By Lisa Macdonald
Iain Aitken, in "The use-value of postmodernism" (GLW May 25), falls squarely into the trap set by postmodernism which has caught so many, often well-intentioned, leftists before him. This is the illusion that postmodernism is both new and radical.
Postmodernists may "take the question of radical politics seriously", as he says, but this does not necessarily make their analysis correct or useful. Anarchism too takes radical politics seriously, but it has contributed very little to our understanding of how society works and how people have in the past, and can in the future, change it fundamentally.
Marxists take a strictly scientific approach to understanding and changing the capitalist system. Are we really going to be more effective radicals if we reconcile ourselves to never quite understanding how society works because it is all so complex? Does that then mean that we will never quite be able to bring about revolutionary social change and save the planet from destruction? Why not just spare ourselves any more pain and concede defeat?
Yes, Marxists hold that there is an objective reality which exists independently from how (or even whether) we perceive it and give it labels. We give it labels, use language, to describe that reality — to communicate our (still limited) knowledge about this reality and to improve that knowledge. We radicals do that so that we can have an impact on, improve, that reality. This is precisely what differentiates human beings from all other animals.
Since both objective reality and language predate capitalism, if postmodernism is correct that "objective reality, transparent to language, is a capitalist myth", then human society is in much bigger trouble than even we radicals already realise.
Fortunately, however, scientific knowledge and language are not inherently "totalitarian" or "stifling", as postmodernism claims. On the contrary, it is only with the fullest possible knowledge of society that we can achieve the full liberation of all individuals. Postmodernism's rejection of this, its basis in a philosophy (post-structuralism) which consciously rejects achieving a coherent, rational, generalisable understanding of the world so that we can know how best to change it, robs postmodernism of "use-value", let alone radicalism.
Meaning
A critical stance is not necessarily the same thing as a politically radical stance. And throwing up our hands in exasperation at the complexities of capitalist society and, in the process, throwing away the scientific method in the hope of some new and less rigorous way to understand the world, is not going to help.
Unless we are prepared to take on the (often very difficult) task of creating an effective left politics based on the scientific method of historical materialism, we have no right to call ourselves radical. Marxism may not have all the answers all the time in all the detail necessary to change the world overnight, but it provides a theoretical framework and a historical understanding of social development within which we can seek these answers, test them in practice and move forward. Postmodernism does not even try to begin that search.
Much of Aitken's contention that there is something new (and, he implies, therefore better) about postmodernism rests on the supposed unique contribution that this perspective makes to our understanding of "meaning". Paraphrasing Baudrillard, Aitken states that "capitalism dominates not through the control of production per se but through the control of the production and consumption of meaning".
Of course the production and consumption of ideology plays an important role in maintaining the dominance of the capitalist class. Postmodernism's discovery of the importance of "meaning" in this process is not new. Marxists have spent over a century analysing and explaining the nature and significance of ideological production and consumption as a vehicle for the control of one class by another in capitalist society. To imply otherwise is to reduce Marxism to crude economism, something radical activists should leave to conservatives and Stalinists.
Marxism's analysis of the construction of "freedom" and "democracy" in capitalist society, for example, has revealed that under capitalism the content of "freedom" and "democracy" is the opposite of what most people understand these terms to mean. "Freedom" for the capitalists means their freedom to exploit and dominate the majority. "Democracy" does not mean rule by the majority, but the right of working people to decide every three or four years which capitalist party will exercise governmental power in the interests of the capitalists.
Relationships
Even more importantly, Marxists' use of the historical materialist method has also allowed the most thorough and accurate explanation yet developed of the relationship between economics, politics and ideology.
Postmodernism contributes nothing to our understanding of these relationships; it only confuses the question of how and why "meaning" is constructed by lapsing into an idealist position which ignores institutionalised power relationships and opposing class interests. Contrary to Aitken's claim, "whether one agrees completely with" Baudrillard and other post-structuralists in this idealist approach does matter, precisely because it determines one's strategy for changing the world.
All of humanity's experience indicates that it is not possible to change the world simply by changing the terms in which we talk about it. In any case, for so long as radical postmodernism's pretence to be egalitarian is so thoroughly contradicted by its use of unbelievably obtuse and inaccessible language, I very much doubt the potential for postmodernism's success in its project of constructing a more radical "meaning".
Finally, with respect to the "use-value" of postmodernism, while left activists' search for something useful in the plethora of radical postmodernist writings is understandable, postmodernism, in practice, has to date disorganised and disempowered oppressed groups in advanced capitalist society. If this test of practice is the scientific basis upon which Marxists call postmodernism reactionary and dangerous then I for one am satisfied.
Of course, if the test of real life finds otherwise and the practice of postmodernism leads to the eradication of Third World poverty and starvation, war, rape, the ecological crisis, racism and all of the other brutalities which accompany imperialism today, then I (and probably all Marxists) will happily become postmodernists. But since postmodernism does not even aim to achieve such goals, such an outcome seems highly unlikely.