That still stands as a general criticism of a postmodern penchant for struggles against phrases ("the plan," "modernity," "reason," "truth," etc.), which postmodernists mistake for history. Stuart Barnett wrote: "History provided material with which to present a philosophical -- indeed, Hegelian -- argument...". Or Hegel against Hegel.... Left-Hegelian without acknowledgement. You need to invent "Lenin" after Lenin's death. You need "Leninism" without Leninists. Otherwise, how can you argue for a postmodern Third Term of a non-place, a socialism without planned production? (Council Communists, Market Socialists, Albert & Co. etc. at least have a virtue of offering a Third Term in a non-postmodern manner.)
Meanwhile, I've noticed there has been no reply to Christian and Jim H:
>> It is amazing that you do not recognise the mind-numbing stupidity of
>> cold war liberal ideology that equates left and right as 'ideology' and
>> disguises itself as 'the end of ideology'. Of course this intellectual
>> project has its origins in Heidegger's own apologetic prejudice that
>> Communism and Americanism are the same. Later he re-worked it with
>> Hannah Arendt's assistance to mean that Communism and Fascism were the
>> same. His purpose was to diminish his own guilt by pretending that he
>> had not done anything worse than leftists had done.
>
>Well, actually I do recognize this--although I don't simply call it stupid
>because I think it's much more pernicious than that. In what I've written
>about Derrida's _Specters of Marx_ I make exactly that argument: i.e.
>Derrida is an unreconstructed cold warrior. So, I agree with you. I just
>agree for different reasons.
>
>Christian
Barbara Foley made a similar argument. So did Peter Starr. While the Third Way rhetoric is more expansive than Christian and Jim imply, for it loosely includes Anarchism, Council Communism, Maoism, Trotskyism, Yugoslav Self-Management Socialism, the Non-Aligned Movement, Participatory Democracy, etc., it seems that most postmodern philosophers' politics range from liberal to leftish liberal. Peter Starr wrote in _Logics of Failed Revolt_: "In French theory of _l'après-Mai_,...the absolutist formulations underlying the logics of revolution as repetition served a primarily _tactical_ function: they defined an impasse (the contemporary neither/nor) as the pretext to a displacement, translation, or reinscription..." (124). Kristeva in a roundtable discussion "Why the United States?" said:
***** In both Western and Eastern Europe, our way of doing things, inherited perhaps from a certain religious and state tradition, consists of "dealing with" a constraint by confronting it with its antithesis. But *as everyone knows [_comme chacun le sait_]*, to invert Spinoza's phrase, every negation is a definition. An "opposing" position is therefore determined by that to which it is opposed. And in this way we arrive at two antithetical systems which introject one another and reflect each other's properties...: on the one hand, a government, the conservative and established System; on the other hand, an opposition that ultimately has the same statist, collectivist and totalitarian flaws. All this has culminated in those twentieth-century dramas that are Fascism and Stalinism....
In America, though, it seems to me that opposition to constraint is not unique, isolated and centralized, but is _polyvalent_ in a way that undermines the law [_effrite la loi_] without attacking it head on. (emphasis mine, _Logics of Failed Revolt_, 126) *****
*As everyone knows* -- such is an appeal to the Cold-War-liberal commonsense that Jim H and Christian noted. The rhetoric of back-to-back dismissal is the common feature of postmodern philosophy, which can't allow history to disturb its logics of specular doubling, structural repetition, and recuperation. When you dispense with these logics, which is to say, when you cease to rely on postmodern masters, you may be able to discuss and even criticize Lenin and Leninism with pertinence. Meanwhile, you are only fighting specters of "Lenin" you conjured up yourself.
Yoshie