But Marx also recognised that the imposition of the real abstractions you applaud is a process steeped in blood and dirt. It might be a good or bad thing, but you will not find many people in the next generation of the left who see this imposition as something that is potentially liberatory.
This is maybe why you have to entertain the possibility that at the present historical conjuncture, with some leninst recognition of the balance of objective forces, this future is not an immanent practical possibility. It is only a potentiality that we can see within what is posited objectively by the workings of the capital relation.
Activists today who employ the ideas in the 11th thesis on Feuerbach do so in contradistinction to understanding the world. Hence the project they are enacting is not trying to raise the real to the level of ideas, but reduce it to their spontaneous depravity. In the current climate you might argue that what is revolutionary is to understand the world - in its contradictions - especially when so many attempts to change it are abortive or exacerbate the problem.
In an Adornoesque vein then, the project of philosophy or of understanding the world needs to be recommenced with rigour appropriate to the type of confusion that modern capitalist relations produce. And postmodernisms are examples of the confusion that abounds in this process.
>By employing the basic
>culutralist empiricism of notions of identity, the individual/ society,
>they are begging to be deconstructed.
>Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach" is instructive on the inadequacy of
>philosophy based upon the categories of abstract individual and civil
>society.
>In other words, the Third Way.
And these are not post-modern constructions, but those of theorists of modernity. I.e. the idea of self-idenity and modernity is Gidden's game - and he is also one of the leading theorists of the Third Way.
Erik