/lit/ - Literature

>>19734681
>Did they really create it as a last bastion for Marxism after seeing that they lost the moral argument for Marxism with the catastrophe of Stalinism and Maoism?
I'm not some grad school person who can really answer this, but Marxism seems very "modernist" to me and the few existing governments in the world that profess a commitment to Marxism at least as a method of analysis (like China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, etc.) seem to much more "modernist" in their methods of expression, aesthetic and otherwise, and in the language of the party guiding the people on an epic narrative -- and I don't think they got this from Derrida or Foucault:

https://youtu.be/qQkVwLoS8b0?t=153

>Are Derrida and Foucault both responsible for the creation of "identity politics" like Peterson claims? [...] He also claims that, despite post-modernism being a movement that rejects "meta-narratives" ... contemporary post-modernists still emphasize the idea of "oppressed vs oppressors" and that this is what ties it to Marxism.
It seem like a more complicated relationship. I think that for the Western left, the old-style class struggle exhausted itself, and what's called "identity politics" was an attempt to keep a radical tradition alive at all. In other words, the class struggle was co-opted first and rendered politically impotent in the West via a combination of repression (purging communists from unions in the 50s which "depoliticized" the unions) and providing selective benefits to some, like sufficient wages and health plans provided by employers -- and also mass homeownership as a form of capitalist "central planning" and "welfare" -- organized along sectional lines (white workers benefiting much more than black workers) which had the effect of breaking up the working class while selectively repressing / co-opting different sectors of it.

I don't really know where to go from there. I think that postmodernism's rejection of grand narratives leads to paralysis. To put it in terms of aesthetics, postmodernism is the obsession with surface appearance, superficiality, and identity at the expense of grand narratives and historical movements. All life is part of normalcy, all resistance is itself a part of the functioning of the system, and all alternatives are unimaginable. Life simply goes on. So you could say that about the left, but as Zizek pointed out, the most postmodern figure in the West is Donald Trump. He's a pastiche who repeated conservative mantras about family and society, while gloating about not paying taxes and acting in a very vulgar way and being proud of it, which confronts the antagonism at the heart of modern conservatism as the stable communities they want are undermined by the same economic forces favored by conservatives. But he's doing a performance like Kamala Harris is about signaling to racial justice while being a career prosecutor turned regime official.

This is postmodern:

https://youtu.be/n4UTtRRZvzw?t=122