Post-Marxism is built on abandoning the dialectic as a mystification

Evidence

From the feeling — virtually universal in “Western Marxism” — that the dialectic was not likely to occur “in nature,” and that Engels’s illicit transformation of inert, external, natural, and physical differences (water is not an ice cube) into dialectical oppositions (the basis for much of “dialectical materialism”) was philosophically shoddy and ideologically suspect, to the conviction that “dialectical oppositions” are not even “in society” and that the dialectic is itself a mystification — from the first of these positions to the second is not quite what you would call a “mere step,” since it involves political apostasy and a deconversion in shame and betrayal; but it is surely the central philosophical step in what is called post-Marxism. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 742

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what post-Marxism means as a movement: the rolling back of Hegel and Marx by discrediting dialectical contradiction.
• XREF: Connects to the broader postmodern condition of ‘waning of affect’ and loss of master narratives, and to debates about the dialectic in critical theory. — connects to: Castoriadis believes Marx’s dialectics must be destroyed, not inverted — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 244; Older-generation Marxist scholars held pre-dialectical orthodox views — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 126