Alex Callinicos — Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique

273 published claims from this book.

• 1970s reference theory rejected the self-present Cartesian subject avant la lettre.
• 1980s consumer aestheticism was driven by the new middle class’s material prosperity
• Accessing Hobsbawm’s thesis, the nineteenth century marked capitalism’s triumphant transformation rather than aristocratic persistence.
• Accounts of postmodern art typically co-opt motifs that are genuinely Modernist
• Across nineteenth-century Europe the bourgeoisie integrated into aristocratic regimes rather than overturning them
• Adorno made instrumental reason a transhistoric urge rather than a capitalist product
• Adorno’s negative dialectics located emancipation’s hints in modern art’s distortion
• Agreement in judgments stems from shared human nature, not just shared beliefs
• Agriculture replaces nomadic presentism with past-and-future rooted identity
• Allegory loses its melancholy character when viewed from a redemptive standpoint
• An apolitical traditionalist could still revolutionize art
• Anti-Cartesian theories of reference flourished in analytic philosophy
• Any defensible theory of rationality must include a factual account of human beings
• Avant-garde art depends on concrete political conditions, not just aesthetic logic
• Avant-garde attempts to destroy art-as-institution misfire into merely revolutionizing art itself.
• Avant-garde death followed the loss of the anticipated revolution
• Avant-garde movements are defined by seeking to abolish art’s separation from life
• Avant-garde retained aestheticism’s rejection but aimed to build new life-praxis from art.
• avant-garde shock loses its subversive force once it becomes expected and institutionalized
• Baudelaire’s celebrated definition of modernity was contextually specific, not universal.
• Bell’s postindustrial stage theory is a crude analogue of Marx’s productive forces.
• Bell’s postindustrial theory rests on technological determinism cruder than vulgar Marxism.
• Benjamin saw distracted mass reception as politically radicalizing
• Benjamin’s concept of redemption fused Jewish Messianism with secular socialist revolution
• Both forms of poststructuralism owe an overwhelming debt to Nietzsche
• Both poststructuralist strands derive their core from Nietzsche
• Bourgeois adoption of aristocratic style consolidated, not abdicated, bourgeois class rule
• Brecht’s didactic theatre resists being co-opted into a Postmodernist canon.
• Brecht’s epic theatre is fundamentally enlightenment-oriented and cannot fit a Postmodernist canon
• California’s postindustrial growth concentrated gains among entrepreneurs and asset owners
• Capitalism simultaneously destroys and expands human potential
• Capitalist realism requires materialist explanation, not individual psychology
• Claimed cultural crisis rhetoric drew on a shared vocabulary borrowed from earlier sources
• Classical Marxists always defended liberal democratic rights against the right
• Classical social theory defined modernity by the application of scientific rationality over tradition
• Collapsing theory into narrative destroys the critical distance rational critique requires
• Commodity exchange reduces difference to identity through endless novelty
• Competing state-capitalist blocs destabilized the global economy and caused World War II.
• Competition among capitals and commodified labor drive rapid technological development
• Consensus-based truth theories cannot justify specific assertions
• Critical theory that identifies reason with domination cannot justify its own critique
• Critics of Saussurian meaning-theory must presuppose an unmediated givenness of reality
• Cubist collage made fragments of reality enter art as reality itself.
• Debord theorized spectacle as commodity fetishism’s absolute fulfillment
• Deconstruction can be read as Ideologiekritik rather than Nietzschean irrationalism.
• Deconstruction necessarily operates within the metaphysics it contests
• Deconstruction paradoxically requires political resistance to stay silent and unprogrammatic
• Defining Postmodernism as internal to Modernism abandons its periodizing claim
• Deindustrialization was relative, driven by manufacturing productivity gains
• Deleuze’s corpus reduces to a modernized Nietzschean will to power.
• Derrida claimed his philosophy was politically oppositional from 1980 on.
• Derrida moved upstream beyond history where Adorno and Merleau-Ponty moved into it.
