The Use and Abuse of Postmodernism

THE NOTOR] ETY that postmodernism has achieved in recent times derives from two things. On the one hand, its arrival as a mode of analysis, undermining the established certainties and analytical frameworks of many disciplines, has earned it the enmity of scholars occupying positions across the political spectrum. On the other hand, it has now become something of a commonplace, both popularly and within the academy, that we stand at the dawn of a new postmodern era, one in which the social, economic, political, and cultural arrangements of the modem era begun in the Enlightenment and the revolutions of the 18 century are being fundamentally transformed. As with the arrival of postmodernist analysis, the passage to a condition of postmodernity is deplored by many. Indeed, it is a hallmark of the political left today to stand in opposition to both postmodernism and postmodernity. Indicative of the left's repudiation of postmodernism is James Laxer's The Undeclared War: Class conflict in the Age of Cyber Capitalism. The central aim of this work is the analysis of what Laxer takes to be a new, postmodem cyber capitalism, where the triumph of the market and market ideology over social democracy is nearly complete and where class conflict has re-emerged as a major fact of contemporary social existence. While this aim dominates, of clearly equal concern to Laxer is the revindication, through its practical application, of an essentially Marxist social theory (which is to say one which takes the analysis of global capitalism and class relations as essential) against a faddish postmodernism whose effect, he argues, is to reinforce the social arrangements of the new capitalism. So while it is the analysis of postmodernity (which is to say contemporary

Epistemology · Postmodernism · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Elite Sociology and Global Capitalism · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Political theory and Gramsci · Psychology