The current epoch presents an interesting paradox in the context of global politics. In global affairs, economic analysis has been abandoned for cultural policy. Politics proper, politics as a struggle for power, has been abandoned for politics as negotiation between interest groups. The conservative position seems to be characterized by a demand for separate cultural identity, the liberal position defined by multicultural-permissiveness. However, our paradox actually exists within a series of unexpected congruencies. For within continental philosophy, theorists have drifted towards postmodernism, generally criticizing the current global order as homogenizing, and conservative. The coincidence is that post-modern philosophy, in an attempt to understand how exclusion can exist within “inclusive” philosophies, has elevated the idea of cultural difference to a position of inherent value, perfectly aligning themselves with today’s modern “information age” liberal democratic, global, tolerant capitalism. The congruency between neoliberal politics and postmodern philosophy constitutes the greatest threat to genuine emancipatory change. Our revolution should instead re-examine the relevance of Marxism, as Marx puts it “Communism is…not a state of affairs…to be established, an ideal to which reality [has] to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”
“Tolerance” has become the panacea of the ruling class but is actually a symptom of de-politicization. What is lost is the struggle based identity of greater commonalities that cut across different identities that can serve as an actual basis for authentic challenges to power structures. This is where the postmodernist would oppose “meta-narratives” that attribute such a commonality and “limit” diversity, which will maintain the status quo. The existence of power structures seems to under dispute as well as neoliberals paint capitalism as both “the worst but only system we have” and then prescribe more of it to solve global oppression. The “false” antagonism exists between “global civil society” and fundamentalism (as Fukuyama called “20th century ideology”). Postmodernists, like Foucault, instead suggest an “open-space” where identities struggle for “hegemony” as Deconstructionist set about “subverting binaries”.
The paradox emerges when we recognize the escalated violence of “capitalism with a human face”. The system will be instead maintained by such books as Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, as future George Soroes and Bill Gateses begin to assimilate a postmodernity of fluid identity and rhizomatic organization to increase profitability within digital capitalism, utilize charity to maintain power structures, and further demand the individuals of the 1st world to become postmodern subjects, a fluid being who’s cynicism turns them to hedonists, the perfect consumer, capable of fully disavowing complicity by buying “Fair trade coffee” from Starbucks, apathetic to the corporation’s violent treatment of unions. The paradox: our position as dedicated leftists, in fidelity to emancipation, must oppose the liberal position in global politics and demand a firm identity based in a common human culture, in search of a truly radical politics. We must refuse to see all global problems as problems to be solved by “tolerance”, re-politicize economics, and demand truly emancipatory action in the form of political struggle.