• Derrida’s critique of presence relies on a ‘myth of the given’ Sellars already refuted
• Derrida’s différance is an unknowable absolute in the German idealist tradition
• Derrida’s politics lack rational grounding because his language philosophy denies discourse-world relations.
• Derridean textualism denies not extradiscursive objects but knowledge of them
• Différance functions as an unknowable absolute akin to Schelling’s
• Différance is ontologically prior to presence and absence and so unknowable
• Diplomatic realignment carried Soviet avant-garde art into Western Europe.
• Discussion defined parliamentarism for Schmitt, not majority rule alone
• Distinctive postmodern skepticism was already espoused by leading modernists
• Early liberal parliamentarism presupposed an elite excluding universal suffrage
• Early modernists saw industrial city life as demanding a fundamentally new art
• Elite reaction from the 1890s, not worker insurgency, fueled Europe’s prewar crisis
• End-of-epoch crisis feeling was endemic to modernism, not postmodernism.
• Escaping monologic reason requires replacing philosophy of consciousness with communicative rationality
• European Modernist movements like Cubism and Neue Sachlichkeit refute the inwardness reading.
• Extreme postmodernism erases historical specificity into a millennia-old cultural constant
• Fascist aesthetics can still protest reified social life
• Fascist art can encode genuine protest against reified social life
• Financial crashes correct overextended finance relative to depressed industrial production
• Flexible specialization decouples production technology from dedicated single models
• For Nietzsche self-creation means making one’s life a coherent work of art
• Foucault himself repudiated the postmodern label.
• Foucault rejected the postmodern label and poststructuralists were co-opted by American theorists.
• Foucault traces the subversion of the Cartesian subject to Modernist literature and philosophy
• Foucault treated history as war and battle, not language and meaning.
• Foucault’s conception of modernity derives from Nietzsche and Mallarmé
• Foucault’s late turn back to Nietzsche still fails to ground resistance.
• Foucault’s later turn to the subject still lacked a strong theory of agency
• Foucault’s own work shifted from linguistic to power-focused truth games
• Foucault’s power-knowledge analytic is as anti-realist as Derrida while remaining worldly.
• Freud dethroned the Cartesian subject yet stayed committed to scientific rationalism
• Freud’s mechanized, rationalistic worldview was condemned as antithetical to Goethe’s spirit
• Globalization writing lacks historical perspective on state power
• Habermas over-weighted Weber and under-weighted Marx in diagnosing modernity
• Habermas overstates late capitalism’s success in overcoming Marxian contradictions
• Habermas restricts moral philosophy to procedural justification, leaving substance to citizens
• Habermas’s poststructuralism critique is shaped by German anxieties over reactionary challenges
• Hegel solved modernity’s self-justification problem too completely through Absolute reason
• Hegel’s system collapsed when the Young Hegelians exposed it as sanctioning oppression
• Heidegger’s influence extended even to anti-humanist Marxism like Althusser
• High and mass culture interpenetration predates postmodernism by decades
• Historiographic contextual self-awareness already defined major Modernism
• Holism about meaning need not abandon reference or truth.
• Holistic semantics does not require denying reference or truth, contra the post-structuralist route.
• Holistic theories of meaning need not abandon reference or truth
• How one reads pre-1914 Europe determines the diagnosis of 1914-45
• If power is omnipresent, genealogy’s critical standpoint becomes problematically internal to power
• India’s capitalist economy refutes Jameson’s First-Third World binary.
• Instrumental rationality’s dominance results from system-lifeworld uncoupling, not from reason’s inherent dialectic.
• Interpreting others presupposes shared rationality and a common world.
• Jameson’s periodization of postmodernism rests on intuition, not empirical economics
• Jameson’s political unconscious is compatible with modernism-as-political-indifference
• Jameson’s postmodernism account lacks positive historical specificity
• Japan refutes the theory that manufacturing declines with economic maturity
• Jencks’ ‘double-coding’ criterion fails because montage already defines Modernism
• Keynesian remedies shaped the 1980s economy even as Keynes fell into disrepute.
