A new anticommunist Third-Worldist intellectual displaced traditional left affiliations after 1975

Evidence

Within this reorganized global conjuncture we have witnessed, in all the bourgeois countries, the ascent to dominance of an entirely new kind of intellectual within a formation which continued to call itself a Left. The characteristic posture of this new intellectual was that he or she would gain legitimacy on the Left by constantly and fervently referring to the Third World, Cuba, national liberation, and so on, but would also be openly and contemptuously anticommunist; would often enough not affiliate even with that other tradition which had also descended from classical Marxism, namely social democracy, nor be affiliated in any degree with any labour movement whatsoever, but would invoke an anti-bourgeois stance in the name of manifestly reactionary anti-humanisms enunciated in the Nietzschean tradition and propagated now under rhe signature of anti-empiricism, anti-historicism, structuralism and post-structuralism, specifically Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida, Glucksmann Kristeva, and so on. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 791

Categorization

• XREF: This is Ahmad characterizing the milieu that produced Spivak and Said — the very discourse theorists the reader’s strategic essentialism research confronts; connects to Ahmad’s forthcoming close reading of Said in the next chapter. — connects to: A new Left intellectual type combined Third World rhetoric with anti-communism — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 356; Global anti-capitalist revolution retreated by the mid-1970s — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 271; French New Left students remained Leninists oriented toward Third World revolution — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 90 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• A new Left intellectual type combined Third World rhetoric with anti-communism #corroborates (0.97) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 356