Postmodernism Today

One of the prevailing theories in the circles of the Western intelligentsia, which has the aim of disarming youth and students from having their own outlook and taking the working class as their leader, is postmodernism. Its defining feature is that often, unless one is taking a class on theory, this theoretical underpinning of a significant amount of study material is not even defined. That is, statements in the light of postmodernism can easily be taken as fact. Postmodernism declares that there is no such thing as objective laws governing society, that all of human history has been a clash of various "discourses," the written and spoken word -- sometimes oppressing, dominant, sometimes oppressed, dominated. In the final sense, this worldview does not see class as determining social relations, but rather language. So, instead of the raging struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie, we have various discourses, and sometimes the postmodernists are forced to concede class conflict exists, but only as a difference in "discourse" between worker and capitalist -- the former is not oppressed by the latter and their prevailing social relations, but by words, only in that the two have conflicting "identities." Class struggle, as an "identity," is seen in the same light as "opposing" discourses of "man vs. woman," "black vs. white," "gay vs. straight" and so on. This reactionary ideology is thus, logically, the birthplace of identity politics -- the idea that one should look at the world merely through their "own" narrow "identity." It is such narrow politics that leads to the vulgar hatred of modern universalism and the worship of everything tribal, feudal, slave and primitive. Of course, these hypocritical postmodernist theoreticians will never give up their fat salaries to join the working class, never mind the societies they worship. In the last sense, postmodernism, as borne out by Siraj and genuine Marxist-Leninists of all countries, is a conservative and reactionary outlook. In opposition to it, we proclaim that there are objective laws governing society -- that by virtue of the contradiction between social production and private appropriation of surplus value, the proletariat is bound to constitute itself the nation, emancipating itself and all of society from antagonistic vestiges. In every situation, we insist that there is a key link, and that to divide society on the basis of anything other than that link is diversionary.