• Lakatos fused Lukács and Popper into a two-part theory-testing model
• Language enables conventions rather than being constituted by them.
• Lash defines postmodernism as imagistic, de-differentiated, and immanent within modernism
• Late-capitalist crises are displaced from economy onto culture as legitimation gaps
• Locating Postmodernism within Modernism severs its link to stages of social development
• Logical positivism in Vienna functioned as political resistance to fascism
• Lukács saw rationalization as reification caused by commodity fetishism
• Lyotard defines postmodernism as a modernism that celebrates the loss of ordered totality
• Lyotard defines postmodernism as a refusal to mourn lost totality
• Lyotard defines the modern by its appeal to grand legitimating narratives
• Lyotard rejects periodizing the postmodern as a clean break with the past
• Lyotard’s postmodern condition structurally resembles conservative ideology
• Market penetration shifted emotional investment into the private sphere
• Marx conceded capitalism universalizes human capacity while emptying out its content
• Marx conceded that capitalism’s universal development empties out human content
• Marx judged modernity as unsatisfying and vulgar compared to antiquity’s limited wholeness.
• Marx rejected Enlightenment progressivism by treating bourgeois society as class exploitation
• Marx saw historical development as contradictory rather than unilinear
• Marx saw historical progress as inherently contradictory and destructive
• Marx, Nietzsche and Saint-Simon founded the three ruling modernities theories
• Marx, Nietzsche, and Saint-Simon founded modernity’s three thinking schools
• Marx’s conflation of exploitation with systemic differentiation led him to overpromise communism’s restorative power.
• Marxism holds that capitalism’s collapse could end in barbarism, not only communism.
• Mass culture’s commercial self-justification is a subterfuge that evades responsibility for falsity
• Mass reproduction decays the aura by collectivizing distracted consumption
• Material production remains indispensable even where services dominate employment
• May 1968 paradoxically advanced the narcissistic individualism its actors opposed
• Modern philosophy replaces substance-dualism solipsism with knowledge-based connection to the Other.
• Modern rationality is procedural rather than substantive across all value spheres
• Modernism can be defined despite internal national variations.
• Modernism emerged as private emotional life displaced a withering public sphere under market penetration
• Modernism emerged from a specific industrial-capitalist conjuncture that postwar capitalism destroyed
• Modernism emerged from the risky space between past, present, and political future
• Modernism flowered between a usable past, uncertain present, and open future.
• Modernism is a coherent artistic category despite skeptics who call it empty
• Modernism itself rejected historical progress, undermining postmodernism’s distinctiveness.
• Modernism reacts to lost totality with nostalgia while postmodernism stops looking backward.
• Modernism’s aesthetic withdrawal from reality was a retreat from politics
• Modernism’s ambiguity is an aestheticized romantic irony that drains the world of causal reality
• Modernist ambiguity stems from a romantic refusal of objective commitment
• Modernist art criticizes capitalism by mirroring commodity form rather than denying it
• Modernist artists engaged mass culture and revolutionary politics
• Modernist interiority’s deep probing tends to dissolve the very subject it explores
• Modernist parody persists in Eliot and Joyce, so parody cannot distinguish Postmodernism
• Modernity and modernization concepts may be inadequate to explain modern experience
• Modernity is best understood as the civilization produced by global capitalism
• Modernity names real novelties of capitalism even though it cannot explain them
• Modernity should be defined as the civilization capitalism built.
• Modernity’s need for self-justification arises from the collapse of traditional norms
• Modernization means splitting unitary practices into autonomous economic and state spheres
• Modernization shifts conduct from tradition to means-ends calculation
• Modernization shifts understanding from inherited tradition to risky rational agreement
• Neue Sachlichkeit’s cool tone was politically committed, not neutral
• New Objectivity’s critical stance replaced Expressionism’s collapsed optimism.
