> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Charles Brown
>
> Did Postmods start criticizing Marxists first ? Who started it ?
> CB
Since the original postmods in France were mostly members of the French Communist Party, most of them considered them versions of Marxists criticizing the rigidity and "essentialism" of what passed for Marxist thought within the Party. The interesting transition was that this internal theoretical fight among French Marxists got translated to the United States as a fight largely by non-Marxists (and many anti-Marxists) against the whole Marxist project, often against the whole socialist project itself.
When Derrida wrote his "Spectres of Marx" a couple of years ago, I think it was a revelation to some of the less sophisticated pomos that their intellectual heritage has a lot of pinko commie heritage.
Since that time, I have sensed an abandonment of pomo theory by anti-Marxists towards other theoretical projects and a greater synthetic effort by pomos to include more traditionalist socialist concerns. Not to give that one paper too much credit, since it reflected other changes in politics and intellectual though as much as it caused them, but it does seem to have been an important intellectual marker in ending "postmodernism" as its own bounded project in opposition to Marxist and other socialist intellectual approaches.
-- Nathan Newman