A new Left intellectual type combined Third World rhetoric with anti-communism

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 anti-communist; 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 the signature of anti-empiricism, anti-historicism, structuralism and post-structuralism, specifically Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida, Glucksmann Kristeva, and so on. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 356

Categorization

• XREF: This described intellectual posture resonates with the tourist/lateral exoticism critique in the chapter on ‘lateralisms’ and with Mohsin Hamid’s portrait of a cosmopolitan who attaches to American power while claiming Third World allegiance. — connects to: Postwar New Leftists rediscovered the Frankfurt School through pirated and reissued pre-1950 writings — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 76; Late Horkheimer embraced anti-Communist and pro-American rhetoric — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 1726; Leftist intellectuals defended the USSR as an ideal worth moral compromises — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 771 (+7 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: the 1970s-80s genealogical origin of today’s hollow center-left figure who brands everything post-communist while abandoning labor and social democracy.

Related

• A new anticommunist Third-Worldist intellectual displaced traditional left affiliations after 1975 (similarity 0.90)
• A new post-1970s left intellectual combined Third World rhetoric with anticommunism and Nietzschean post-structuralism (similarity 0.87)
• Postwar New Leftists rediscovered the Frankfurt School through pirated and reissued pre-1950 writings (similarity 0.80)
• The New Left crystallized in 1967-68 after divergent national origins (similarity 0.80)
• Leftist intellectuals defended the USSR as an ideal worth moral compromises (similarity 0.78)