• New social movements directly resist the colonization of the lifeworld
• Nietzsche is the source of the principal theses of postmodern theory
• Nietzsche reduces all knowledge claims to will-to-power purposes
• Nietzsche’s genealogy makes reason itself an expression of the will to power.
• Nietzschean theory retrofitted a postmodern anticolonialism that Marxist anti-imperialism already held
• No sharp line separates language’s conventional form from its factual content.
• Omnipresent power undermines the grounding of resistance in Foucault’s theory
• Only socialist overthrow can turn productivity gains into working-day abolition
• Parsonian modernization theory stripped modernity of its European historical specificity
• Parsonian modernization theory treats the United States as the teleological end-state of all societies
• Parsons exemplifies neo-conservative affirmative attitudes toward modernity.
• Pastiche is parody stripped of any norm it deviates from
• Perceived failure of revolution drives acceptance of postmodernity
• Period labels like Postmodernism mainly serve present-day purposes rather than describing the past.
• Pervasive music extends political domination by breaking down individual resistance
• Plurality and indeterminacy beliefs long predate the postmodern era
• Political defeat turned Viennese bourgeois assimilation into a retreat into art
• Post-crisis cities compete to host centralized finance and command functions
• Postmodern architectural disputes are inseparable from capitalist spatial reorganization
• Postmodern architecture debates are aesthetic mystification masking socioeconomic causes
• Postmodern architecture functions as marketing differentiation for office space
• Postmodern art severs images from meaning into random nonrelational fragments
• Postmodern ideas’ acceptance, not their content, is what needs materialist explanation
• Postmodern irony is not distinctive because parody pervades the Modernists too
• Postmodern multiplicity claims were already the idiom of 1905 Mitteleuropa Modernism
• Postmodern narcissism is not new but rooted in nineteenth-century European public life’s erosion.
• Postmodern urban redevelopment coincides with deepened inequality and infrastructural decline
• Postmodernism discourse expresses a generation’s disillusionment rather than describing reality.
• Postmodernism discourse must be dated to its specific historical conjuncture
• Postmodernism emerged as a response to the revolutionary failure of 1968-76.
• Postmodernism functions for Jameson as a cultural dominant marked by depthless pastiche.
• Postmodernism fuses changes in the arts with poststructuralist philosophy
• Postmodernism’s acceptance stems from 1968ers’ class position and disillusionment
• Postmodernism’s defining move is proclaiming a radical break in Western civilization
• Postmodernism’s self-definition depends on an inadequate account of what it opposes.
• Postmodernism’s supposed novelties stem from longer trends and the 1980s conjuncture
• Postmodernists borrow modernism’s features to claim a false novelty
• Postmodernity’s signature multiplicity was already common among 1900s Modernist thinkers
• Poststructuralism emerged as a coherent ‘68 thought’ constellation
• Poststructuralism is essentially a discourse of modernism, not postmodernism
• Poststructuralism’s anti-subject philosophy demanded a deliberately obscure Modernist style.
• Poststructuralism’s piecemeal politics arose from dashed 1968 revolutionary hopes.
• Poststructuralist language theory need not ground political commitments
• Poststructuralist theory’s repudiation of stable subjects collapsed inquiry into futile conversation
• Postwar architectural change is commodification’s next stage, not Modernism’s end
• Postwar French thought shifted from three Hs to three masters of suspicion
• Postwar Western art lost its fire while Third World culture reproduces Modernism’s conditions
• Pre-1914 European bourgeoisie adapted to rather than challenged aristocratic rule
• Pre-revolutionary Russian modernists embraced Bolshevism as the political twin of their aesthetic radicalism.
