Max Sawicky wrote:
>
> Failures in the sense that history didn't end there, that they solved
> certain problems, and thereby rendered other problems possible. Without
> Brecht, no Heiner Mueller; without Lenin, no Central European social
> democracy. . . .
>
> Lenin paved the way for Central Euro Social Democracy?
>
> Hmmm.
>
The problem with the claim seems less that is doubtful or wrong than that it is merely banal. Without the events of 1857 (say) the events of 1858 would not have happened. Dress that up in complex enough language and you have a profound grasp of history. As to a material claim to be educed from the banality, one could claim that without the Russian Revolution the working classes of the west would not have achieved the power to force s-d reforms. Just as it is arguable that except for the fact that the battles of the Cold War were being fought out in "non-white" areas of the world the Civil Rights movement of the '50s and '60s would have been less successful. Those claims can be defended or attacked in terms of concrete historical analysis; the claim that Lenin or Brecht was a failure seems to rest merely on a tautology, which hardly seems worth attacking.
That may be the problem with most thought labelled "postmodern"; if one is arguing tautologies, one needs to hide that fact from oneself in the sort of prose that Butler, for example, produces.
Carrol