Rejecting Marxism reframed colonial conflict as nations and culture, not classes and capital

Evidence

An obvious consequence of repudiating Marxism was that one now sought to make sense of the world of colonies and empires much less in terms of classes, much more in terms of nations and countries and races, and thought of imperialism itself not as a hierarchically structured system of global capitalism but as a relation, of governance and occupation, between richer and poorer countries, West and non-West. And whether one said so or not, one inevitably believed that ideas – culture’ was the collective term in most mystifications, or discourse’, but it mainly meant books and films – and not the material conditions of life which include the instance of culture itself, determine the fate of peoples and nations. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 70 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

When the limits of the nationalism of the national bourgeoisie became altogether evident, the hostility towards rigorous kinds of Marxism that had been assimilated from the postmodern avant-garde made it impossible for this literary theory to produce a rationally historicized autocritique of its own prior enthusiasms for that kind of homogenized nationalism. Instead, poststructuralism itself was offered as the determinate answer to nationalism, while – in at least some versions – some discrete elements of Marxism (not to speak of feminism) were reworked into the subordinate clauses of poststructuralism. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 70 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Repudiating Marxism reframed global power as a West-non-West relation of nations rather than classes — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 70; Third-worldist nationalism regresses from the Marxist critique it displaces; Rejecting Marxism foreclosed self-critique, so poststructuralism replaced rather than corrected nationalism — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 70

Related

• Repudiating Marxism reframed global power as a West-non-West relation of nations rather than classes (similarity 0.90)
• Rejecting Marxism foreclosed self-critique, so poststructuralism replaced rather than corrected nationalism (similarity 0.87)
• Third-worldist nationalism regresses from the Marxist critique it displaces (similarity 0.84)
• Poststructuralist critique rejects nationalism wholesale instead of judging its specific historical forms (similarity 0.84)
• Discourse-first theory redefines imperialism as a wealth relation rather than class structure (similarity 0.83)
• Third World literary theory effaces Marxism-rooted radical cultural heritage (similarity 0.83)
• Frame choices that collapse politics into nationalism versus postmodernism erase socialist alternatives. (similarity 0.82)
• Poststructuralist Third World theory arose as a substitute for failed nationalist ideology (similarity 0.82)
• Literary theory’s rejection of nationalism mirrors poststructuralism’s rise (similarity 0.82)
• Culturalist postcolonial labeling is arrant idealism that levels history (similarity 0.82)
• Poststructuralist debunking of nationalism succeeded Third-Worldist nationalism as the dominant academic counter-canon (similarity 0.82)
• Marxism in colonized formations rejects both the nation-culture equation and tradition-modernity binary (similarity 0.82)
• Postcolonial theory’s turn to representation displaced study of imperialist political economy (similarity 0.81)
• Third World literary theory’s rise marked retreat from activist anti-imperialism (similarity 0.81)
• Postcolonial subdisciplines emerged by distancing themselves from anti-imperialist activist politics and economics (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Repudiating Marxism reframed global power as a West-non-West relation of nations rather than classes #corroborates (0.93) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 70
• Rejecting Marxism foreclosed self-critique, so poststructuralism replaced rather than corrected nationalism #expands (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 70
• Third-worldist nationalism regresses from the Marxist critique it displaces #complicates (0.75)