• Procedural ethics cannot justify principles without empirical accounts of persons
• Psychoanalysis itself was born from sublimated bourgeois political frustration
• Rapallo treaty was the conduit for Russian avant-garde influence on the West
• Reagan-era tax cuts transferred over 35 billion to high-income families
• Real liberation struggles necessarily articulate themselves within existing political discourses
• Reference is fixed socially, not by individual consciousness
• Reference-based theories of language presuppose a mind with direct access to reality
• Rejecting atomism need not entail abandoning the concept of reference
• Revolution is a real referent while postmodernity remains a mere theoretical construct
• Russian avant-garde artists deliberately fused aesthetic and political revolution
• Saussure’s relational theory of meaning displaced the atomistic referential model of language
• Saussurean holism makes meaning autonomous from both objects and the subject
• Schiller treated aesthetic theory as the necessary path to political freedom
• Scientific and ethical appraisal of capitalism are compatible, contrary to Jameson
• Sectoral shifts to services came at agriculture’s expense, not manufacturing’s
• So-called postmodern trends merely continue capitalist processes begun under modernism
• Social stability rests on consciousness fragmentation, not belief in legitimacy
• Stalinism and Nazism together destroyed the avant-garde
• State intervention after the 1987 crash averted a 1929-style depression
• Suburbanization restructured space to make car and oil consumption a necessity
• Television only intensified pre-existing privatization and image permeation
• The 1968 generation’s disillusionment followed the events’ modernizing logic
• The 1970s economic crisis fundamentally changed urban development patterns
• The 1980s boom was overheated growth within decay, not renewed expansion
• The 1980s economic booms relied on Keynesian government stimulus, not deregulation.
• The aestheticized self belongs historically to bourgeois private life
• The avant-garde attacked art’s institutional status, not merely artistic styles
• The avant-garde sought to dissolve art into life praxis, not integrate art into it
• The category Modernism is a heterogeneous portmanteau lacking shared attributes
• The classical theory of truth remains indispensable for scientific practice
• The core-periphery workforce split assumed by post-Fordism is implausible in intense international competition.
• The critique of Enlightenment predates postmodernism by two centuries.
• The Enlightenment concept posits science as progress and clergy as its obstacle
• The Enlightenment provided both the explanation and the measure of human progress
• The Fordist mass production model is misrepresented by post-Fordist theorists.
• The German pre-1945 state served industrial capital despite Junker staffing
• The mass movements of the 1890s Vienna threatened the post-1866 liberal constitutional regime
• The Reagan-era recovery was speculative, not a real industrial revival.
• The Reagan-Thatcher era redistributed wealth from poor to rich rather than abandoning Keynesianism
• The Theory of Communicative Action originated in 1977 German political crisis
• The traditional-modern dichotomy obscures the pathologies of modernization.
• The twentieth century’s catastrophes shook faith in historical progress.
• Third World industrialization and capital flows barely grew despite globalization rhetoric
• Two wars and the Holocaust were needed to dislodge aristocratic presumption from Europe
• Uncoerced agreement requires speech acts backed by criticizable validity claims
• Uneven industrialization during France’s Fifth Republic briefly revived Modernism
• Vienna juxtaposed an absurd ancient régime with a great industrial working class
• Vienna simultaneously hosted Hitler’s antisemitism model and Austro-Marxist socialism
• Vienna was simultaneously the seedbed of Nazi antisemitism and fierce socialist resistance
• Vienna workers staged the first mass armed anti-fascist resistance in 1934
• Vienna’s cultural flowering emerged from the crisis of a weak liberal bourgeoisie
• Vienna’s fin-de-siècle ferment included an Enlightenment defence, not only irrationalism
• Wage labour has grown more pervasive even as manufacturing employment declined
• Weber’s rationalization theory defines modernization as differentiation plus instrumental rationality
• Weimar architects aimed to reunite art with the masses after 1918
• Weimar Berlin concentrated the century’s contradictions in one city
• Weimar Berlin’s cultural modernism grew from its extreme class and political contradictions.
• Weimar modernists sought to rebuild a medieval-style integrated culture on socialist foundations.
• Weimar New Objectivity blended realism, social critique, and new media.
• Working-class defeats were contingent, not intrinsic to capitalism’s logic
• World market integration survived the 1970s-80s slumps without protectionist collapse
• World War I expressed aristocratic reaction, not rising industrial capitalism