on "The Importance of Theory" (previous season)

Key Quotes

1. "Incredulity towards meta-narratives... these people are sceptical towards theory. That is the long and short of it. But you can't really write that. You could have written 'suspicion towards big ideas' — that would have been the simple version."

2. "They reject theory. They reject science. And they do that on the basis that theory and science is inherently oppressive. In other words, it is not the conditions of humanity that creates oppression of any sort, but it's the interpretation that we put on it that creates oppression."

3. "The idea that the correctness of your ideas is determined by your race — that's the word that the imperialists use. That's normally a ruling class idea. But actually that's the idea that these guys are putting forward here."

4. "Spinoza said it may indeed be the highest secret of monarchical government and utterly essential to it to keep men deceived and to disguise the fear that sways them with the specious name of religion, so that they will fight for their servitude as if they were fighting for their own deliverance. And that is what postmodernism and its derivatives do."

5. "The ignorant man is not free because what confronts him is an alien world, something outside of him... The impulse of curiosity, the pressure for knowledge from the lowest level to the highest rung of philosophical insight arises only from the struggle to cancel this situation of unfreedom and to make the world one's own in one's ideas and thought." (Hegel, quoted approvingly)